Читать книгу: «Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 10 - 12», страница 13
Jenan did his best to inject some decisiveness into his voice. “We’ll find him,” he said. “The spy. We’ll find him.”
“How?”
“We’ll question them,” Jenan said. “We’ll question them all, every Third Year boy of that height with that hair colour. And I know who we’ll start with.”
“You have a suspect?”
“I do,” Jenan said immediately. “Omen Darkly.”
Nero leaped to his feet, furious. “You let the Chosen One into the goddamn meeting?”
Omen watched Jenan’s feet stumble back. “No, no! That’s Auger! That’s his brother! Omen Darkly’s nobody, I swear to you! Even if he told anyone, they probably wouldn’t believe him!”
“What about the Chosen One?” Nero asked. “Would the Chosen One believe him?”
Jenan swallowed. “Maybe.”
“Jesus …” Nero said. “Of all the people to let in, of all the goddamn people, you let in Auger Darkly’s brother.”
“It mightn’t be him,” Jenan said quickly. “It might be someone else. We’ll find out, though. I’ll interrogate him personally.”
“You’d better, Jenan. A lot of people are depending on you.”
“You have my word. By my family’s crest.”
“And if it turns out that it was this Omen Darkly … and if he has told the Chosen One … you know what you have to do, don’t you?”
There was a hesitation. “Yes. Yes, of course.”
“You kill him,” Nero said. “You kill them both.”
Jenan nodded. “Yes. I swear.”
“We’ll be back in touch, Jenan,” said Nero. “Don’t fail us, you hear me? You really don’t want to fail us.”
Omen didn’t know why he did it. He wasn’t planning on it, that was for certain. It wasn’t something he’d thought about, lying there under that bed. But the moment he realised Nero was about to leave, he reached out a hand, and his fingertip touched the heel of Nero’s stylish shoe, so that when Nero teleported, he took Omen with him.
31
“Where are we?” Valkyrie asked, peering out of the car window. The street was narrow. There was graffiti on the walls, none of it any good. She was surprised at this. She hadn’t thought Roarhaven would be tolerant of something so mundane as declarations of lust and crudely drawn genitalia. She’d expected their graffiti standards to be higher.
“We are where we need to be,” Skulduggery said, coming to a stop and turning off the engine. “Ironfoot Road is close by.”
They got out and he locked the Bentley. Valkyrie zipped up her jacket against the cold and they started walking. She kept her head down and he kept his façade up, but everyone they passed was too busy with their own problems to notice them.
They walked for three minutes before coming to a blue door. Valkyrie stood watch while Skulduggery picked the lock. When he was done, he tapped her and they slipped inside. He drew his gun and they crept upstairs to a quiet corridor. They found Melior’s apartment and Skulduggery picked that lock next. When the door was open, he splayed his hand, reading the air, and led the way into the kitchen, where Richard Melior stood with his back to them, watching the window.
Skulduggery walked right up to him without making a sound and pressed his gun into the back of Melior’s head.
“Not an inch,” Skulduggery said.
Without turning, without looking over his shoulder, Melior said, “I’m … I’m very glad you came.”
“You should be glad I haven’t pulled the trigger.”
“I’m glad about that, too.”
“Turn.”
Melior turned, saw Valkyrie and tried to smile. “Hello.”
“If you even think about blasting us again,” she said, “we’ll hit you until you’re nothing but a puddle of mess on the floor.”
“I understand. And I’m really sorry about that. If you’re in any pain, I can help you.”
“I’m fine,” she replied irritably. “We have doctors who specialise in healing people.”
“Take a seat, Doctor,” Skulduggery said. “I want you where we can keep an eye on you.”
Melior nodded, and sat in the chair Skulduggery pulled out for him. He didn’t object when the shackles were produced. Valkyrie turned on her aura-vision for this next part – she wanted to see what happened when they were put on – but she noticed something as Skulduggery moved in. Like most auras she’d seen, Melior’s was orange, but it was a slightly different shade. She didn’t know what that meant, didn’t know if it meant anything, and then the shackles snapped on and Melior’s power dampened, and the aura shrivelled away until Valkyrie could barely see it.
She switched off the aura-vision. She was really going to have to find a better name for it. “What were you looking at?” she asked.
“Sorry?”
“You were looking down at the street. At what?”
“Oh,” he said, “no, I wasn’t looking at anything. I was waiting for you. You came through the window the first time we met and for some reason I thought you’d come through the window again. I never expected you to come through the door.”
“Doors are for people with no imagination,” she conceded, “but we like to mix it up a bit around here.”
Skulduggery sat opposite Melior and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You’ve got a lot to tell us,” he said.
“I do. Anything you want to know.”
“Let’s start from the top,” Valkyrie said. “What is the anti-Sanctuary? What’s it really called?”
“It’s not called anything,” said Melior. “It’s easier to hide something when it doesn’t have a name, I guess. The anti-Sanctuary, that’s as good a name as any. They’ve been working away behind the scenes for hundreds of years. Assassinations. Disappearances. They’ve orchestrated wars to get their agenda just a little bit further along the line. I know what you’re thinking. I thought it, too. How could it even exist? How could an organisation like this be responsible for centuries of murder and upheaval and yet no one knows anything about them? But that’s why they mostly recruit Neoterics. They’re looking for outsiders, sorcerers with no links to the Sanctuaries. They’re careful. They’re unbelievably, impossibly careful to not leave any fingerprints that’d lead people like you back to them. Or they were, at least. Their endgame is in sight. They’re coming out of the shadows.”
“What do they want?”
“War,” said Melior. “A proper, full-scale war, at the end of which the mortals will be our slaves. They want sorcerers to rule the world.”
“Who’s in charge?” she asked. “Smoke? Lethe?”
“Smoke’s a lackey. He doesn’t have one original thought in his head. Lethe’s different. He’s smarter. Very talented, very dangerous, very cunning. I’ve never seen him lose a fight. He plays with them at first, lets them think they’ve got the upper hand … I think he does it because he’s bored.”
“Why does he wear the suit?” Valkyrie asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ve never seen him without it.”
“What about the Teleporter?”
“Nero,” said Melior. “An arrogant little creep. In love with himself. Don’t know much about him. Don’t know much about most of them, to be honest.”
“The guy who slowed time …”
“Ah,” said Melior, “Destrier. He’s not really part of the team, as far as I can tell. He helps out, but he’s got his own thing going on. I get the feeling an arrangement has been reached there. They call what he does temporal manipulation.”
“Last person I saw doing that was a serial killer.”
“He’s a weird one, I can tell you that. I’ve seen him talking to himself – practically the only person he does talk to. I’ve certainly never spoken to him.
“Then there’s Memphis. He’s got this thing about Elvis. Apparently, he met him once, when he was a kid. But he’s dangerous. His power manifested as some form of hyper-agility. I’ve seen him flip around like a trapeze artist without the trapeze. He used to have a sister, but Lethe killed her. As far as I know, Memphis doesn’t hold a grudge.”
“Who’s the Australian?” Valkyrie asked.
“Razzia. She’s completely off the rails. I never know what she’s going to do from one moment to the next. She’s got a creature living in her arm, a parasite of some sort. I’ve asked several times to examine it, but she hasn’t let me get close.”
“Tell us about Smoke,” Skulduggery said.
“All I know about him is what he can do. I’ve seen him touch people – not even skin-on-skin contact, but through their coat sleeves – and they’re corrupted. Ordinary, decent people turned into psychopathic versions of themselves. I’ve seen it go on for weeks – every two days, Smoke just taps them and it starts all over again. I’ve seen people under his influence kill their entire families and laugh while they do it.”
“We’ll stop him,” said Skulduggery. “We’ll stop all of them. Anyone else we should know about?”
“There are others, though they come and go. But that’s the main group.”
Skulduggery leaned back in his chair. “I’ve read a bit about you, Doctor. Your power manifested in medical school, didn’t it? Up until that moment you had no idea magic existed.”
“That is correct,” Melior said, nodding. “I did some haphazard research after it happened, managed to talk to a proper sorcerer and had my eyes opened. After that, I met Savant and fell in love, and … well, never looked back.”
“And then Parthenios Lilt talked to you.”
Melior’s face soured. “Yes. He’d heard about me and came to interview me, to run some tests … The term Neoteric was actually my suggestion. We became friends, or so I thought. This was back in the 1960s. Savant and I were living in San Francisco, because where else would you be living in the sixties? Parthenios introduced us to his friends – mostly other Neoterics. For a while, it was fun – we even had our own bowling team, as lame as that sounds now and, in fact, back then. But then we met more of his friends. People like Bubba Moon. Have you heard of him?”
“We have,” said Skulduggery.
“That’s when the alarm bells really started to ring. This was an insane man sitting at the table with us, talking about the tyranny of mortals, about how we should rise up against them and join with the being who lives beyond our reality.”
“We met him,” Valkyrie said. “The being beyond our reality, I mean. His name was Balerosh.”
Melior blinked. “Moon was telling the truth? He exists?”
Valkyrie shrugged. “Not any more.”
“Anyway,” Melior said after a moment, “I didn’t like the way things were going, and I wanted nothing more to do with any of them. Savant took a little longer to come to the same conclusion, but then he sees the good in everyone. His power is knowledge; he absorbs vast quantities of information at a glance, but he’s also a pacifist. He’s never hurt a soul in his life. I fell in love with him because of that quality, but it also meant that he couldn’t understand the destructive urge that I could see in the people around us.”
“But you understood it,” Skulduggery said.
“I did. When I was a kid, I hurt people. It’s why I became a doctor, to make up for the pain I’d caused. So yeah, I understood it.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing,” said Melior. “For a long time, nothing. We moved around a bit – it’s very hard to stay working in a hospital when you don’t age. We learned to forge new certificates with each passing decade. Eventually, we went back to my hometown, to Baltimore. More time passed. We hadn’t even thought of Parthenios or any of them in forty years.”
“Where’s your husband now, Doctor?”
“They have him. Parthenios Lilt and three others broke into our apartment, beat me half to death and took him away. I went to the Sanctuary, but they didn’t do anything. Two months later, I woke up to find Lethe standing over my bed. He told me who he was with, said they’d kill Savant unless I joined them.”
“When was this?”
“Five years ago.”
Valkyrie frowned. “Savant’s been gone five years?”
“Every so often, I’ll get a voice message telling me he loves me, telling me to be strong …” Melior’s voice cracked.
“Why go to the trouble of kidnapping him, though? Why doesn’t Smoke just corrupt you?”
“His touch doesn’t work on healers,” Melior said. “I don’t know why. I think it’s something to do with our power, maybe it acts as an immune system to his influence.”
“Your aura’s different,” Valkyrie said. Skulduggery looked at her and she shrugged. “It’s a different shade of orange.”
“I don’t know anything about auras,” Melior said, “but, whatever the reason, they needed some other way to control me.”
Skulduggery asked, “And Lethe’s in charge?”
“No,” Melior said. “He does what he’s told, same as everyone.”
“So who tells him what to do? Is there another Balerosh that we don’t know about?”
“Not as far as I’m aware,” said Melior, and hesitated. “It’s the voice in his head.”
“I’m sorry?”
“They all hear it,” Melior continued. “It’s their leader. I don’t know anything about her, I don’t know where she is, but I overheard some of them talking and they said a name. Abyssinia.”
Skulduggery turned his head slightly.
“You know who that is?” Valkyrie asked.
“I might,” he said. “I’ve only known one Abyssinia in all my years.”
“Does she have silver hair?”
Skulduggery looked at her. “She does.” He looked back. “Doctor, what were you told about your role in all this? What do they need you to do?”
“Please call me Richard. From what I can gather, I’m to facilitate a resurrection. I’ve done it before, more or less, on patients who’ve died on the operating table, but never before on someone long dead. This would be exponentially more difficult.”
“It would be,” said Skulduggery. “For a start, I would imagine that Abyssinia is the one in need of resurrection, as she’s been dead for three hundred years.”
Valkyrie looked back at Melior. “Is that possible? Could you do that?”
“I … I guess so. Under the proper circumstances.”
“If that is the case, you’d have one further complication,” Skulduggery said, “in that all that is left of her is a heart.”
“I’m sorry?”
Skulduggery stood. “Richard, would you excuse us for a moment?”
“Uh … of course.”
“Thank you. If you try anything sneaky, I’ll shoot you. Valkyrie?”
Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and he shut the door.
“Right then,” she said, “you’re acting sufficiently suspicious about this, so who is she? Who is Abyssinia?”
Skulduggery crossed to the window and looked out. He took a moment, and turned. “Abyssinia,” he said, “was many things.” “Fiercely intelligent, incredibly manipulative, savagely violent. She was a mage and a murderer but also, and this is where things could be said to take a surprising twist, were you inclined to be surprised by twists, she was a …”
“A what?”
“I suppose you could call her, if you had to, if you needed to find a label, even though I’m not fond of them myself, I feel they can be far too restrictive though there are, of course, exceptions, you could possibly call her, if you desperately needed to call her anything at all, an … ex-girlfriend.”
Valkyrie stared. “What?”
32
“You probably require an explanation,” Skulduggery said.
“I probably do.”
“Would you like to sit down?”
“Do I need to?” Valkyrie said. “Yes, I’ll sit down. No, I won’t. I need to walk around for this. I feel I need to be moving. Tell the story.” She started pacing.
“Very well.” Skulduggery sat on the bed. “Where to start …”
“Start at the skeleton booty call and move on from there. Oh, wait!” She swung round. “Was she a girlfriend before you were killed, or after?”
“After.”
“Oh.” Valkyrie resumed her pacing. “Go on.”
“It doesn’t matter how I met her. It doesn’t matter where. What does matter is what state I was in.”
“What state were you in?”
“A bad one. The war was never-ending. Friends were dying all around us. Every time I got close to Serpine, he’d slip away again. My anger was growing. My hatred was at its peak. Abyssinia knew this. She saw it. She latched on to me. She told me she loved me. I hadn’t had anyone say that to me since my wife died. She influenced me. I didn’t even notice it happening. Ghastly did. He warned me, but I didn’t listen to him. I listened to her, though. Her words infected me; they weighed me down. Dragged me down. She knew I was … what did I call it once? Magically ambidextrous. She encouraged me to explore other types of magic.”
Valkyrie froze. “Wait … was this …?”
“I rediscovered Necromancy,” Skulduggery said, “and she gifted me with a very special suit of armour.”
“She turned you into Lord Vile?”
“No. I did that. I turned myself into Vile. But she was there. She made sure I stayed on course.”
“That … that cow …”
“By this point, I no longer cared about which side I fought on. I just wanted to fight. I just wanted to kill. Meritorious’s army had too many rules so I switched. Abyssinia brought me over. With the armour on, nobody knew who I’d once been, and the truth was, I wasn’t me any more. I wasn’t,” Skulduggery tapped his chest, “me. I was him. I was my anger and I was my hatred. I quickly became one of Mevolent’s generals. I didn’t even mind that I was now fighting alongside the man who had murdered my family.”
“And what did Abyssinia do?”
“She was beside me the whole way. She tore the life force from her victims, used it to heal her wounds or get stronger. We slaughtered entire villages together. She had an appetite for bloodshed that I found … fascinating. I’d stop sometimes, just to watch her kill. She was born to it. It came as naturally to her as breathing.”
“This is getting weird.”
“While I was becoming a general, Abyssinia was integrating herself into the upper echelons of Mevolent’s army, which had been her plan all along. China Sorrows herself invited her to join the Diablerie. Abyssinia was as fervent and fanatical as any of them, and was just as dedicated. Or so it appeared.”
Valkyrie frowned. “It was an act?”
“Abyssinia was full of surprises. One of the reasons she latched on to me was because she saw something in me, something she could twist. She used me to get close to Mevolent. And she wanted to get close to Mevolent in order to kill him, and take his army for herself.”
“Ambitious.”
“Yes, she was,” said Skulduggery. “But she made a mistake. One single, solitary mistake.”
“Which was?”
“Me.”
“She underestimated you.”
“She trusted me. In whatever sick form it took, she actually believed she loved me. She believed I loved her back, even as Lord Vile. Her mistake was to tell me her plans. She wanted me by her side, you see – king to her queen. She planned to kill Mevolent at a feast he was hosting – she was gambling that a move so ridiculously bold would actually be well received by those in attendance. Kill Mevolent in front of everyone and watch them bend the knee. She was probably right, actually. It probably would have worked.”
“What … what happened?”
Skulduggery took off his hat, adjusted the brim. “Mevolent held the feast and, even though China and Serpine and Baron Vengeous were in attendance, it was Abyssinia who was seated at Mevolent’s side. She must have felt like all her work had paid off – that she was among his most trusted. Her plan – our plan, or so she thought – was to wait for the toasts. When they were both standing, I would strike, incapacitating him. Then she would take his head.
“The courses were served. I didn’t eat, naturally. I didn’t drink. I watched them all. They talked and laughed and got full and got drunk. Even Abyssinia drank too much. Overconfidence, I suppose. Mevolent stood up, singing Abyssinia’s praises for all to hear. But, when Abyssinia rose to toast him in return, I ran my sword through her back.”
Valkyrie didn’t say anything.
“Mevolent gave me the opportunity to fight and kill,” Skulduggery continued. “Abyssinia would have ended the war far too quickly. There would have been no one left to battle if she took over. The world would burn and she would sit in her throne and laugh. So, before she could recover, I lifted her off her feet, walked to the window and tossed her through. She fell to the rocks. It was a long way down.”
“Christ.”
“Yes.”
“That’s … I don’t know what to say.”
“The story isn’t over.”
“Oh, God. Maybe I do need to sit down.”
Skulduggery stood and she took his place on the edge of the bed. “Carry on,” she said.
“Her body wasn’t where it should have been,” Skulduggery said. “We found a trail of blood leading away and then … nothing. But there was no way she could have survived that. The sword was enough to have killed her, let alone the fall. It was assumed that animals had taken her corpse away, or even cannibals.”
“Cannibals?”
“There’d been reports of cannibals in the area. Anyway, the war went on. I killed and butchered old friends and innocent people and I did so without one shred of remorse. And then I had my epiphany.”
“Epiphany?”
“My moment of clarity.”
“I know what the word means, I just want to know what this particular epiphany was.”
“It was not relevant to this story,” Skulduggery said, “that’s what it was. Anyway, I saw the error of my ways, took off the armour, hid it in a mountain where no one would ever, ever find it, and returned to being good old me.
“Then, a few years later, Abyssinia returned. Rather than die a painful death alone in the shadows, she had somehow become vastly more powerful. She attacked both Mevolent’s army and ours. She decimated battalions. No one could stand against her. Then a deal was struck.”
“Between Abyssinia and Mevolent?”
“Between Mevolent and us.”
“Oh my God.” Valkyrie shook her head. “I need to sit down.”
“You are sitting down.”
“I need to sit down more.”
“A secret deal,” Skulduggery went on. “A few soldiers from our side and a few soldiers from their side. The Dead Men and the Diablerie, working together.”
“You’re joking,” Valkyrie said.
He shrugged. “It made sense. She was an enemy to us both, so we pooled our resources and set off. It was an uneasy alliance, to say the least. As the weeks went by, tensions grew. The only reason we didn’t murder each other was because we finally picked up Abyssinia’s trail. She was travelling with a boy that turned out to be her son.”
“So what happened?”
“Abyssinia led us into a trap we barely survived. It was only when China held a knife to the boy’s throat that Abyssinia stopped her attack. We offered her a deal. We would let her son go free if she allowed us to kill her.”
The room was quiet. “And did she accept?” Valkyrie asked.
“She didn’t have a choice,” Skulduggery said. “We killed her and we let the boy walk, then we dismembered her, cut off her head and burned her limbs. But it was only when I carved her heart from her chest that it finally stopped beating.”
“Jesus,” Valkyrie whispered.
“And that’s it. That’s the story.”
“So wait a second,” Valkyrie said. “You betrayed her, threw her out of a window, tracked her down and threatened her son, and she agreed to let you kill her … and at no stage during all this did she tell anyone that you were Lord Vile?”
“As far as I’m aware, she didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Skulduggery said. “I hope I don’t get a chance to ask her.”
“What happened to the son?”
“No idea.”
“Could he be this King of the Darklands guy that Auger is destined to fight?”
“Possibly.”
“She ever mention that to you, the fact that she was the Princess of the Darklands?”
“It never came up in conversation.”
“Where are the Darklands? I mean, is it an actual place or, like, a state of mind or something?”
“I don’t know,” Skulduggery said.
“I’m just asking because if it’s an actual place, with people and a royal family and stuff, then your girlfriend was an actual princess.”
“Ex-girlfriend.”
“Yes, because that’s the point we need to be focusing on.” Valkyrie stood. “OK. OK, that’s a lot to take in.”
“The fact that my ex-girlfriend was one of the most dangerous people I have ever encountered, or the fact that I had a girlfriend?”
“Both, actually.” She nodded. “It’ll just take me a while to digest all this. But for now I’m ready to go back in. Unless you have any other bombshells about your past that you’d like to share …?”
“None that I’d like to share, no.” He went to the door and opened it. “After you,” he said.
