by Derek Landy
Moving quietly, she retraced her steps, passing the rooms with the blood and the heads and the blades, and stepped back into the operating theatre. She took her heart and her sternum and put them in a bag she found in the corner, and then she left by the other door.
She emerged into the warehouse where she had first stepped down from the carriage. The dead stood around, barely looking at her as she passed between them.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Valkyrie turned as Nye ducked through the doorway.
“You think you’re going to escape?” it asked, walking over. It was still wearing the smock, but not the mask or the cap. Thick veins pulsed against the pale skin at its temples. “You can’t escape, you stupid girl. You’re dead. In here, as in the Dullahan’s carriage, you enjoy an untroubled existence. You’re one of the dead things. But outside of these walls is life. You set one foot outside, you collapse. Blood spurts and your body caves in. You’re carrying your heart around in a refuse bag, for God’s sake. What did you think was going to happen?”
“Let me go,” Valkyrie said, her tongue thick in her mouth.
“No,” Nye said. “Get back on the table. I’m not finished with you.”
“Fix me then,” she said.
Nye’s ruined mouth jerked into a surprised smile. “I’m sorry? What? You’re giving me orders, is that it? Is that what you’re doing?”
She nodded.
“You don’t give me orders!” Nye screeched, and it was in front of her before she even realised it had moved. The back of its hand swooped down and caught the side of her face. The force of the impact sent her stumbling, but she felt no pain.
“I’m in charge here!” Nye yelled, and kicked her. Valkyrie rolled across the ground, and the bag was snatched from her grasp.
“We’ll see how many orders you give once your heart has been incinerated!” the surgeon spat, and turned to stalk back to the door.
Valkyrie pushed herself up and reached out, but Elemental magic was still closed off to her. A thought flashed into her mind, and she plunged her hand into her jacket pocket, sliding the ring on to her finger.
Shadows coiled around her, and a great wave of darkness smashed into Nye and took it off its feet. The surgeon squealed in fear and Valkyrie slammed the wave to the floor. Nye struck the hard ground and bounced slightly.
Valkyrie went to walk towards him, but, like an eager servant, the shadows swept her up. She touched down beside Nye and it scrambled up, tried to run. She was vaguely aware of an intent, to simply stop him from fleeing, and then suddenly the shadows wrapped themselves around Nye’s right leg, its long right leg, and wrenched.
Nye screamed as its leg snapped in a dozen places, and it fell to the ground.
“Please!” it called. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
The shadows played with Valkyrie’s hair.
“That’s Necromancy!” Nye yelled. “But you’re dead! It’s death magic wielded by a dead person – you don’t know what you’re doing! You can’t control it – you’re not strong enough! Please don’t kill me!”
“Fix me,” Valkyrie said.
“I will!” Nye cried, tears streaming down its face. “But my leg is broken! Let me mend it and then I’ll—”
“Fix me now,” Valkyrie said without emotion, “or I’ll let the shadows kill you.”
Nye nodded quickly. “Yes, yes, of course. Just get you back to the table and—”
“No straps,” said Valkyrie. “Nothing tying me down. You do this or you die.”
25
DIRT
Surviving the poisoning wasn’t the hard part. Tesseract had survived poisonings before. The fluids that his mask injected into his skin were designed to bolster his immunity and his natural, and unnatural, defences -mainly against the rotting disease that cursed him, but also, as a happy side effect, any other diseases, afflictions and poisons he happened to encounter on his travels. So the poisoning hadn’t really troubled him for more than a few minutes.
The being buried alive part, however, was more of a reason to worry.
He had made a small air pocket for himself, giving him a little more time to shake off the poison’s effects. When the feeling returned to his limbs, he tried to heave himself up, but the weight of the earth was just too much. The hole was, at the most, one and a half metres deep. That meant that all he had to do was stand up and he’d be out.
Standing up, however, was not as easy as it had once been.
His fingers scrabbled at the dirt, digging upwards slowly. He managed to get them reasonably far up, before realising that all he had achieved was to put himself in an even more uncomfortable position.
He lifted his body, straining against the weight, and kicked his legs. Loose earth shifted beneath him as he moved his right knee slowly. Moving the second one was more difficult, but he managed it. Now both knees were beneath him, his face was still pressed to the bottom of the grave, and his arms were somewhere above. If he died down here and was dug up in hundreds of years’ time, he had a feeling the archaeologists would be puzzling over what exactly he had been doing upon his ridiculous death.
Tesseract took a deep breath, the last of the oxygen, and raised his head. His legs were burning, his back muscles screaming at him, and he felt like every tendon in his neck was about to snap. He pushed upwards, forcing his body straighter, his hands clawing at the freezing dirt. The fingers of his left hand suddenly felt no resistance. He pulled himself up, his right hand breaking through now, and then he felt air on his scalp, and all at once his head was free.
He gasped, sucking in air through his mask and blinking the dirt away from his eyes. His vision was blurry, but he was relatively sure he was alone. The way his luck had been going lately, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Ceryen and Graft standing here, still arguing.
A little more effort was required to climb out of the grave, and then Tesseract sprawled on the sodden grass, his vision clearing as he looked up at a sky so grey it could have been made from slate. He was just thankful to be looking up at any kind of sky at all. Slate grey, he decided, was a particularly beautiful shade of grey.
He got to his feet. There was cold clay in his clothes, down his back, down his trousers, in his mask. He brushed off what he could, shook out what he was able, but there was no denying the fact that it still felt like he had just crawled out of his own grave.
He looked down the hill, at the town and the lake and the Sanctuary. He didn’t take it personally. He was a hired killer, after all. It would be pretty hypocritical to take a murder attempt personally, after everything he’d done. But that was no reason to let them live.
Graft, from what he could remember from his files, lived just off Roarhaven’s main street. Tesseract found him in a small house, freshly emerged from the shower, and killed him while he begged for his life.
Ceryen worked directly for the Torment, though, so she would have returned to the Sanctuary. Tesseract entered without being seen. Everyone was too busy setting it up for business to bother guarding the entrance. After fifteen minutes of sneaking around, he heard the Torment’s voice, and followed it through the long corridors.
He peered round a corner, saw the Torment and three other Children of the Spider – Madam Mist, a young woman called Portia and a young man called Syc. Ceryen trailed behind at a respectful distance. The Spider people were talking among themselves.
Tesseract had encountered Portia before, but had only heard stories about Mist, and had only ever seen a blurred photograph of Syc. He didn’t know much about them though, and that made him uneasy.
The Torment led his brethren through a heavy set of double doors, and gestured at Ceryen, dismissing her. She bowed, waited until the doors were shut, and walked towards Tesseract. He stepped back into the shadows to watch her pass, then followed. When they were far enough out of earshot, he made himself known by reaching down and tapping her leg. She screeched as it bent back on itself and
she crumpled to the ground.
“Hello, Ceryen,” Tesseract said, walking around so she could see him.
“My leg!” she cried. He had never worked out why some people liked to name the parts of them that had broken. “Please don’t kill me!” He knew what was coming next. Tales of woe and then begging, interspersed with logic and reason. “The Torment ordered it! I was following orders! Please don’t kill me! I have a family!”
“And yet I’m going to kill you anyway.”
She lunged at him, but he reached down, and caved in her head with a touch.
“You are not an easy man to kill.”
Slowly, Tesseract turned to face the Torment, who stood with Madam Mist at his side. He heard movement behind him, and didn’t have to glance back to know that Portia and Syc were closing in to trap him.
“You shouldn’t have tried to cheat me,” Tesseract said. “I would have returned home and we would never have crossed paths again. Instead, we are where we are. You understand, I cannot let you live.”
“You speak as though you hold the upper hand. There are four of us.”
“Being outnumbered means very little to me. You will still die one by one.”
The Torment vomited blackness that splashed to the ground and became spiders, as big as rats. Tesseract kicked one away from him, stomped on another, and backed away as thousands of smaller spiders, tiny spiders, spilled towards him like water. They flowed from the folds of Madam Mist’s long dress, scrambling over her body, in and out of her clothes, crawling up her neck and disappearing behind her veil.
He heard blades being unsheathed, and spun to dodge the first swipe of Syc’s twin daggers. He tried to grab him, but Syc was fast, faster than anyone Tesseract had ever seen. The blades flashed again and Tesseract stumbled. He stepped on a mass of spiders and they crunched beneath him.
One of the big spiders scuttled up his leg, digging its talons in as it came. Tesseract snarled and looked down. Syc was young and inexperienced and unimaginative, and he took the bait. When he sprang, Tesseract caught him and hurled him into the wall. Syc kept him at bay by vomiting, like the Torment had. The inky blackness coalesced, formed spiders, not as big as the Torment’s, but definitely getting there. Tesseract backed away again. Too many damn spiders.
Portia came for him. Like Syc, she had a way to go in her studies, but the fact that she wasn’t able to complete the full transformation to spider made her look even more fearsome. She had grown to twice her size, with black armour covering her chest and back. Four extra arms sprouted from her elongated torso, each tipped with claws, but it was Portia’s face that was the most terrifying. Her fine-boned features had disappeared, replaced by a mouth that was a gaping hole, filled with fangs that dripped venom. Eight black eyes were grouped around her head.
Tesseract dodged as she attacked. Spiders were crawling all over him. Their poison was in his system and making him clumsy. He should have run when he’d had the chance. He looked up to see Syc plunging a dagger at his chest.
He blocked, fingers closing around Syc’s wrist. The bones there broke and Tesseract took the dagger and slammed an elbow into Syc’s face. He kicked him and the younger man went down, falling on thousands of spiders. Tesseract used him as a springboard to leap on to Portia. He held on as she tried to dislodge him, then slipped the dagger between her armour plates. He dropped to the ground as she reared back, shrieking.
Something flitted to her face, and clung there. Something black. Tesseract turned, saw Anton Shudder striding through the corridor, Remnants swirling around him.
One of those foul black things crawled into Syc’s mouth, and the young man gagged and choked. Barely aware of the Torment and Mist already fleeing, Tesseract knew it was too late for him to make his escape. So he leaped forward, to Shudder, kicking him to drive him back. Shudder smiled, and reached for him, and Tesseract seized his arm and broke the bones.
Shudder hissed in pain and stepped back. “You’ve damaged me,” he said.
Then the Remnant darted out of his mouth, to Tesseract’s mask, and for a moment Tesseract couldn’t see anything. It squirmed in through the eyeholes and he felt it cold on his face, sliding down. He glimpsed another Remnant attaching itself to Shudder’s unconscious form – waste not, want not – and then he fell to his knees. The Remnant found his mouth, and Tesseract gagged as it forced its way in.
26
THE TRUTH
Valkyrie stepped into the sunlight and she was alive again.
She rubbed her eyes, as if she was awakening from a long sleep. Feeling flooded through her. Emotion. Sensation. The cold air forced the grogginess from her mind, which began to sharpen as the world came into focus around her. She was in the docklands. The weak sun was directly overhead. It was midday.
“You haven’t fallen apart,” Nye said.
Valkyrie turned. Nye stood inside the warehouse, where everything was grey and lethargic. She looked at the line she’d crossed as she’d moved from dead to living – a line where the gloom of the warehouse was beaten back by the vivid clarity of life.
“I’ve done a good job,” Nye nodded, more to itself than to her. “And it wasn’t easy, what with the pressure I was under. But I did it. I’m one of the few who could.”
“How many more like me do you have in there?” Valkyrie asked.
“Like you?”
“People who aren’t supposed to be there.”
“None,” it said, shaking its head. “Everyone else was delivered by the Dullahan according to the rules. The Dullahan always follows the rules. He makes sure I do too.”
“Sometimes he messes up. You were going to keep me.”
Nye smiled. “Can’t blame me for trying, eh? But all’s well. You’re walking, talking, living, breathing – and not falling apart. And your true name is sealed. It wasn’t easy, but I knew, if anyone could do it, I could.”
Valkyrie reckoned she ought to do something, but she couldn’t think what. Arrest him? Punch him? Threaten him? She decided to go with threatening. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” she said. “If I ever hear of you trying anything like that again, I’ll come back and drag you out of there.”
Nye nodded. “Yes, yes, you’re very frightening. Better run along and play now. Grown-ups have work to do.”
It smiled, and the warehouse door slid closed. Valkyrie glowered. She should have gone with option two.
She hailed a taxi. She was halfway home before she thought to check that she had any money, but thankfully she found some cash in her back pocket. The driver listened to the radio all the way to Haggard, and Valkyrie watched the world pass. She got out at the pier, hurried to her house, and rose to her window. She slipped her fingers through the crack, opened it and climbed in.
Her room was empty, the reflection elsewhere. Valkyrie was glad. She looked around and realised she was smiling. It was good to be home. It was good to be alive, and safe, and home, and it was good to know that she wasn’t going to become a monster who would murder the world. That was particularly comforting.
She heard someone coming up the stairs, and recognised her own footsteps. The reflection opened the door, not looking the least bit startled to see her.
“Your parents have gone out,” it said, and Valkyrie wondered if it had said ‘your’ simply to reassure her that its earlier mistake would not be repeated. “Do you want to resume your life?”
Valkyrie shook her head. “I just want to take a shower and eat something, then I’ll be heading out again.”
“I’ll stay up here then, shall I?”
Valkyrie remembered, in her hallucination, the reflection encouraging Skulduggery to shoot her. “Yeah, you do that.”
She went downstairs, grabbed a plate of leftover turkey and a glass of milk while she turned on her phone. Messages popped up – three missed calls. She cringed, and called Skulduggery to apologise for sleeping in. He sounded bemused, but told her he was on his way, and he’d be there in half an hour.
Va
lkyrie ate more turkey and drank more milk, then took a shower. As she stood under the spray, she ran her hand along her chest, not detecting the faintest trace of any scar. Nye was good – its skills might even be comparable to Kenspeckle’s. And she reckoned their bedside manners were roughly the same, too.
She dressed, grabbed the present she’d wrapped for Skulduggery, and climbed out of the window without even glancing back at her reflection. She walked to the pier, wondering if she should tell Skulduggery what she’d done. Now that the danger was over, now that the future was changed, could she share this secret she’d had to keep for five months? He’d understand why she hadn’t said anything. If anyone would understand, he would.
She reached the pier. The Bentley was already parked, and Skulduggery stood beside it, looking out at the sea that thundered against concrete and rock. He had brown eyes today, and thin lips. Same cheekbones and jaw, and the same waxy skin. His hat was cocked at its usual angle. Valkyrie marvelled at the way it tended to stay on, no matter how hard the wind was blowing. Then she realised he was probably manipulating the air around his head. Sneaky and stylish, the perfect combination.
She held out her hands. “Present.”
He looked at her. “You’re not getting your present.”
Valkyrie frowned. “What? Why not?”
“Because it was a Christmas present. It’s not Christmas any more.”
“Of course it is. There’s twelve whole days of Christmas.”
“They don’t count.”
“Yes they do.”
“The twelve days are merely to let people know when it’s time to take down their tasteless decorations. It’s St Stephen’s Day today, and I didn’t get you a St Stephen’s Day present.”
The wind whipped her hair in front of her face. “But… But that’s not fair! I have your present!”
