The Maleficent Seven (From the World of Skulduggery Pleasant) (12 page)

“Might be the wisest option,” said Vex. “And no one would think any less of you. We are scary individuals, after all. My friend Saracen here, the one who knows things, he’s technically a monster. He’s ten foot tall and he has extremely sharp teeth and two heads. Do you really want to face that? Really? Better run now, while you still have a—”

“He’s gone,” said Saracen.

They walked to the corner. On the ground beneath the open window was a machine pistol. They passed it, walked to the door at the end of the corridor. Vex waited for Saracen to give him the all-clear, then he opened the door and they walked in.

Jackie Earl sat in his swivel chair, both hands flat on the desk. To his right was a bottle of whiskey. “I don’t want no trouble,” he said.

Vex raised an eyebrow. “Some of your boys tried to kill us just there.”

“You broke in. This is private property. They were just doing their jobs. I hope you didn’t kill any of them.”

“Hard to say,” said Vex. “But I don’t think so. Not even the Necromancers. That’s quite a thing, you know, having Necromancers on your payroll.”

Earl shrugged. “You got to be competitive if you want to stay in business.”

While Vex wandered around the office, Saracen sat opposite Earl. “Can I ask you something, Mr Earl? It almost seems like you were waiting for us, like all this was an ambush that didn’t quite go according to plan.”

Earl shrugged. “My boys are always ready, what can I say?”

“But this is quite a large compound,” Vex said from behind him, forcing Earl to look round. “And you only have a handful of goons with guns? I’d heard you had a small army in here, and I’d even heard rumours of a vampire. And while you do have five unconscious Necromancers downstairs, I saw no vampire tonight.”

“Cutbacks,” said Earl. “Had to let the vampire go.”

Vex completed his tour of the office, ended up standing beside Saracen’s chair. “You know why we’re here.”

Earl remained impressively impassive. “You’re thinking of getting into the mobster business and you want some tips?”

Vex smiled. “Where’s the bow, Mr Earl?”

“What bow? I don’t know what you’re—”

Without taking his eyes off Earl, Saracen nodded to the wall to their left. “It’s behind there,” he said. “Hidden compartment. Circuitry runs across the floor to the desk.”

Earl paled.

“Would you mind?” Vex asked. “Just press the little secret button like a good chap.”

The mobster hesitated, then reached under his desk.

“Be careful you don’t accidentally knock against the gun that’s hidden down there,” Saracen said. “Wouldn’t want it to go off by mistake.”

Earl’s jaw tightened, then he moved again, very slowly, and there was a loud click from the wall. Vex walked over, got his fingertips behind a large painting and pulled. It swung open, revealing the compartment. He lifted the bow clear, feeling the power that practically made the thing vibrate. There was a quiver of arrows in there, and he took that, too.

“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 seed 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.”