The Maleficent Seven: From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant

  “Are these special arrows?” he asked.

  “No,” said Earl, speaking as if every word caused him physical pain. “Arrows are ordinary. It’s the bow that gives them their power. Can I ask you to return it when you’re done? It is mine, after all.”

  “Sorry,” said Vex. “I have a feeling you’d be using it for criminal gain, and that’s just unfair to all the other criminals in this fine city.”

  “But I paid for it. I paid a lot for it.”

  “Then you’d probably have been better off spending that money on something else, like a waffle iron. I love waffle irons. You can pick up a good one for, what, thirty dollars? How much did the bow cost you?”

  “Half a million.”

  Vex hesitated. “That would have bought a lot of waffle irons. You probably wouldn’t even need that many.”

  “I don’t know,” said Saracen. “He might really like waffles.”

  “That is true,” said Vex. “Do you really like waffles, Mr Earl?”

  Earl poured himself a drink. “You know what I hope, gentlemen? I hope you and that blonde psycho meet up and kill each other, that’s what I hope.”

  Vex’s smile faded. “And what blonde psycho would that be?”

  Earl took a sip, closed his eyes to the taste and sat back in his chair. When he opened his eyes, he looked up at the ceiling. “Tanith Low. She was here last night – after the bow, same as you. She told me you’d be coming, which is why I hid it away. Didn’t do a whole lot of good. Neither did those damn Necro’s.”

  “You’re sure it was Tanith Low?” Saracen asked.

  Earl looked at him. “One hundred percent positive.”

  “Did she have anyone with her?”

  “Monsters. A blue, ugly woman. A tall, ugly man who kept jumping about. She said she had a vampire too, but I didn’t see it.”

  “What about a man in sunglasses?” Vex asked.

  Earl nodded. “He was here, sure. Him and a woman. Don’t know much about them, and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. I like the thought of you two running into trouble and getting your heads cut off. Takes the sting out of losing the bow.”

  Vex frowned. “So she came here for this – but left without it?”

  “I got the drop on her. Didn’t really give her much choice.”

  “You got the drop on Tanith Low?”

  “I can be pretty sneaky when I want to be. Now then, you boys gonna talk all night, or you gonna let me try to salvage what’s left of my business?”

  Back in the van, driving from the compound, Vex put the bow in a long case and locked it while Saracen relayed the story to the others. Frightening, behind the wheel, didn’t bat an eyelid when Tanith’s name was mentioned. Wilhelm, on the other hand...

  “Tanith Low?” he gasped. “We’re going up against Tanith Low?”

  “Relax,” said Aurora. “She’s not that great.”

  “Maybe not twenty years ago when she was going out with Frightening here,” said Wilhelm, “but she’s changed. She’s got a Remnant in her now. You know what that means? She’s got no mercy. This is a woman who runs up walls and swings a sword and there is nowhere you can be safe from her. She’s basically a ninja, and now that she’s got no conscience? That is the definition of someone I have no intention of messing with.”

  “It gets worse,” Saracen admitted. “It looks like Billy-Ray Sanguine is still hanging around.”

  “Oh great,” said Wilhelm, “the hitman deluxe.”

  Saracen hesitated. “Plus Springheeled Jack, Black Annis, some unknown girl and... Dusk.”

  Wilhelm gaped. “The vampire? She has a vampire? So that’s Springheeled Jack and Black Annis and a vampire against... what? Us? That’s it. I quit. I’m out.”

  “You’re not quitting,” said Aurora.

  “Two monsters, a vampire, a hitman and a ninja, plus whatever this mystery woman is. You know what this means? We’re going to die. We are going. To die.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “You know what’s dramatic? Being horribly killed by any one of the people I just mentioned. That is drama. This? This is just me quietly freaking out.” Wilhelm swung around to Vex. “Please,” he said, “tell me we’re not continuing with this.”

  “We’re continuing with this,” Vex said, and Wilhelm moaned. “And we don’t have an awful lot of time. I think we can safely assume that Tanith was the brunette Johann Starke was talking about. She tried to get the dagger, saw the amount of security and probably decided to go for an easier one first. But she didn’t get it – we did. We have the bow, Johann still has the dagger and that leaves two more weapons. We have to get to them before she does.”

  “So where to next?” Gracious asked.

  “A man named Crab,” said Vex. “Tanith will leave the sword till last – that’s the trickiest one. Crab has the spear – that’ll be the easiest.”

  “If it’s so easy, she probably has it already.”

  “If she already had it, she’d have used it to get the bow and the dagger – but using any one of the God-Killer weapons would risk alerting the owners of the others. No, she’s left the spear to just before the end. A nice easy job to let her get her breath back before the big one.”

  “Let me guess,” said Frightening, “that was our plan as well, yes?”

  “Yes,” Vex admitted. “This whole thing was meant to be quick and quiet. Get in, take the weapons, get out. Tanith and her little band of merry psychopaths have made a mess of that. The least we can do is return the favour.”

  anith sat in the darkness high above the stage, legs dangling from the rigging while the men sang far below her. She had never been a big opera fan. Her parents were, though, and she distinctly remembered sitting by the fire while her father played his favourite pieces on the phonograph. But that was so long ago now. That was back when some records were still cylinders, before the gramophones came along to dominate. For her, the gramophone signalled the beginning of change. Every time her brother returned home, he’d bring one of those new flat records for her collection. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong... He’d tell her stories about seeing these people play and even meeting some of them afterwards. She asked again and again to be allowed to accompany him on his journeys, but he always told her no. When she was older, they said. When she’d finished her schooling.

  But those years in between were bereft of music. There had been no melodies down there in the dark, and the only rhythm was her own heartbeat, tip-tapping against her chest. Music no longer mattered.

  She emerged different. She was older, of course. Bigger. Taller. Stronger. Her parents had left her there as a child, and when she had emerged blinking into the warm sunlight, she was nineteen years old. A woman. There was another World War going on and she barely knew who the sides were. She returned home and she sat with her parents by the fire while Dvorˇák played. On the gramophone, she noted. Conversation was stilted. They didn’t know her any more and she didn’t know them. It would be years before she realised that she’d need to forgive them for abandoning her, and it was only then that she could let herself love them again.

  They had to leave the house soon after her return because of the air raids. Her parents travelled to Scotland. Tanith’s new duties as a hidden blade took her on a different path. And she started paying attention to music again. But try as she might, she couldn’t find that sense of delight she used to feel. And then the fifties came, and brought with them Nina Simone and Elvis and Chuck Berry. She did her best to ignore Pat Boone and found a spark of that old delight that only burned brighter with the advent of the sixties and the Beatles and the Stones and long-haired hippies and free love, and she was right in the middle of it all, forty years old and looking half that age. Magical and powerful and beautiful and trained to kill.

  That might have been what did it. Surrounding herself with flower people and singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ at Vietnam rallies might have been just the thing she needed to plant the se
ed in her head that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life killing people. She already had blood on her hands. How many murderers, thieves, traitors and conspirators had she killed by the early seventies? She didn’t want to know. They were scarcely innocent, but that had stopped mattering a long time ago.

  Maybe it was the flower people. Maybe it was John and Yoko, spending days in that bed. Whatever it was, whatever made her decide to quit, it was accompanied by music. Not this music, as she sat in this opera house twenty years later, unseen by all those people below her, and not the music of today, not Nirvana or Curve or Jeff Buckley, but music nonetheless. Zeppelin. Sabbath. Bowie. To someone, of course, Luciano Pavarotti was their Robert Plant. Maybe even to the man she was here to protect. She spied him over there, sitting in his private box, eyes on the Three Tenors. The box was dark and otherwise empty. She only knew two things about him – she knew where he’d be sitting tonight and she knew someone wanted him dead. She didn’t even know his name.

  A shadow moved past the outline of the door behind him, and Tanith tensed. It came back, hovered there a moment before slowly moving away again.

  Tanith stood, climbed the rigging to the very top and folded her body till her feet touched the ceiling. Using one hand to keep the sword on her back from slipping out of its scabbard, she hurried upside down along the curved dome to the open balcony. A woman in black stood at the door to the target’s box, a sword in her hand. No one around. Tanith flipped almost soundlessly to the red carpet, but the woman in black heard her anyway and spun.

  They looked at each other for a moment, and the woman in black narrowed her eyes. “Highborn?” she said.

  Tanith’s heart wanted to leap to her throat. She forced herself to smile, to keep her voice level. “Hello, Avaunt,” she said.

  Avaunt stepped away from the door. “They told me about you,” she said. “You abandoned us.”

  God, Tanith’s throat was dry. “There is no law against leaving. My brother did it.”

  “Another traitor,” said Avaunt. “And now you’ve joined him in his disgrace. Little Miss Highborn. Too good for the rest of us.”

  Moving slowly, Tanith slid out her sword as Avaunt drew closer. “I never really understood where all this animosity came from,” she said, “and now that I finally have the chance to ask, I realise I just don’t care any more. You’re here to kill a man. I’m here to stop you.”

  Avaunt laughed. “You? What can you do? Are you going to run up a wall a few times and hope to make me so dizzy that I pass out?”

  “It doesn’t have to go down like this. You could just walk away.”

  “I am a hidden blade, a knife in the shadows. I do not walk away. Why do you care who I kill? What has any of this to do with you?”

  “It’s my job now,” Tanith said. “I help Sanctuaries around the world, hunting down criminals, fighting monsters, that sort of thing. I save people.”

  “You’re an assassin, you ridiculous tart.”

  “Ex-assassin,” said Tanith.

  “And you really think you can stop me? I’ve always been twice the fighter you ever were, Highborn. You should scurry away before you annoy me.”

  “I could,” Tanith conceded, “but seeing as how we both have swords, what do you say we fight to the death instead?”

  Avaunt grinned. “You read my mind.”

  She came in with blade flashing and Tanith blocked and blocked again and stepped back and kept blocking. Avaunt’s eyes burned with determination, her lip curled in hatred. She was right, of course. Avaunt had always been the best. Down there in the cold and the dark, her practice sword would smack against Tanith’s fingers, her arms, her head. She had something – a raw aggressiveness, an eagerness to inflict pain that Tanith had always lacked. But it wasn’t a practice sword Avaunt wielded tonight, and if Tanith were to survive, she needed to do something she’d never managed to do before – she needed to beat her.

  Tanith jumped over a low swipe and turned her body sideways so her feet settled on the wall as she answered with a swipe of her own. Avaunt cursed, caught off balance. She stumbled and Tanith walked sideways, her sword clanging against Avaunt’s, keeping the pressure on, forcing her back. Avaunt lunged and Tanith flipped so that she was upside down and Avaunt passed beneath her. Tanith’s blade opened up her shoulder and Avaunt hissed. Energy crackled around her hands, but she needed both of them to hold the sword.

  Just as Avaunt was getting the measure of her upside down, Tanith dropped to the floor and spun, opening a long slash across Avaunt’s thigh. Avaunt hobbled back a few steps and Tanith pressed the advantage. Avaunt’s guard was getting weaker. Her blocks were being pushed aside by Tanith’s overpowering strength. It was all so easy. It was all so incredibly easy.

  Their blades locked and Avaunt did something, moved somehow, and Tanith felt an impact against her hips and the world tilted and she was on the ground and her hands were free.

  Where the hell was her sword?

  She rolled to avoid Avaunt’s blade, somersaulted back and came up in a crouch. She sprang at Avaunt and they wrestled, firing headbutts at each other. Avaunt’s grip loosened and Tanith snatched the sword away and turned and an elbow cracked into her jaw.

  Tanith fell straight back. She hit the carpet and lay there. A hazy image grew sharper. Avaunt, standing over her with energy crackling in her hand.

  The door opened behind her and the target, a bald man with broad shoulders, stepped out. Avaunt spun, fired a bolt of energy that he twisted his body to avoid. The energy scorched the wall over his right shoulder, but he remained calm. He looked bored, even.

  Avaunt grabbed her sword and leaped, swinging for his neck. The bald man closed his fingers round the blade.

  Avaunt froze and Tanith stared. That sword should have cut through his hand like it wasn’t even there. Instead the blade was locked in place, like it had embedded itself in a tree trunk. And there wasn’t even any blood.

  Furiously, Avaunt tried pulling the sword away, but the bald man took it from her hands and tightened his grip and the blade shattered. She rammed a fist into his side, but it was she who grunted in pain. She kicked at his knee and her foot bounced off. She kicked him between the legs and he didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

  Avaunt stepped away, her eyes wide. She curled her fingers and energy crackled, and she jumped at him and he reached out, grabbed her throat and squeezed. Above the singing there was a strange sound, a cross between a snap and a pop, and Avaunt fell lifeless to the carpet.

  The bald man was already looking at Tanith. “Who sent her?” he asked.

  Tanith struggled to her feet. “I don’t know. I heard from a guy who heard a rumour. I just knew that someone with some connection to the Irish Sanctuary was going to be targeted here tonight. Do you know of anyone who’d want you dead?”

  His eyes were a startling blue. “I have many enemies,” he said. “It may have been one of them. It may have been my sister. What’s your name?”

  “Tanith,” she said. “Tanith Low.”

  “Thank you, Tanith. You risked your life to save mine.”

  She picked up her sword, returned it to its scabbard. “Pardon me, but I don’t think your life needed saving.”

  “You weren’t to know that,” said the bald man. “You had better leave, however, before a member of staff appears.”

  “Yeah,” said Tanith, and turned to go.

  “Do you know who she was?” asked the bald man.

  She looked back. “Her name was Avaunt. We trained together.”

  “I see. Was she your friend?”

  Tanith hesitated. “The closest thing I had to one.”

  ravelling to Poland was not a straightforward task with monsters in the group. Dusk had to be kept under close scrutiny during the night, Annis had to be kept out of the sun during the day, and Springheeled Jack had to be hidden from view at all times. When Tanith had grabbed the bow, they had sixty-four hours until the dagger lost its charge
and Johann Starke spread the word about the forgeries. Loads of time, she’d figured. But now those hours had trickled away until there were only twenty-five left with two more weapons to go – and Dexter Vex had a bloody jet plane at his disposal.

  Tanith could practically feel him breathing down her neck, and she was starting to get nervous. Failure at this point could have disastrous consequences for Darquesse, and that wonderful future that Tanith had seen, of blood and death and desolation, could crumble to nothing before it even had a chance to spring into existence.

  But she couldn’t lose hope. The Remnant had gifted her with many things, wisdom and memories and skills beyond her experience, but she’d brought a lot to the table as well. A keen sense of style, a wicked sense of humour, a fine edge of determination, and a whole heap of optimism. She was Tanith Low, for God’s sake. If anyone could pull this off, it was going to be her.

  Of course, she’d probably have a runny nose when she did it. It was cold in Poland. She hadn’t spent an awful lot of time there over the years, but she knew it wasn’t always as cold as this. The last time she was there the sun had been shining and she’d had to resist the urge to go skinny-dipping.

  She laid the bike on to its kickstand. Hanging the helmet off one of the handlebars, she wrapped her coat round herself and made her way down to the beach. No skinny-dipping today, she reckoned. The sea churned against the pebbled beach and a light rain spat down at her. She walked to the rocks and after a few minutes found the cave.

  “Hello,” she called. “Do you have a minute? I’d like a chat.”

  The sound of the wind through the cave was like a great beast yawning.

  “Crab,” she called. “Don’t make me come in there after you.”

  A few moments later, a man emerged from the darkness. He looked to be in his seventies, with long grey hair and a long grey beard that hung in matted clumps. He held a long spear in his right hand. Despite the cold he was wearing only a loincloth.