It had been two months since Skulduggery disappeared through the yellow portal.
Tanith missed him, of course. Everyone did, even if they never talked about it. China, who had lost her brother in the same day, wasn’t seen at her library for days at a time – so unlike her that Tanith had almost considered putting together a search party the first time it happened. Several times now, Tanith had caught Ghastly simply staring off into space, an expression of such loss and hopelessness on his face that it broke her heart. He’d only just come back into the world, only just reunited with Skulduggery, and then… this.
But none of them were strangers to loss, and Tanith knew that given time, even Ghastly would eventually move on. The only person she was truly worried about was Valkyrie. As maturely as the young girl liked to present herself, she wasn’t even fifteen yet, and she’d just lost her best friend.
It only worried Tanith more when Valkyrie didn’t seem to collapse, almost didn’t seem to care. Face closed, few words, carrying on with her life as if nothing had changed except her own bitter view of the world. That, Tanith knew, couldn’t last. At some point soon, Valkyrie was going to come to her with an impossible and reckless plan for getting Skulduggery back, despite the Sanctuary’s firm insistence that the portal could not be opened again. And Tanith was going to have to gently explain that Skulduggery himself made sure the portal was closed forever. Without the Grotesquery, without the Isthmus Anchor, he was well and truly gone. Tanith only hoped that it would be enough to break through the wall surrounding Valkyrie’s heart, so that Tanith could finally help her young friend begin to heal. That was her role, right? The mature big sister.
Well. She was right about some of it, at least. Valkyrie had come to her, with a cocky and reckless plan for rescuing Skulduggery from the Faceless Ones. Except that this was a cocky and reckless plan that might actually work.
Tanith closed her eyes and shook her head. “You want to run that by me again?”
There was no frustrated sigh, no snappy line so characteristic of Valkyrie. It was like she’d emptied herself of emotion, forced herself neutral and utterly focused on the task at hand. “To open the portal, you need a Teleporter and an Isthmus Anchor, right? Something that belongs over there, but it’s here instead.”
“Yeah,” Tanith agreed. “Like the Grotesquery.” She hesitated. “Which is gone.”
“I know,” said Valkyrie evenly. Her tone was so deadpan that it physically hurt Tanith to hear it. “We have the Teleporter, obviously. Fletcher’s more than happy to try again. But we also have an Isthmus Anchor, and that’s Skulduggery’s head.”
And that was the crux of the plan, the assumption that Skulduggery hadn’t simply been exaggerating stories when he told Valkyrie that his current skull was not actually his own. “Which he lost in a poker game, eh?” Tanith finished quietly.
“No. Goblins stole it. He won the head he’s wearing now in a poker game.”
Only you, Skulduggery. Tanith fixed Valkyrie with a sympathetic look, wondering if it was really the teenager she was now trying to convince, or herself. “But that was twenty years ago, you said. That skull could be anywhere. It could take us decades to track it down.”
Valkyrie smiled, an expression that startled Tanith as much as the happiness that wasn’t in it. “Then we’d better start now. I already did. Skulduggery found out a while ago that someone named Larks stole everything the goblins had, and then sold them on. He never found out who bought them.” Her smile vanished. “I did. The skull was bought by a mortal woman as a wedding gift, but she used it to beat her husband to death after he stole from her. It was logged as evidence. Have you ever heard of the Murder Skull?”
“Once,” Tanith admitted. “Didn’t it disappear?”
“Exactly. And I need your help to find it. You and Ghastly and Fletcher. Maybe even China, if she’s feeling generous.”
Tanith couldn’t help scowling at the thought of China helping anyone other than herself. “Valkyrie, opening that portal is dangerous. There’s a reason Skulduggery made sure it could never happen again. We might let more Faceless Ones through, or maybe something else just as nasty. And I know you don’t want to hear this, but Skulduggery…” Tanith bit her lip, and took the plunge. “He’s alone in a dimension with a race of evil gods who are angry at us, and have no one to take it out on but him. He might not even be Skulduggery anymore.”
“He’s my friend.”
Tanith looked at Valkyrie, at the single tear on her cheek, and instantly knew that they had to try. Because the knowledge that it was at least possible might be the only thing holding Valkyrie together. And besides, Skulduggery would have done the same stupid, reckless thing for any of them by now.
Tanith gave a curt nod, and a smile. “What do you need us to do?”
Valkyrie didn’t return the smile. She just reached up to wipe away the tear, staring down at the floor. “What do you think it’s like, where he is?”
Tanith gripped Valkyrie’s shoulders, somehow even more scared of this new, unsure version of her friend than the empty shell. “Don’t, Valkyrie. Don’t do that to yourself. There’s nothing anyone could have done, okay? Wherever Skulduggery is, I can guarantee you he’d rather be there alone than let the Faceless Ones get control of this reality. And it doesn’t matter anymore, because we’re going to save him. You hear me? We’re going to get him back.”
~~
Everyone was home.
That was the first thought to cross Skulduggery’s mind as he tumbled out onto the thick white stone. The Institute may or may not have been gone; it was impossible to tell now. Even Martin Landel’s fate was unknown, supposedly in the hands of people who knew better. But the one hard fact was that everyone was free, and back where they belonged, for better or for worse. For Skulduggery, it just happened to be worse.
He’d been poised to run. If the battle at Aranmore Farm was any indication, it was practically impossible to run from a god, but Skulduggery was not going to let them take him without a fight. He’d been prepared to run, prepared for the wonderful feeling of his magic once again flooding his body, prepared to escape into an unfamiliar environment that was likely just as dangerous as anything the Faceless Ones had to offer.
But he’d made one mistake, apart from apparently misjudging the height of the portal. He’d gotten a little too used to his new human body during his imprisonment in that Institute, and when one foot moved forward to begin the process of running, far too little weight was on top of it, and Skulduggery ended up crashing painfully into the ground. He thought he’d be returned to the exact moment he was taken, that he would still have that intestine wrapped around his leg, pulling him through the portal, and he would look up to find himself surrounded by insanity-inducing blasphemies of nature intent on ripping him apart. Instead, it seemed a lot of time had passed. Skulduggery was alone, the portal was nowhere in sight, and nothing was moving around for miles, according to the air currents.
Skulduggery looked down at his skeletal form, surprised at how strange it suddenly looked. It felt just like the first time he’d glanced down to see nothing but bones where his leg should be. This time, fortunately, he wouldn’t have to crawl out of a sodden cloth bag and put himself back together. That was an experience that did not bear repeating. On the plus side, he now knew the human skeleton better than most doctors did.
Over the next few hours, Skulduggery was no closer to understanding where, exactly, he’d ended up – or even knowing how to describe it. The closest equivalent he could think of was a Brazilian mountain town. It was a sprawling city carved out of the rock into the side of a mountain, baking underneath a sun at least five times bigger than the one Skulduggery was used to. The sky was blood-red, and any ground that wasn’t rock sparkled like the golden sand of a desert.
All in all, the effect should have been rather beautiful, but there was something ominous about it. The city, and the horizon, which the sun never seemed to touch. When Skulduggery finally made it to a proper cliff at the edge of the city, he looked out over nothing but more city, extending down into the valley floor and up onto the side of another mountain off in the distance. Everywhere he looked, there was only the blinding white of sun-bleached stone.
The skeleton detective was fascinated, despite himself. Of course, the Faceless Ones wouldn’t have been the first to occupy this reality. Millions of people would have lived here once. He wondered what they looked like, before the Faceless Ones carved into their city and slaughtered all of them.
As more time passed and still, nothing moved but Skulduggery, he began to wonder if the planet in this reality was as big as Earth. The Faceless Ones might be thousands of miles away by now. He might have nothing to worry about, other than an eternity of loneliness in a city that looked as big as a country.
It didn’t matter. Everyone he cared about was home, and safe. Whatever happened next would do nothing more than satisfy his curiosity.
Of course, in a city as big as a country, there were bound to be survivors, and Skulduggery ran into a small group of them some unidentifiable amount of time later; it was difficult to judge the passing of time, as the sun never seemed to set and he never got tired or hungry. The survivors, though initially suspicious of him, grew very friendly after a while. The language they spoke really was beautiful, designed to be a fluid painting of sound rather than to get information across. Skulduggery could imagine, when millions of the creatures lived in the city, that the constant sound of their talking would be magnified by the bare walls of their stone houses and mix together to create a symphony in the air above the valley. Nature really was remarkable.
It didn’t take him long to learn that language. He’d never be able to speak it as fluidly or captivatingly as they could, which seemed to amuse the younger ones in particular, but he learned enough to get by. Eventually, when they told each other stories, he even understood a good deal of them. And what he learned darkened his mood.
When the Ancients first cast the Faceless Ones out of their reality, they hadn’t even considered where they were sending the dark gods. It turned out that they ended up in a reality very similar to this one, killed everyone in it, tore through the walls into a different reality, killed everyone there, and continued on, until they came to this one. Countless trillions of people, dead because of the very first sorcerers in Skulduggery’ s world.
And he’d made another mistake, he realized bitterly as the dreaded, thunderous whispers finally picked up over the valley after one such story. No sooner had he convinced himself to stop feeling responsible for everything the Faceless Ones had done over the last few eons, than the Faceless Ones had tracked him down – and he’d led them right to the last group of survivors.
Of course. It was idiotic to think they might have forgotten about him.
Skulduggery never saw what happened to his new friends. He couldn’t even remember if they’d screamed or not. All that filled his waking moments now were his own screams, the blur of unendurable agony separated by a few hours of sheer bliss as he was generously given time to find his various limbs and pull them back on. And as soon as he was in one piece, like clockwork, a Faceless One would appear in its shambling, broken-down human form with no face, and it would hunt him back down to start tearing him apart all over again. It, and all of its equally-nasty-looking pets atop flying black beasts.
In his more lucid moments, Skulduggery would try to put together lists of everyone and anyone who knew where he was, who would have the capability of rescuing him, and the willingness to try. Those survivors? Of course not. They were dead. Skulduggery should be dead too, but either there really was no way of killing a skeleton, or the Faceless Ones actually felt something close to satisfaction with his pain.
Valkyrie? Tempting. He hallucinated her occasionally, talking to him. But there was no way back into this reality. The Sanctuary, and Thurid Guild, would make damn sure that Valkyrie never even tried.
Anyone from Landel’s reality? Gabriel, maybe. He’d made it clear he wouldn’t let anything like this happen. But he was an Archangel with a whole universe of his own to run. He might even be cleaning up Landel’s mess. Besides, was Skulduggery worth rescuing? Gabe might have said he was, but there was no way any kind of Christian God would want him out of harm’s way anymore, not after the war with Mevolent and what happened in it.
So Skulduggery allowed himself to accept the simple truth he’d known since that intestine first wrapped around his ankle so long ago – he deserved this. He deserved this and worse. In fact, it was mildly surprising his punishment had waited so long to get here.
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Tanith missed him, of course. Everyone did, even if they never talked about it. China, who had lost her brother in the same day, wasn’t seen at her library for days at a time – so unlike her that Tanith had almost considered putting together a search party the first time it happened. Several times now, Tanith had caught Ghastly simply staring off into space, an expression of such loss and hopelessness on his face that it broke her heart. He’d only just come back into the world, only just reunited with Skulduggery, and then… this.
But none of them were strangers to loss, and Tanith knew that given time, even Ghastly would eventually move on. The only person she was truly worried about was Valkyrie. As maturely as the young girl liked to present herself, she wasn’t even fifteen yet, and she’d just lost her best friend.
It only worried Tanith more when Valkyrie didn’t seem to collapse, almost didn’t seem to care. Face closed, few words, carrying on with her life as if nothing had changed except her own bitter view of the world. That, Tanith knew, couldn’t last. At some point soon, Valkyrie was going to come to her with an impossible and reckless plan for getting Skulduggery back, despite the Sanctuary’s firm insistence that the portal could not be opened again. And Tanith was going to have to gently explain that Skulduggery himself made sure the portal was closed forever. Without the Grotesquery, without the Isthmus Anchor, he was well and truly gone. Tanith only hoped that it would be enough to break through the wall surrounding Valkyrie’s heart, so that Tanith could finally help her young friend begin to heal. That was her role, right? The mature big sister.
Well. She was right about some of it, at least. Valkyrie had come to her, with a cocky and reckless plan for rescuing Skulduggery from the Faceless Ones. Except that this was a cocky and reckless plan that might actually work.
Tanith closed her eyes and shook her head. “You want to run that by me again?”
There was no frustrated sigh, no snappy line so characteristic of Valkyrie. It was like she’d emptied herself of emotion, forced herself neutral and utterly focused on the task at hand. “To open the portal, you need a Teleporter and an Isthmus Anchor, right? Something that belongs over there, but it’s here instead.”
“Yeah,” Tanith agreed. “Like the Grotesquery.” She hesitated. “Which is gone.”
“I know,” said Valkyrie evenly. Her tone was so deadpan that it physically hurt Tanith to hear it. “We have the Teleporter, obviously. Fletcher’s more than happy to try again. But we also have an Isthmus Anchor, and that’s Skulduggery’s head.”
And that was the crux of the plan, the assumption that Skulduggery hadn’t simply been exaggerating stories when he told Valkyrie that his current skull was not actually his own. “Which he lost in a poker game, eh?” Tanith finished quietly.
“No. Goblins stole it. He won the head he’s wearing now in a poker game.”
Only you, Skulduggery. Tanith fixed Valkyrie with a sympathetic look, wondering if it was really the teenager she was now trying to convince, or herself. “But that was twenty years ago, you said. That skull could be anywhere. It could take us decades to track it down.”
Valkyrie smiled, an expression that startled Tanith as much as the happiness that wasn’t in it. “Then we’d better start now. I already did. Skulduggery found out a while ago that someone named Larks stole everything the goblins had, and then sold them on. He never found out who bought them.” Her smile vanished. “I did. The skull was bought by a mortal woman as a wedding gift, but she used it to beat her husband to death after he stole from her. It was logged as evidence. Have you ever heard of the Murder Skull?”
“Once,” Tanith admitted. “Didn’t it disappear?”
“Exactly. And I need your help to find it. You and Ghastly and Fletcher. Maybe even China, if she’s feeling generous.”
Tanith couldn’t help scowling at the thought of China helping anyone other than herself. “Valkyrie, opening that portal is dangerous. There’s a reason Skulduggery made sure it could never happen again. We might let more Faceless Ones through, or maybe something else just as nasty. And I know you don’t want to hear this, but Skulduggery…” Tanith bit her lip, and took the plunge. “He’s alone in a dimension with a race of evil gods who are angry at us, and have no one to take it out on but him. He might not even be Skulduggery anymore.”
“He’s my friend.”
Tanith looked at Valkyrie, at the single tear on her cheek, and instantly knew that they had to try. Because the knowledge that it was at least possible might be the only thing holding Valkyrie together. And besides, Skulduggery would have done the same stupid, reckless thing for any of them by now.
Tanith gave a curt nod, and a smile. “What do you need us to do?”
Valkyrie didn’t return the smile. She just reached up to wipe away the tear, staring down at the floor. “What do you think it’s like, where he is?”
Tanith gripped Valkyrie’s shoulders, somehow even more scared of this new, unsure version of her friend than the empty shell. “Don’t, Valkyrie. Don’t do that to yourself. There’s nothing anyone could have done, okay? Wherever Skulduggery is, I can guarantee you he’d rather be there alone than let the Faceless Ones get control of this reality. And it doesn’t matter anymore, because we’re going to save him. You hear me? We’re going to get him back.”
~~
Everyone was home.
That was the first thought to cross Skulduggery’s mind as he tumbled out onto the thick white stone. The Institute may or may not have been gone; it was impossible to tell now. Even Martin Landel’s fate was unknown, supposedly in the hands of people who knew better. But the one hard fact was that everyone was free, and back where they belonged, for better or for worse. For Skulduggery, it just happened to be worse.
He’d been poised to run. If the battle at Aranmore Farm was any indication, it was practically impossible to run from a god, but Skulduggery was not going to let them take him without a fight. He’d been prepared to run, prepared for the wonderful feeling of his magic once again flooding his body, prepared to escape into an unfamiliar environment that was likely just as dangerous as anything the Faceless Ones had to offer.
But he’d made one mistake, apart from apparently misjudging the height of the portal. He’d gotten a little too used to his new human body during his imprisonment in that Institute, and when one foot moved forward to begin the process of running, far too little weight was on top of it, and Skulduggery ended up crashing painfully into the ground. He thought he’d be returned to the exact moment he was taken, that he would still have that intestine wrapped around his leg, pulling him through the portal, and he would look up to find himself surrounded by insanity-inducing blasphemies of nature intent on ripping him apart. Instead, it seemed a lot of time had passed. Skulduggery was alone, the portal was nowhere in sight, and nothing was moving around for miles, according to the air currents.
Skulduggery looked down at his skeletal form, surprised at how strange it suddenly looked. It felt just like the first time he’d glanced down to see nothing but bones where his leg should be. This time, fortunately, he wouldn’t have to crawl out of a sodden cloth bag and put himself back together. That was an experience that did not bear repeating. On the plus side, he now knew the human skeleton better than most doctors did.
Over the next few hours, Skulduggery was no closer to understanding where, exactly, he’d ended up – or even knowing how to describe it. The closest equivalent he could think of was a Brazilian mountain town. It was a sprawling city carved out of the rock into the side of a mountain, baking underneath a sun at least five times bigger than the one Skulduggery was used to. The sky was blood-red, and any ground that wasn’t rock sparkled like the golden sand of a desert.
All in all, the effect should have been rather beautiful, but there was something ominous about it. The city, and the horizon, which the sun never seemed to touch. When Skulduggery finally made it to a proper cliff at the edge of the city, he looked out over nothing but more city, extending down into the valley floor and up onto the side of another mountain off in the distance. Everywhere he looked, there was only the blinding white of sun-bleached stone.
The skeleton detective was fascinated, despite himself. Of course, the Faceless Ones wouldn’t have been the first to occupy this reality. Millions of people would have lived here once. He wondered what they looked like, before the Faceless Ones carved into their city and slaughtered all of them.
As more time passed and still, nothing moved but Skulduggery, he began to wonder if the planet in this reality was as big as Earth. The Faceless Ones might be thousands of miles away by now. He might have nothing to worry about, other than an eternity of loneliness in a city that looked as big as a country.
It didn’t matter. Everyone he cared about was home, and safe. Whatever happened next would do nothing more than satisfy his curiosity.
Of course, in a city as big as a country, there were bound to be survivors, and Skulduggery ran into a small group of them some unidentifiable amount of time later; it was difficult to judge the passing of time, as the sun never seemed to set and he never got tired or hungry. The survivors, though initially suspicious of him, grew very friendly after a while. The language they spoke really was beautiful, designed to be a fluid painting of sound rather than to get information across. Skulduggery could imagine, when millions of the creatures lived in the city, that the constant sound of their talking would be magnified by the bare walls of their stone houses and mix together to create a symphony in the air above the valley. Nature really was remarkable.
It didn’t take him long to learn that language. He’d never be able to speak it as fluidly or captivatingly as they could, which seemed to amuse the younger ones in particular, but he learned enough to get by. Eventually, when they told each other stories, he even understood a good deal of them. And what he learned darkened his mood.
When the Ancients first cast the Faceless Ones out of their reality, they hadn’t even considered where they were sending the dark gods. It turned out that they ended up in a reality very similar to this one, killed everyone in it, tore through the walls into a different reality, killed everyone there, and continued on, until they came to this one. Countless trillions of people, dead because of the very first sorcerers in Skulduggery’ s world.
And he’d made another mistake, he realized bitterly as the dreaded, thunderous whispers finally picked up over the valley after one such story. No sooner had he convinced himself to stop feeling responsible for everything the Faceless Ones had done over the last few eons, than the Faceless Ones had tracked him down – and he’d led them right to the last group of survivors.
Of course. It was idiotic to think they might have forgotten about him.
Skulduggery never saw what happened to his new friends. He couldn’t even remember if they’d screamed or not. All that filled his waking moments now were his own screams, the blur of unendurable agony separated by a few hours of sheer bliss as he was generously given time to find his various limbs and pull them back on. And as soon as he was in one piece, like clockwork, a Faceless One would appear in its shambling, broken-down human form with no face, and it would hunt him back down to start tearing him apart all over again. It, and all of its equally-nasty-looking pets atop flying black beasts.
In his more lucid moments, Skulduggery would try to put together lists of everyone and anyone who knew where he was, who would have the capability of rescuing him, and the willingness to try. Those survivors? Of course not. They were dead. Skulduggery should be dead too, but either there really was no way of killing a skeleton, or the Faceless Ones actually felt something close to satisfaction with his pain.
Valkyrie? Tempting. He hallucinated her occasionally, talking to him. But there was no way back into this reality. The Sanctuary, and Thurid Guild, would make damn sure that Valkyrie never even tried.
Anyone from Landel’s reality? Gabriel, maybe. He’d made it clear he wouldn’t let anything like this happen. But he was an Archangel with a whole universe of his own to run. He might even be cleaning up Landel’s mess. Besides, was Skulduggery worth rescuing? Gabe might have said he was, but there was no way any kind of Christian God would want him out of harm’s way anymore, not after the war with Mevolent and what happened in it.
So Skulduggery allowed himself to accept the simple truth he’d known since that intestine first wrapped around his ankle so long ago – he deserved this. He deserved this and worse. In fact, it was mildly surprising his punishment had waited so long to get here.