Until the End, page 1
First published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2022
Published in this ebook edition in the USA in 2022
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Text copyright © Derek Landy 2022
Skulduggery Pleasant™ Derek Landy
Skulduggery Pleasant logo™ HarperCollinsPublishers
Cover illustration copyright © Tom Percival 2022
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Source ISBN: 9780008457129
Ebook Edition © July 2022 ISBN: 9780008457136
Version: 2022-04-27
This book is dedicated to Iron Man.
Tony Stark stopped Thanos and saved us all and I, for one, will never forget the sacrifice he made.
Also to Natasha Romanoff for yeeting herself off that cliff.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Faceless Ones …
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Keep Reading …
The Skulduggery Pleasant series
About the Publisher
“Welcome,” she said.
The Faceless Ones were in her soul.
She felt them, an entire race of them. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Billions? More? She had no way of knowing. The only thing she knew without question was that there were multitudes squirming and writhing within the essence of who she was. They flitted to her light, to her aura, like moths, and when they were ready they left her soul and emerged, intangible to the touch, invisible to the mortal eye. They stood on the horizons and they waited until it was time to become solid.
They were her children, and they were going to reshape the world.
Getting punched through a building at sixteen was new and fun and actually pretty cool. Getting punched through a building at twenty-six was annoying, frustrating, and, when she really thought about it, kind of rude.
Valkyrie picked herself up, bits of broken masonry falling from her shoulders, clouds of dust blossoming and swirling on the breeze that came through the ruined structure. She pulled the skull mask off her face and it flowed into the hood, and she pulled that down and shook out her hair. The sorcerer hovered in the night sky above her, his arms folded, waiting for her to look up. Instead, she walked over to a piece of the collapsed roof, and sat.
She crossed her legs. Took out her phone.
The sorcerer drifted down a little, trying to catch her eye without making it look obvious. Finally, he said, “What’s happening?”
“I’m not fighting you,” Valkyrie said.
“So you surrender?”
“Nope. Just not fighting you.”
“Why not?” he asked.
Her thumbs danced over the screen, replying to a message. “Because fighting is dumb,” she said, and sent it off.
He drifted down lower. “What do you mean?”
She looked at him now. His hair was long and brown and he had a little beard, and he wore colourful robes with intricate designs. His name was Mansel, or Mantle, or Barney or something.
“Is this really the best way to resolve a problem? By punching the person you’re arguing with? Being powerful doesn’t make you right.”
“Being powerful means you don’t have to be right,” Barney said, smiling with evil intent. Or just regular intent. Valkyrie couldn’t be sure. She had a lot going on these days.
Headlights swooped in as a car approached. Most people would run from a battle that had already demolished two houses in this construction site. It took a certain kind of person to drive towards it – a certain kind of person driving a certain kind of car. The 1924 Rolls Royce Phantom 1 pulled up to the kerb, and Skulduggery Pleasant got out.
His three-piece suit was dark blue tonight, with matching hat, and his skull reflected the orange streetlamp. It was October but Dublin was still warm. Ignoring the front door, which had miraculously survived the battle, Skulduggery stepped through a massive hole in the wall and made his way over.
“Have you surrendered yet?” he asked Barney, checking the time on his pocket watch. His head tilted in annoyance, and he started winding the crown.
“I’m not the one surrendering,” Barney said. “I’m winning this.”
“You’re not, though,” said Valkyrie.
“You’re really not,” said Skulduggery.
“I’ve thrown her through two buildings,” Barney said with a hint, a smidge, a soupçon of exasperation in his voice.
“No,” Valkyrie corrected. “You’ve only thrown me through one building. I bounced off the second.”
“My point is,” Barney continued, “I am too powerful to be stopped by the likes of you.”
Valkyrie raised an eyebrow.
Skulduggery lifted off the ground slowly, the dust whirling beneath him. “You’re too powerful for us?” he said. “Too powerful for me? A man who was murdered and came back to something resembling life? A man who has saved the w
Barney hovered in the air. “She doesn’t command them,” he said quietly.
“What? What was that?”
“She doesn’t command the Faceless Ones,” he said, louder this time. “She brought them here, yeah, fair enough, but she’s not, like, in charge of them or anything.”
Valkyrie swiped through her social-media feed. “I’m the Child and the Mother,” she muttered.
She felt Barney’s gaze swing back to her. “What?”
“It’s what they call me,” she said. “I’m the Child of the Faceless Ones because I’m descended from them, but I’m also their Mother because I’m the conduit through which they must travel to this dimension.” She put her phone away and looked up. “The Child and the Mother. See? Which means they do what I tell them.”
Barney licked his lips. “Why are you doing this? Why did you come after me? I didn’t do anything to you.”
“You tried to steal some very powerful weapons for your own destructive purposes, and you killed three mortals doing it.”
“So?” Barney responded. “I thought you were, you know …”
“What?”
“I thought you were on our side,” Barney said. “I know you were a what-do’ye-call-it detective, an Arbiter, but haven’t you changed? Like you said, you’re working with the Faceless Ones now. You’re a bad guy. What do you care if the rest of us kill a few people?”
Valkyrie sighed. “I’m not a bad guy, you idiot. My horizons may have been broadened recently, but I’m still me. I’m still an Arbiter, and part of our job is to bring in murderers like you.”
“Why, though?”
“Because murder is, like, totally wrong,” she said. Sarcastically.
“But you brought the Faceless Ones back!” Barney exclaimed, really not getting it. “The mortals don’t know they’re here right now, but sooner or later they’ll be able to see them and then …” Barney looked like he was running out of words, so he waved his arms around. “They’ll kill them! The Faceless Ones will kill them! So, if they’re going to die anyway, why amn’t I allowed to start off by killing a few myself?”
“Barney, I don’t think you’re grasping the fundamentals here.”
“Who the hell is Barney?”
“The Faceless Ones are love and light and peace and happiness, and, if they have to kill some people, it’ll be for a very good reason, and those deaths will have meaning. But you’re just a dude with a little beard who got a power boost along with the rest of the sorcerers and now thinks he’s a big deal. You’re not a big deal, Barney.”
“Seriously, who is this Barney person?”
“Are you going to come quietly,” Valkyrie said, “or will I have to continue beating you up?”
Barney sneered. “You’ll need an army to stop me.”
Skulduggery had drifted in behind him by that point, and snaked an arm round his throat. He applied the choke before Barney knew what was happening. Barney struggled and flailed. He tried using magic, but he was panicking too much. He went red, then purple, and finally went unconscious. He fell, but Skulduggery used the air to catch him and hold him upside down. All the change fell out of his pockets.
“I’ll find him a nice cell in Roarhaven,” Skulduggery said. “You may as well go home and feed your dog.”
“Yeah,” said Valkyrie, letting that go without comment. “See you tomorrow.”
She flew to her bike, put on her helmet, and eased out on to the road. She would have loved to go home and be greeted by her dog, by the excited patter of doggy feet and that dopey grin, but Xena didn’t live with her any more. That was one of the side effects of her new status as the Child and the Mother: animals didn’t like being in her presence. Not even Xena, the most loyal German shepherd to ever stride this Earth. Valkyrie missed her terribly, of course, and her heart physically ached whenever she thought about what she’d had to give up – so she tried not to think about it. Besides, Xena seemed happy enough to be with Militsa.
Valkyrie found herself on familiar streets. Glad of the distraction, she pulled up outside the site that used to house the old Waxworks Museum and, below that, the Sanctuary. It was a hotel now. She thought of the museum itself and the dark halls of musty, cobwebbed celebrities. She thought of the wax figure of Phil Lynott that stood at the secret entrance, given a kind of life through magic, and for the first time wondered if that had been sacrilege, of a sort. This had been a real person, a talented man beset by his own demons, and they’d used his likeness to check passwords and open doors.
It was odd the things that occurred to her now that they had passed. Despite what she had insisted at the time, despite what Skulduggery had said, perhaps plunging into danger at twelve years old had, in fact, been astonishingly reckless and incredibly stupid.
Valkyrie sat on her bike and thought of the Elders, of Meritorious and Crow and even Tome. She thought of Nefarian Serpine finding the Sceptre of the Ancients, charging it with his magic, then accidentally using it to destroy the Book of Names. She thought of how the Sceptre had exploded when Skulduggery used it. She remembered Serpine trying to keep himself together when the black lightning struck him. She remembered how he crumbled to dust.
Something flashed into her head, a memory or a thought, and it seemed hugely important in that instant, but it moved too quickly for her to latch on to. The more she tried to pin it down, the further it scrambled, until Valkyrie couldn’t even be certain it had been there in the first place. She shrugged. If it was important, it’d come back to her. Probably.
She put her helmet back on, started the bike, and joined the easy flow of traffic.
A few years after Serpine’s death, Valkyrie herself had replaced the broken crystal – hirranian, the scientists now called it, or katahedral, to use its traditional name, capable of absorbing the souls of those it destroyed to add to its strength – and used it to kill two of the Faceless Ones who’d come through at Aranmore Farm.
She shook her head as she rode. She hated remembering this. Now that she understood what they truly were, she hated remembering the fact that she’d been responsible for the deaths of some of them. To get her mind off the oncoming wave of guilt and shame, Valkyrie focused on the last time she’d seen that black lightning, when the new Sceptre had exploded in her hand just five months ago. She’d been lucky it hadn’t killed Skulduggery. She’d been lucky it hadn’t killed her, come to that. The only explanation she could come up with as to how she’d survived was that the universe, in all its wisdom, had needed her alive.
But of course it needed her alive. Within an hour of the new Sceptre exploding, she had thrown herself into the path of Creed’s Activation Wave and had become the Child and the Mother of the Faceless Ones.
Proof, Valkyrie reckoned, that this was always meant to be.
She stopped at the traffic lights in Drumcondra and put her foot on the road, the engine idling. She was alone here, at the lights. No cars around. Someone was out walking their dog. The dog barked its little head off at something its owner couldn’t see, but Valkyrie could. At first, Valkyrie had been the only human who could see the Faceless Ones standing over the cities of the world, but now all sorcerers had acclimatised to their presence – and soon the mortals would be able to see them, too. And there were plenty more to come, plenty more to emerge from Valkyrie’s soul and take their place in the world. She knew each of their names, or at least a pronounceable, shortened version. Cyarrnaroh’s full name was over eight hundred letters long, and Dhahun’garun’s name involved half an alphabet that no one with ears had ever heard. This one, the one towering over Dublin like a mountain of flesh and claws, folds and tentacles, bore the name Khrthauk, and it was beautiful.
Valkyrie smiled up at it, and then the lights changed, and she rode on, towards home.
China woke from another bad dream and someone was standing over her.
A twist, a roll, throwing sheets aside, and China dived on the intruder and passed straight through, clutching nothing but air. She turned, the sigils on her palms burning and ready to release twin streams of energy, and the image of the old woman chuckled in the dark.
“Oh, Mother,” said Solace, “you do amuse me.”
Heart rate lowering, adrenaline calming, China straightened.
