The Faceless Ones

by Derek Landy

  She wanted to slam the door in his face, but he was right. If she was discovered, they could split up and the Cleavers would automatically go after the adult first.

  “Give me one good reason why I should even run the risk of helping you escape. Your grand ambition in life is to kill people.”

  “Yes, but …” Scapegrace faltered, then looked down at his shoes, and his bottom lip quivered. “But as you keep pointing out,” he continued, “I’m not very good at it, now am I?”

  “I … suppose not.”

  Valkyrie sighed and let the flames go out in her hand.

  “Fine,” she said. “Come on and stay quiet.”

  She hurried to the desk and opened and closed drawers, searching for her phone. She found it, noted the five missed calls on the screen. She dialed Skulduggery while Scapegrace, a smile on his face, fished out loose money from an open drawer. She tapped the drawer closed with her foot, catching his fingers. He yelped and leaped back, grabbed his right hand with his left by pure instinct, and yelped again as both sets of injured fingers came into contact.

  “Valkyrie,” Skulduggery’s voice said on the phone. He sounded relieved but urgent. “Where are you?”

  Scapegrace hopped and screamed in silence beside her, and she did her best to ignore him.

  “I’m in the Sanctuary,” she said. “Did the trade happen?”

  He hesitated. “Yes. They have Fletcher, we have Guild, but he’s unconscious. We’re still fugitives until he wakes up. You’re going to have to get yourself out. Can you do that?”

  “Course I can. I’ll use the secret passage.”

  “Don’t. Guild will have deactivated it after last time. You’re going to have to leave through the main door. If you’re not out in ten minutes, I’m coming in after you.”

  “Someone’s coming—I have to go.”

  Valkyrie jammed her phone into her jeans and motioned to Scapegrace to hide. They flattened themselves against the wall, and she peeked out. A sorcerer passed in the corridor ahead, never even glancing at the holding area. She waited until his footsteps had faded away.

  They didn’t have much time. Every second spent undetected was a second stolen.

  Then the lights went out.

  Valkyrie whirled, bracing herself for the attack. The space around her was silent. She held out a hand, doing her best to read the air, and the only movement she felt was Scapegrace behind her.

  “What’s happening?” he whispered.

  “How should I know?”

  “You didn’t do this? Or the skeleton? Or your friends?”

  “This isn’t us. Maybe there’s a power cut.”

  “In the Sanctuary? Sanctuaries don’t have power cuts. This is an attack. Maybe it’s my friends, breaking me out.”

  “You don’t have any friends.”

  “Which would make it unlikely, but not impossible.”

  She clicked her fingers, taking the spark into her palm and feeding it magic, letting the flame grow bigger and brighter. The light flickered off the walls.

  She could hear someone shouting, and even though the shout was urgent, there was no danger in it. If Scapegrace was right, if this was an attack, then maybe it hadn’t begun yet. And maybe she could use it to her advantage.

  They picked up their pace, jogging through the dark. Occasionally, they’d see another flame ahead of them or behind them, and they’d divert course to stay away. Valkyrie was struggling to keep her sense of direction, following a map in her mind that she hoped was accurate.

  Something moved ahead of her and she jerked back, stifling a scream. It was a Cleaver, crossing their path and immediately disappearing into the gloom. Either he hadn’t seen her face or else he just didn’t consider her a priority. Valkyrie wondered if they could see in the dark.

  There were voices in the next corridor, so they turned right in an attempt to circumvent any crowds. So far, Scapegrace hadn’t been a whole lot of help, and she was starting to think of the best way to abandon him.

  She heard a familiar voice and stopped. Scapegrace ran into her, squashing his hands between them. He spun around and fell to his knees in muted agony.

  “Quiet,” she whispered, and extinguished her flame. Mr. Bliss approached, talking with a slender woman holding a flashlight. Valkyrie recognized the Administrator’s soothing tones.

  “With the respect due to your position,” the Administrator was saying, “security matters are handled by the Cleavers, not the Elders. Besides which, with the Grand Mage injured, you need to be kept safe.”

  “By the time someone gets around to telling me what has happened,” Bliss responded, “it may be too late to do anything about it.”

  Valkyrie straightened up. Bliss would help her get out, and the Administrator would do whatever she was told. This would also be the perfect opportunity to send Scapegrace back to his cell.

  “Sir,” the Administrator said sharply, and they stopped walking. The beam of her flashlight had picked out something on the wall. Valkyrie could see a carved symbol. The Administrator edged forward curiously. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I just can’t remember where.”

  “Stay away from it,” Bliss ordered. “Symbols are my sister’s forte, not mine, but even so …”

  “Sir?”

  “It’s a warning sigil, a silent alarm. If we pass, it will alert whoever is waiting in the corridor ahead.”

  Valkyrie frowned. If there were enemies lurking nearby, ready to spring an ambush, then she hadn’t seen them.

  The Administrator stepped back. “We should go the other way and send the Cleavers.”

  Bliss crouched by the symbol. “Shine the light here.”

  “Sir, this isn’t safe.”

  “Shine the light.”

  Slowly, Bliss reached for the symbol, and it started to glow. He shook his head.

  “I was wrong. This isn’t a warning sigil.”

  “No,” the Administrator agreed, “it’s not.”

  She stepped back as a dozen symbols lit up, catching Bliss in a circle of blue light.

  He tried to stand, but energy crackled and streams of light seared through his body, connecting the symbols to each other, with him at their center. The Administrator, no longer needing her flashlight to light up her surroundings, flicked it off.

  Valkyrie stared. The Administrator was the traitor—the one who had told Sanguine how to open the Grotesquery’s cage, the one who had told him how to find Baron Vengeous’s prison cell last summer. The Administrator, brought in by Guild but working for the Diablerie.

  Bliss grunted and fell to his knees. His strong shoulders sagged, and his head lolled forward.

  “You’re not an easy man to kill,” the Administrator said. “Batu worked for a long time researching this. Another few minutes, and then it’ll be over. He assured me it would be quite painful.”

  Valkyrie turned to Scapegrace to try to formulate a rescue plan, and she caught sight of him just as he fled around the far corner. Seething, she looked back. Even if she somehow performed the miraculous feat of overpowering the Administrator, she didn’t know how to deactivate the trap. That meant she needed the Administrator conscious, which added another layer of the impossible.

  She couldn’t think of anything clever to do, so she crawled, sticking to the shadows as much as possible. When there was no more room to sneak, she took a breath and launched herself forward. She pushed at the air, and the Administrator whirled, her own hands open and flat. The spaces between them rippled and surged, the disturbance warping the Administrator’s smile.

  Then the Administrator waved, and Valkyrie was yanked off her feet. She slammed into a wall, and the Administrator raised her arm and Valkyrie slid upward, to the ceiling.

  “You’re a beginner,” the Administrator told her kindly. “You couldn’t expect to defeat me. But it was a noble effort.”

  The air around her was heavy, too heavy to shift. Valkyrie strained to move her arms, but she was pinned tight. She tur
ned her head to take a breath, but there was nothing to take.

  “Sorry,” the Administrator said. “I can’t allow you to breathe. You have to die, just as Mr. Bliss has to die. It’s all part of Batu’s plan, you see.”

  Valkyrie gasped uselessly. She tried clicking her fingers, but with a gesture from the Administrator, the rest of the oxygen whistled away from her, and no flame would grow.

  Her lungs, however, were burning fiercer than any fire.

  She heard something beyond the blood pumping in her ears. Someone was screaming and the scream was getting closer. Her eyes flickered to the left as Scapegrace pelted out of the darkness, hit the wall, and hurtled off again in another direction. Two Cleavers raced after him, then came to a sudden yet graceful stop when they saw Bliss in a circle of blue, Valkyrie pinned against the ceiling, and the Administrator standing between them, with a look of shock on her pretty face.

  They unsheathed their scythes.

  The Administrator released her hold, and Valkyrie fell to the floor, gasping. The Administrator stepped back.

  “Don’t. Just … Listen to me. Just … don’t …”

  The Cleavers darted forward, and the Administrator turned, tried to run, but Valkyrie stuck out her foot and she tripped. The Administrator toppled into the circle of blue, and all those streams of energy branched off from Bliss and struck her. She screamed and her body twisted. There was a loud pop, a smell of ozone, and the blue light vanished.

  Darkness again, but for the hazy blue images that swam in Valkyrie’s vision. A flashlight was turned on. The Administrator was on the ground, unmoving, and one of the Cleavers was checking Bliss.

  The second Cleaver was standing over Valkyrie. She began to crawl away, and the Cleaver moved to stop her.

  “Leave her,” Bliss whispered.

  The Cleaver stopped, and Valkyrie scrambled to her feet and ran.

  She ran blindly through the dark until she saw moving lights ahead. She ducked into a room. She heard Crux in the lead and waited for them to pass before stepping out and continuing on. She reached the foyer, where someone had set up emergency lights, and she kept her head down as she joined the line of people leaving. She took the stairs out of the Sanctuary and passed through the disused Waxworks Museum. The sorcerers around her were talking about an attack and exchanging theories, and at the first opportunity, Valkyrie detached herself from the group.

  She left the Waxworks Museum, stepped out under a gray sky spilling rain, and jogged to the street. The Purple Menace pulled up sharply, and she got in.

  “Where are the others?” was the first thing she asked.

  “Already on their way to Aranmore.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Skulduggery put the black bag containing the Scepter into her lap, and with a squeal of tires, her prison break was complete.

  Thirty-four

  THE BATTLE OF ARANMORE

  THEY DROVE THE rest of the way in silence, with only Skulduggery’s skill stopping them from skidding off the road. By the time they reached Aranmore, it had stopped raining, and the Purple Menace took the turn and sped up the meandering driveway, long grasses growing on either side. There was a plume of smoke just over the hill, and Ghastly’s van came into view. It was on its side, burning fiercely. The doors were open.

  There was an explosion up ahead, and they saw Tanith flipping away from it. She landed and ran for the corner of the farmhouse. She reached it just as a hail of bullets tore up the ground at her feet. “They have machine guns,” Valkyrie said. “And hand grenades.”

  The Purple Menace braked, and Skulduggery kicked the door open. Valkyrie gripped the black bag.

  “Stay low,” he said, and they ran.

  She caught a glimpse of the Diablerie in the yard on the other side of the farmhouse. She saw Fletcher, his hands cuffed in front of him, staggering after Gallow. Murder Rose saw her, raised her gun, and fired. Valkyrie stumbled, but kept running until she reached the cottage and got behind cover.

  Skulduggery pulled his revolver from his jacket. “Ghastly?” he called to Tanith.

  “He’s somewhere around,” she said, ducking back as more bullets slammed into the corner beside her.

  The door to the farmhouse was yanked open, and Paddy charged out, shotgun in hand and yelling a battle cry. Skulduggery pushed at the air, nudging the shotgun upward just as Paddy fired, and then gestured and the gun flew into his grip.

  Paddy realized who he had just tried to shoot and winced. “Sorry! Sorry!”

  “What are you still doing here?” Skulduggery demanded. “I called to tell you to leave.”

  “To be honest, I don’t really give a damn what you told me to do. Give me back my gun.”

  “Paddy, this isn’t safe.”

  “You don’t think I have a right to be here? This is my home. It has been for forty-two years. I’m not abandoning it just because a bunch of wizards are waving their wands about and firing a few bullets.”

  “This is dangerous,” Valkyrie said.

  “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself, young lady. I have plenty of cartridges for my shotgun, and these are a new pair of trousers. I’m ready.”

  “If you’re volunteering,” Skulduggery said, handing him back his shotgun, “stay here with Valkyrie.”

  “You can count on me, Mr. Skeleton.”

  The ground erupted behind them, and two figures flew from the spray of dirt: Ghastly, with his arm wrapped around the throat of Billy-Ray Sanguine. They hit the ground and tumbled, Ghastly losing his hold. Sanguine gasped, suddenly able to breathe again, and he unfolded his straight razor and came at Ghastly with a snarl.

  Ghastly dodged, then jabbed, and Sanguine’s head jerked back. Ghastly’s fist crashed into Sanguine’s ribs, lifting him off his feet. Stunned, Sanguine could only swing the razor wildly as Ghastly moved in and caught him with a perfect right hook.

  Sanguine’s legs gave out from under him, and he dropped.

  “Into the farmhouse,” Skulduggery ordered.

  Tanith went first, then Paddy. Skulduggery ushered Valkyrie in before him. Ghastly came last, shutting the door. They stayed low as bullets flew and glass rained down upon them.

  Skulduggery crawled to the window that looked out on the yard and returned fire. The sheds and the farm machinery provided excellent cover for Murder Rose as she danced and spun, reloading her machine gun and laughing all the while.

  “Where are the Necromancers?” he shouted to Ghastly.

  “Wreath was supposed to be approaching from the west, to come up from behind. I don’t know what’s keeping them.”

  “Never trust a Necromancer,” Tanith growled.

  Valkyrie risked a glance. At the far side of the yard she saw Gruesome Krav drop the Grotesquery’s torso inside a chalk circle that Jaron Gallow was drawing on the ground. Fletcher tried to run, but Krav hauled him back, throwing him down beside the torso. Gallow was drawing something else now—symbols, all around the circle.

  Before Valkyrie could ask anyone what was happening, the symbols began to glow, and red smoke rose from them, mixed with the black smoke that rose from the circle, collecting into a cloud that swirled around the circle’s perimeter, roaring like a hurricane.

  “Damn,” Skulduggery said, and switched targets from Rose to Gallow. But it was like the bullets hit the smoke and were caught up in it as it rose high into the air in a spiraling column.

  Valkyrie glimpsed Fletcher, on his knees, the handcuffs on the ground beside him. Gallow was standing close, both hands gripping the boy’s shoulders. The handcuffs were off, but if Fletcher tried to teleport away, he’d take Gallow with him—and she knew Gallow would waste no time in punishing him for his disobedience.

  Gallow made Fletcher put his hands on the Grotesquery. He was doing it. He was going to open the gateway. The smoke swirled, and he was hidden from view.

  Valkyrie looked over at Murder Rose as the madwoman laughed and lobbed something at the farmhouse.

  Val
kyrie whirled. There was an explosion behind her and she was thrown off her feet amid a shower of splinters and rubble and glass. She fell painfully, ears ringing, dust in her mouth, and pain in her shoulder.

  “Valkyrie!” Skulduggery shouted.

  “I’m okay!” she called back, her voice dull. She looked around for the bag with the Scepter, saw it in the corner.

  Bullets peppered the wall above her, and Ghastly dragged her from the danger zone.

  “Hold still,” he said, and he gripped something at her back and pulled. She hollered and jerked away from him. He was holding a shard of glass, the tip dripping with her blood. “Anywhere else hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  “I’ve got a new set of clothes for you. Nothing will get through them. They’re in a bag in the van. Think you can make it?”

  She nodded, and he pulled her up. She did her best not to wince. There was a fresh burst of gunfire, and an ugly painting on the wall was reduced to tattered paper in a broken frame. Ghastly yanked open the door.

  “Go,” he said. Valkyrie bolted from the farmhouse. She ran for the burning van and dropped, skidding along the ground until she was behind it.

  She pushed at the air to clear the smoke and saw the bag on the backseat. She reached in, stretching for the bag strap, and yanked it out. The smoke curled and washed over her, and she closed her eyes against the stinging. She crawled backward, coughing, until she felt grass under her. Her eyes watered when she opened them.

  She used her toes to pry off her running shoes as she threw away her tattered jacket, then zipped the sleeveless tunic over her T-shirt. Her jeans were filthy, splattered with mud. She discarded them on the grass and pulled on the black trousers, barely registering how well they fitted, how they were instantly perfect. Her new boots felt as if she’d been wearing them for years.

  Valkyrie searched through the pockets of her old clothes, transferred whatever she found in there, and then pulled on the coat. It was shorter than her last one, stopping midthigh. All these new clothes were black except for the coat sleeves, which were of a red so dark, it looked like dried blood.

  She tied her hair back and heard something like a whisper behind her. She turned in time to see a fist swinging her way. She dodged back, almost tripping over her discarded clothes. Her assailant kept coming, a thing of papery skin and stitches, dragging its heavy feet. Valkyrie clicked her fingers and sent a fireball into its chest. The fire burned through and ignited the gases within, but there was another one behind it, and another one behind that. Valkyrie ran to the farmhouse, giving herself some room before she looked back.