Читать книгу Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 10 - 12 - Derek Landy - Страница 40

“Where are we?” Valkyrie asked, peering out of the car window. The street was narrow. There was graffiti on the walls, none of it any good. She was surprised at this. She hadn’t thought Roarhaven would be tolerant of something so mundane as declarations of lust and crudely drawn genitalia. She’d expected their graffiti standards to be higher.

“We are where we need to be,” Skulduggery said, coming to a stop and turning off the engine. “Ironfoot Road is close by.”

They got out and he locked the Bentley. Valkyrie zipped up her jacket against the cold and they started walking. She kept her head down and he kept his façade up, but everyone they passed was too busy with their own problems to notice them.

They walked for three minutes before coming to a blue door. Valkyrie stood watch while Skulduggery picked the lock. When he was done, he tapped her and they slipped inside. He drew his gun and they crept upstairs to a quiet corridor. They found Melior’s apartment and Skulduggery picked that lock next. When the door was open, he splayed his hand, reading the air, and led the way into the kitchen, where Richard Melior stood with his back to them, watching the window.

Skulduggery walked right up to him without making a sound and pressed his gun into the back of Melior’s head.

“Not an inch,” Skulduggery said.

Without turning, without looking over his shoulder, Melior said, “I’m … I’m very glad you came.”

“You should be glad I haven’t pulled the trigger.”

“I’m glad about that, too.”

“Turn.”

Melior turned, saw Valkyrie and tried to smile. “Hello.”

“If you even think about blasting us again,” she said, “we’ll hit you until you’re nothing but a puddle of mess on the floor.”

“I understand. And I’m really sorry about that. If you’re in any pain, I can help you.”

“I’m fine,” she replied irritably. “We have doctors who specialise in healing people.”

“Take a seat, Doctor,” Skulduggery said. “I want you where we can keep an eye on you.”

Melior nodded, and sat in the chair Skulduggery pulled out for him. He didn’t object when the shackles were produced. Valkyrie turned on her aura-vision for this next part – she wanted to see what happened when they were put on – but she noticed something as Skulduggery moved in. Like most auras she’d seen, Melior’s was orange, but it was a slightly different shade. She didn’t know what that meant, didn’t know if it meant anything, and then the shackles snapped on and Melior’s power dampened, and the aura shrivelled away until Valkyrie could barely see it.

She switched off the aura-vision. She was really going to have to find a better name for it. “What were you looking at?” she asked.

“Sorry?”

“You were looking down at the street. At what?”

“Oh,” he said, “no, I wasn’t looking at anything. I was waiting for you. You came through the window the first time we met and for some reason I thought you’d come through the window again. I never expected you to come through the door.”

“Doors are for people with no imagination,” she conceded, “but we like to mix it up a bit around here.”

Skulduggery sat opposite Melior and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “You’ve got a lot to tell us,” he said.

“I do. Anything you want to know.”

“Let’s start from the top,” Valkyrie said. “What is the anti-Sanctuary? What’s it really called?”

“It’s not called anything,” said Melior. “It’s easier to hide something when it doesn’t have a name, I guess. The anti-Sanctuary, that’s as good a name as any. They’ve been working away behind the scenes for hundreds of years. Assassinations. Disappearances. They’ve orchestrated wars to get their agenda just a little bit further along the line. I know what you’re thinking. I thought it, too. How could it even exist? How could an organisation like this be responsible for centuries of murder and upheaval and yet no one knows anything about them? But that’s why they mostly recruit Neoterics. They’re looking for outsiders, sorcerers with no links to the Sanctuaries. They’re careful. They’re unbelievably, impossibly careful to not leave any fingerprints that’d lead people like you back to them. Or they were, at least. Their endgame is in sight. They’re coming out of the shadows.”

“What do they want?”

“War,” said Melior. “A proper, full-scale war, at the end of which the mortals will be our slaves. They want sorcerers to rule the world.”

“Who’s in charge?” she asked. “Smoke? Lethe?”

“Smoke’s a lackey. He doesn’t have one original thought in his head. Lethe’s different. He’s smarter. Very talented, very dangerous, very cunning. I’ve never seen him lose a fight. He plays with them at first, lets them think they’ve got the upper hand … I think he does it because he’s bored.”

“Why does he wear the suit?” Valkyrie asked.

“I don’t know, but I’ve never seen him without it.”

“What about the Teleporter?”

“Nero,” said Melior. “An arrogant little creep. In love with himself. Don’t know much about him. Don’t know much about most of them, to be honest.”

“The guy who slowed time …”

“Ah,” said Melior, “Destrier. He’s not really part of the team, as far as I can tell. He helps out, but he’s got his own thing going on. I get the feeling an arrangement has been reached there. They call what he does temporal manipulation.”

“Last person I saw doing that was a serial killer.”

“He’s a weird one, I can tell you that. I’ve seen him talking to himself – practically the only person he does talk to. I’ve certainly never spoken to him.

“Then there’s Memphis. He’s got this thing about Elvis. Apparently, he met him once, when he was a kid. But he’s dangerous. His power manifested as some form of hyper-agility. I’ve seen him flip around like a trapeze artist without the trapeze. He used to have a sister, but Lethe killed her. As far as I know, Memphis doesn’t hold a grudge.”

“Who’s the Australian?” Valkyrie asked.

“Razzia. She’s completely off the rails. I never know what she’s going to do from one moment to the next. She’s got a creature living in her arm, a parasite of some sort. I’ve asked several times to examine it, but she hasn’t let me get close.”

“Tell us about Smoke,” Skulduggery said.

“All I know about him is what he can do. I’ve seen him touch people – not even skin-on-skin contact, but through their coat sleeves – and they’re corrupted. Ordinary, decent people turned into psychopathic versions of themselves. I’ve seen it go on for weeks – every two days, Smoke just taps them and it starts all over again. I’ve seen people under his influence kill their entire families and laugh while they do it.”

“We’ll stop him,” said Skulduggery. “We’ll stop all of them. Anyone else we should know about?”

“There are others, though they come and go. But that’s the main group.”

Skulduggery leaned back in his chair. “I’ve read a bit about you, Doctor. Your power manifested in medical school, didn’t it? Up until that moment you had no idea magic existed.”

“That is correct,” Melior said, nodding. “I did some haphazard research after it happened, managed to talk to a proper sorcerer and had my eyes opened. After that, I met Savant and fell in love, and … well, never looked back.”

“And then Parthenios Lilt talked to you.”

Melior’s face soured. “Yes. He’d heard about me and came to interview me, to run some tests … The term Neoteric was actually my suggestion. We became friends, or so I thought. This was back in the 1960s. Savant and I were living in San Francisco, because where else would you be living in the sixties? Parthenios introduced us to his friends – mostly other Neoterics. For a while, it was fun – we even had our own bowling team, as lame as that sounds now and, in fact, back then. But then we met more of his friends. People like Bubba Moon. Have you heard of him?”

“We have,” said Skulduggery.

“That’s when the alarm bells really started to ring. This was an insane man sitting at the table with us, talking about the tyranny of mortals, about how we should rise up against them and join with the being who lives beyond our reality.”

“We met him,” Valkyrie said. “The being beyond our reality, I mean. His name was Balerosh.”

Melior blinked. “Moon was telling the truth? He exists?”

Valkyrie shrugged. “Not any more.”

“Anyway,” Melior said after a moment, “I didn’t like the way things were going, and I wanted nothing more to do with any of them. Savant took a little longer to come to the same conclusion, but then he sees the good in everyone. His power is knowledge; he absorbs vast quantities of information at a glance, but he’s also a pacifist. He’s never hurt a soul in his life. I fell in love with him because of that quality, but it also meant that he couldn’t understand the destructive urge that I could see in the people around us.”

“But you understood it,” Skulduggery said.

“I did. When I was a kid, I hurt people. It’s why I became a doctor, to make up for the pain I’d caused. So yeah, I understood it.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing,” said Melior. “For a long time, nothing. We moved around a bit – it’s very hard to stay working in a hospital when you don’t age. We learned to forge new certificates with each passing decade. Eventually, we went back to my hometown, to Baltimore. More time passed. We hadn’t even thought of Parthenios or any of them in forty years.”

“Where’s your husband now, Doctor?”

“They have him. Parthenios Lilt and three others broke into our apartment, beat me half to death and took him away. I went to the Sanctuary, but they didn’t do anything. Two months later, I woke up to find Lethe standing over my bed. He told me who he was with, said they’d kill Savant unless I joined them.”

“When was this?”

“Five years ago.”

Valkyrie frowned. “Savant’s been gone five years?”

“Every so often, I’ll get a voice message telling me he loves me, telling me to be strong …” Melior’s voice cracked.

“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?”