Resurrection

  “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 m
uch. 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.

  33

  They rejoined Melior in his kitchen. He frowned at Valkyrie.

  “Are you OK?” he asked. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “It’s been an eventful few minutes,” she answered, “but here’s the upshot. Abyssinia was super-powerful and used other people’s life forces to heal her injuries and grow in strength. She was finally defeated and chopped up into little bits. Her heart was cut out. Skulduggery, what happened then?”

  “We took the heart back with us,” Skulduggery said, “put it in a box, put the box in a room and built a prison around it.”

  “Coldheart,” Valkyrie said.

  “Named after its first guest.”

  “Coldheart Prison,” Melior said, straightening. “I heard them talking about that. They have it.”

  Skulduggery tilted his head. “They have the prison?”

  “They overthrew it two days ago. Which means they have the heart.”

  Valkyrie frowned. “And what about the prisoners?”

  “I don’t know what they’re going to do with them.”

  “We put away some of those lunatics …”

  “Could you do it?” Skulduggery asked. “Could you bring Abyssinia back if you just had her heart?”

  “If she has this healing ability you described and I had access to the right type of energy, then … then probably, yes.”

  An idea exploded behind Valkyrie’s eyes. “Could you do that to someone else?” she asked, and glanced at Skulduggery. “What about Ghastly?”

  “Ghastly and Anton were cremated,” Skulduggery reminded her, and the excitement in her chest died as quickly as it had formed.

  Then it sparked again. “What about Gordon? We could bring him back.”

  “I can’t,” Melior said. “Resurrecting someone who’s died on my operating table – that’s one thing. But exhuming a corpse, bringing that back? I’m not prepared to do it, not if I have any choice in the matter. I’m sorry. I’m not here to play God.”

  “We’re not asking you to resurrect everyone,” said Valkyrie. “Just a few. My uncle was such a good man and he was murdered. How is that fair? If it wasn’t right to kill him, then how can it be wrong to bring him back?”

  “Valkyrie,” Skulduggery said quietly.

  “What?” Valkyrie said, speaking too quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying. “How many people have you lost that you would love to see again?”

  Skulduggery’s head tilted ever so slightly, and Valkyrie felt herself flush.

  “There are a few,” he said. “But I wouldn’t presume to have the right to drag them out of their slumber.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry.”

&nbs
p; Skulduggery nodded, and turned to Melior. “The circumstances you would need in order to bring Abyssinia back – what would they be?”

  “When I revive people on the operating table,” Melior said, “I transfer some of my energy to them. It weakens me, but after a few days my life force replenishes and I recover. Something like this, though … I’d need to take a life force and transfer it to her remains. More than one, actually. Two, possibly three. I’d need a modified Soul Catcher to harness it all, and life forces from mortals wouldn’t be enough. I’d need sorcerers, whose unique energy signatures conform to specific …” He trailed off. “Oh, dear God. They knew I’d need Neoterics. That’s why they’ve been recruiting them.”

  Skulduggery nodded. “So not only has Abyssinia built up a small army awaiting her return, but she’s also been using the process to hunt for donors. Infuriatingly clever.” He walked to the window and turned. “But if they took your husband to force you to work for them, and nothing has changed, then why come to us now?”

  “Because things have changed,” said Melior. “They’re so close to getting what they want that they wouldn’t dare kill him now. They need me too much. So I figure there’s an opportunity, right? Now is the time to strike, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  Valkyrie looked at Skulduggery.

  “You actually have a point,” Skulduggery said. “Savant’s probably never been safer than he is right now.”

  “Exactly!” Melior said, clapping his hands. “So we go after him. The three of us. If they’re keeping Savant anywhere, they’ll be keeping him in that prison, right? That makes sense, doesn’t it? Where better to keep a prisoner?”

  “How much do you know about Coldheart?” Valkyrie asked gently.

  “I know it’s pretty much impenetrable,” Melior said. “Only two people have ever escaped from it. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but you two have accomplished miracles together. I’ve heard the stories.”

  “And did you know that it moves?”

  “What moves?”

  “The prison,” Skulduggery said. “It doesn’t stay in one place. It’s a floating island. It could be anywhere in the world right now.”

  Melior paled. “No. No, please …”