be a treaty, and an amnesty, and then Mr Serpine will be able to walk free without a care in the world, and there won’t be a single thing you can do about it.”
The Dead Men took their hands from their guns. They’d been alive long enough to know when they were beaten, and they had enough wisdom between them to know there was no shame in it. Sometimes the cards flipped right, and sometimes they didn’t.
At Pleasant’s nod, they got back on their horses. The Necromancers began to file into the cave, and the wall of shadows became little more than black smoke in the wind. Finally, there were just Pleasant and the Necromancer left standing there.
“What’s your name?” Pleasant asked.
That smile again. “Cleric Solomon Wreath, at your service,” said the Necromancer. He even gave a little bow.
“Mr Wreath, today you have prevented me from doing my duty.”
“On the contrary, I have prevented you from exacting your revenge.”
“Which amounts to the same thing. I won’t forget this.”
“I don’t expect you to,” said Wreath, but Pleasant had already turned his back on him.
That night they rested their horses by a stream and didn’t talk a whole lot.
Pleasant sat by himself, looking out into the darkness. To say he had a peculiar anger would of course be something of an understatement, but a peculiar anger it was, as it wasn’t the sort any normal folk could understand. It was a slow-burning heat, capable of firing up at a whim, but never in any danger of puttering out. It kept him. It sustained him. Maybe there was even a part of him that was glad Serpine had wormed his way free.
As long as the man who’d killed him and his family was alive, somewhere out there across the dark plain, Pleasant had a reason to fight, a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. But kill the killer, and what was left? Something cold and uncertain. Could be he hung on to what he had – his hate, his anger, his job – because hanging on was all he had. The war was coming to an end. His time as a soldier was coming to an end.
What then? Was there something else out there, something he had yet to discover, that could keep him going when he’d used up everything else? Some thing or some person that would give him a purpose again, that would light a different kind of fire within him?
Most likely, he didn’t know. He probably didn’t care to think that far ahead.
The Dead Men slept. But not Skulduggery Pleasant.
No, Skulduggery Pleasant just hung on, waiting.
Because it was all he had.
The costumed guests mingled and laughed, sipped champagne and wine and plucked tasty but pointless canapés from the trays of passing waiters. A string quartet played from the darkened gallery, as if they’d been shunted to one side to make room in the light for the chosen few. And the chosen few they really were; invitations to Sebastian Fawkes’s parties were rarer than an honest coin in a politician’s pocket.
That wasn’t a bad line, actually, Gordon realised. Needed work, but it had potential.
“Invitations to these parties are rarer than an honest coin in a politician’s pocket,” Gordon said to his companion, and waited for the response. When none came, he frowned, stored the line away and vowed to play around with it later.
He recognised a few of the faces – the moustachioed face, for instance, of R. Samuel Keen, an American whose every book had to have either an unnaturally wise child or a psychic dog. His latest one, which Gordon had tried to listen to as a book on tape before the cassette unspooled in his car, had both. It hadn’t been very good.
He saw Adrian Sykes, a soft-spoken Geordie whose work was fantastically gory and outrageously imaginative. The theme of the party was, as usual, horror, and Sykes had come dressed as one of Clive Barker’s Cenobites, all black leather and hooks. Gordon had met him only once before, and had come away thinking of him as a thoroughly decent person. It was occasionally true to say that the writers of the most disturbing horror stories were among the nicest people you could possibly meet.
There were exceptions, of course. For instance, the gentleman Sykes was chatting to, Edgar Looms, another American, was a man of singular vulgarity. Gordon had first met him ten years earlier, just after Gordon’s first book was published, and since then he had developed quite an abhorrence of the man. Tonight Looms was one of many who had come dressed as Frankenstein’s monster – from the James Whale movie, not the book.
For his first time here, Gordon himself had come as the Creature from the Black Lagoon – a costume he’d had specially created at no little cost. It was worth it, though, even if the flippers made it difficult to walk and the mask made it difficult to see, hear or breathe. It also made it difficult to be heard, which may have explained why his companion hadn’t responded to his politician line.
Gordon leaned in closer, careful not to topple over in his costume, and said, quite loudly and clearly, “Invitations to these parties are rarer than an honest coin in a politician’s pocket.”
His companion, dressed as he was in a 1930s suit and tie, his head covered in bandages exactly like Claude Rains from The Invisible Man, turned slightly, so that Gordon could see his own costume’s reflection in those sunglasses.
“Are you having a stroke?” Skulduggery Pleasant asked. “You keep repeating the same phrase. Is it hot in there? It looks hot.”
“It is,” Gordon admitted. “But I’m not having a stroke. I’m too young. I’m only thirty-five, for God’s sake. Though I may start hallucinating, and thirst will likely become an issue before too long.”
“How do you take the mask off?”
“I’m not entirely sure. It took two people to get me into this thing. They probably told me how to take it off, but the mask makes it hard to hear properly.”
Skulduggery said something.
Gordon leaned in again. “What?”
“I said what about toilet breaks?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Can you see a zip anywhere?”
“It looks rather seamless.”
“Damn it. And now I want to pee. I didn’t before you brought it up, but now I can feel how full my bladder is. Oh dear God. If I wet myself in front of all these writers, they’ll never let me live it down.”
Skulduggery nodded. “Writers are small-minded like that.”
