Skulduggery Pleasant: Last Stand of Dead Men (30 page)

Vex was grinning. “Don’t you think you should tell him?”

“Tell me what?” Shudder asked.

Saracen made a face. “Anton … the thing is, you love that story. You do. Every time you tell it, you … you just get all proud. And that’s a lovely thing to see. But the story isn’t the whole, entire, actual truth of what actually, truthfully, entirely … happened.”

“I don’t understand,” Shudder said.

“The Butcher didn’t capture me,” said Saracen. “I never ran when the alarm was raised. I’d twisted my ankle, remember? So, while you guys took off, I hid. And, purely by coincidence, I hid in the Butcher’s own cellar.”

Shudder frowned. “But … but you subdued his wife …”

“Subdue is one word for it,” Ravel chimed in. “Seduce is another.”

Shudder stopped walking. “What?”

“She was really pretty!” Saracen said. “And she wasn’t happy married to
him
. How could she be? He was ninety per cent hair.”

“You spent three days with his
wife
?”

“While he was out hunting you guys, yeah. It was the safest place to be while my ankle healed. The last place he’d think to look.”

Shudder turned to the other Dead Men. “And you all knew about this?”

“We didn’t want to spoil the story you’d concocted,” Ghastly said. “It was really good.”

“Unbelievable,” Shudder said, and walked on.

“Anton,” said Saracen, trailing behind him. “Anton, come on.”

“I used to be proud of you.”

“You can still be proud of me. I’ve done other tough stuff. Remember going up against Vengeous in Leeds? What about Norwich? They were some tough times. Remember the psycho sisters? What were their names? Cerys and Aspen, right? They were a handful.”

“Did you seduce them, too?” Shudder asked, not slowing down.

“No!” Saracen said. “Well, not at the same time …”

“I will never look at you in the same way again.”

“Ah, come on.”

“Anton,” said Ravel, “it’s really not that big a deal …”

“A man I thought I knew,” said Shudder, “a man I thought of as a friend, has been letting me believe stories about him that were mere fabrications. How did you expect me to react to this, Erskine?”

Everyone stopped and looked at him.

And then he grunted. “See? I can make jokes, too.”

Saracen stared. “You were joking?”

“Of course. That story may not have been true, but you are no less a worthy friend in my eyes. I have seen you in action. I have seen you rise to the occasion when lesser men would crumble. The corpse attack, for instance.”

“Corpse attack?” said Valkyrie. “What was that?”

“Valkyrie doesn’t need to hear this story,” Skulduggery said, and they all started walking again.

“Nonsense,” said Shudder. “She needs to hear every story. She’s one of us now.”

“The only reason you don’t want this story told is because you’re not in it,” Vex said. Skulduggery didn’t answer.

“We were in Denmark,” said Saracen, “waiting for the boat to take us home. There were about thirty others with us. We’d been fighting for weeks while Quintin Strom and his lot kept Mevolent busy on the other side of the world. The last we’d heard, Vengeous was injured and we knew that Serpine was unlikely to make the trip out to face us, so were pretty confident that we’d get home without any extra hassle.”

“But we hadn’t heard anything about where Lord Vile happened to be,” said Ghastly.

A Lord Vile story. No wonder Skulduggery hadn’t wanted it told.

“So there we were,” Saracen continued, “huddled round the various campfires, swapping stories, singing songs. We hadn’t lost one single soldier in the last few weeks. Plenty injured, sure, but no fatalities. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves. Feeling pretty unstoppable.”

“Then we found out what unstoppable really was,” Ravel muttered.

“We looked around and Lord Vile was standing right there,” said Saracen, “right in the middle of the camp. The sentries were dead, though we didn’t know that yet. He’d killed them all without making a sound. Easy pickings, for someone like him.”

“We attacked,” Vex said. “Threw everything at him. He killed anyone who got too close. Larrikin was hurt pretty bad, but finally Anton here got past his defences – that Gist of his sure is persistent – and Vile disappeared. He’d had enough, he’d got bored, he didn’t like it when the fight got a little fairer … whatever the reason, he left.”

“He killed twelve people,” Saracen said. “Those shadows of his just sliced them apart. So we gathered up their remains, by morning they were buried, and we dug in and prepared for his return. The boat was still three days away, and he was out there.”

“So the sun went down,” Ravel said, picking up the story. “We formed a perimeter. No one was singing any songs that night, believe me. Hours went by. The breeze rustled leaves, owls hooted, animals skittered by in the undergrowth … I remember every single sound from that night, because every single one of them stopped my heart. But nothing happened. Morning came. Some of the soldiers started to believe that Vile had run off, that maybe Anton had hurt him more than we’d realised.”

“I hadn’t,” said Shudder. “I told them I hadn’t. They wouldn’t listen.”

“Night came again,” Saracen said. “Again, we formed a perimeter. Again, every sound made us jump. Then we heard the voices. Voices of the people we’d buried, calling out to us, begging for help.”

Ravel gave Valkyrie a half-smile. “We don’t spook easily. We’d faced dark sorcerers and vampires and monsters of all descriptions. Ghosts didn’t scare us. Most ghosts can’t even hurt you. But those voices … They kept calling to us. All night. We had to stop people from leaving the camp to go and help.

“By morning, our nerves were in tatters. As soon as it was light, a group of us went out. The graves were empty.”

“We had one more night to go,” Ghastly said. “So we dug ourselves in one final time, and the sun went down. For a few hours, there was nothing. Then there was movement, all around the camp. People, just standing there in the darkness, watching us. The people we’d buried.”

Valkyrie frowned. “Zombies?”

“Of a sort,” said Vex. “But not the decomposing kind. Our friends had been … infected. When Vile killed them, we figured he’d left behind some little shard of Necromancer magic. Remember, some of these soldiers had been sliced to bits, but here they were, whole again, staring at us. And then they attacked.”

“We were down to ten men when the sun came up,” Ghastly said. “Whatever these things were, they could only live at night. At dawn, they fell apart. We gathered them, put them with the bodies of the men and women they’d killed, and we burned them all. A few hours later, our boat came and we got the hell out of there.”

“If you can survive three nights like that,” said Shudder, “then that is all I will ever need to know about you.”

“Pick up the pace,” said Skulduggery from up ahead. “We need to cover more ground before setting up camp.”

Valkyrie watched him as they walked. She knew what it was like to hear people talk about you without them even realising they were doing so. Whenever anyone mentioned Darquesse, she found herself shrinking inside. She tried not to imagine their disgust, their horror, if they ever found out that Darquesse was who she’d become if she ever gave in to the voice in her head, even for a moment.

Was Skulduggery the same? Did Lord Vile whisper to him when things got quiet? Did he have to fight the call of that black shadow-armour like she had to fight against Darquesse’s sheer unbridled power? Valkyrie didn’t even know where Skulduggery kept the armour any more. He’d told her it was locked in a case and hidden away. He told her it was secure. It was caged. He acted so casual about it, like giving it up wasn’t a big deal, like the power wasn’t addictive.

Of course, maybe, for him, it wasn’t. Or maybe his disgust at himself for the things he’d done, the people he’d killed, during those five years as Vile was so overwhelming that it cancelled any addiction he might have felt. That was a possibility. But Valkyrie didn’t believe it.

She believed he was like her. He had a terrible secret, a secret that would cause his friends to turn on him in an instant, but it was a secret that he wanted to keep alive. She believed that the darkness, the power, the freedom, bubbling away beneath the surface, kept him going when nothing else would. Because all he had to do was give in, let it take over, and all the guilt and the shame and the pain would go away forever.

She believed he was like her because she needed to believe that. If he wasn’t like her, if she was wrong, then she was alone.

And there was no one who could save her.

Valkyrie sat close to the fire, gloved hands out to catch the warmth. The rest of the Dead Men huddled in from the cold night, except for Skulduggery, who sat cross-legged on the ground without any need for heat.

She looked at each of them in turn, these men who wore their age in their eyes. Hardened men, veterans of war, warriors and killers and heroes. And villains, too, she supposed. No such thing as a true hero, not where war is concerned. Not where people are concerned. For years she had held Skulduggery himself in that high regard – he was her hero. He still was, in many respects. To have gone through everything he’d gone through, to have done the things he’d done, and to emerge on the other side as the man he was … that was pretty damn heroic. But those things he’d done when he’d given in to the darkness, when he’d surrendered to his own despair … those things could never be forgotten. Never be forgiven. She knew that better than most.

“How did this start?” she asked, breaking the silence. “The Dead Men, I mean? Who put you together?”

“No one,” said Skulduggery. “We just found each other. That’s what happens when people try to kill you – you form attachments. But when the war broke out, I was already friends with Ghastly and Hopeless.”

“And Hopeless brought me in,” said Ravel.

Ghastly nodded. “It was the four of us to begin with. We were soldiers like everyone else, fighting the good fight, trying not to get killed …”

“Some of us were more successful at that than others,” Skulduggery put in. “After Serpine killed me, when I came back, I was the miracle soldier. Not even death could stop me, they said.”

Vex smiled. “I heard stories about him, how he rose from the dead to lead us against Mevolent, how the war was going to be over within weeks. That didn’t exactly happen. When I finally got to meet the miracle soldier, the living skeleton, I was so excited. I was expecting blazing fireballs for eyes and all this magic I’d never seen before. What I got instead was … him.”

Skulduggery tilted his head. “Glad I could disappoint.”

“We joined up a little while after Dexter,” Saracen said, motioning to himself and Shudder. “I impressed them by attacking an entire battalion of Mevolent’s troops on my own.”

“You slipped,” said Shudder.

“Stop saying that. I did not slip.”

“I was there. You slipped and fell down the hill and rolled into their camp.”

“Aggressively. I rolled
aggressively
into their camp.”

“I had to save you.”

“Why do you always say it like that? Like it was a chore? I was very dizzy. I probably had a concussion. However it happened, whatever the exact details were, it was a very brave thing for me to do and because of it we met up with these fine people you see before you, Valkyrie, and we became the squad of which you are now part.”

“It didn’t become official until Meritorious asked for volunteers to undertake a suicide mission,” Skulduggery said, the orange light from the fire bouncing off his skull. “My hand was the first hand raised.”

“Mine was the second,” said Ghastly. “I thought he had a plan.”

“I really didn’t,” said Skulduggery.

“I didn’t know that at the time,” Ghastly admitted.

“I just want it made clear that I did not volunteer for that mission,” Saracen said. “I was yawning. That raised arm was me stretching. But they made me go anyway.”

“By the end of it,” Vex said, “Meritorious had seven volunteers. They started calling us the Dead Men when they thought we were out of earshot. No one expected us to come back.”

“And we came back,” said Ravel. “That’s when they started calling us the Dead Men to our faces. After that, we sort of developed a reputation for undertaking impossible missions and making it out alive. There were some injuries along the way, of course. When I was recovering, Larrikin took my place. And when Skulduggery went on his little walkabout, when none of us knew if we were alive or dead, Larrikin stepped in again.”

“And then when Hopeless died,” Ghastly said quietly, “Larrikin became a permanent member of the squad.”

“Until Serpine killed him,” said Vex.

“And a few months later, Mevolent was killed,” said Skulduggery. “And a few months after that, the war was over, and the Dead Men officially disbanded. We never thought we’d be needed again.”

“And here we are,” Saracen muttered.

“Strike from the shadows,” Vex said.

“Disappear into darkness,” finished Ghastly.

Silence followed, until Ravel said, “We should probably sleep. Big day tomorrow.”