Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 7 - 9. Derek Landy

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      “Mr Bright Side,” she muttered.

      hey flew for half an hour before they came to the field. Whole swathes of grass were scorched, others burned through entirely. Streaks of dried blood coated the ground. A ferocious battle had been fought here, of which Valkyrie had only glimpsed the beginning. She wondered if her reflection had survived, and her gut twisted with anxiety.

      Skulduggery took her high into the air until the fields became a patchwork quilt of colours separated by ditches, trails and hedges. The closest village was to the south and that’s where they flew. But Skulduggery slowed as they neared.

      Not content with attacking the Resistance, Mevolent’s forces had obviously felt the need to vent their anger on the local populace. The buildings were burned and smashed, and bodies lay rotting in the sun, covered in swarms of black-bodied flies. Skulduggery didn’t land. They just hovered above the streets until he was sure that there was nobody down there living. Men and women and children. Even dogs. Unbridled hatred had swept through this little village leaving nothing in its wake. Valkyrie wondered how many of those innocent lives had been taken by Lord Vile. She could tell by Skulduggery’s silence that he was thinking the same thing. She hugged him a little harder.

      They followed the main dirt road that led out of the village. There was a farm a few miles further south and they touched down in the yard. A farmer and his sons gazed at them but didn’t move.

      “You talk to them,” Skulduggery said. “A pretty girl is less scary than a walking skeleton.”

      Valkyrie stepped forward, moving slowly. “Hi,” she said when she was close enough.

      The sons were around ten or eleven, and they stood behind their father, a thin man with a hard face.

      “We don’t want any trouble,” he said.

      “That’s not why we’re here,” she told him. “The village up the road there – do you know what happened?”

      The farmer looked at her, looked at Skulduggery behind her, and nodded.

      “We’re not from the City,” she said. “We don’t work for Mevolent.”

      “We don’t want any trouble,” the farmer repeated.

      “Please, we need to get in touch with the Resistance.”

      The farmer shook his head. “Don’t know anything about them. Please leave.”

      “I understand that you’re scared...”

      “Can’t help you.”

      “Do you know anyone who could?”

      “No. No one. Don’t know anything.”

      “Sir, we don’t have a lot of time.”

      “Please go.”

      Skulduggery touched her elbow and she sighed. “OK. I’m sorry for disturbing you.” The farmer’s sons stepped out from behind their dad as Skulduggery and Valkyrie lifted into the air. She gave them a goodbye wave that they didn’t return.

      “That was horrible,” she said as they flew. “Did you see how scared those kids were?”

      “They can’t really be blamed,” Skulduggery responded. “They’ve just buried their mother.”

      Valkyrie frowned. “How do you know?”

      “There was a dress on the clothes line, but the father didn’t send the kids into the house so there’s no one in there to keep them safe. The cart had a blanket on it.”

      Valkyrie closed her eyes. “She’d been in the village. They used the cart to bring her body home. Oh, God, and then we fly in, the exact kind of people they don’t want anything to do with...”

      “This is some world you’ve found.”

      “Where are we going now? Off to find another family to traumatise?”

      “Actually, I’ve worked out where we are, and back in our reality, the nearest town is Ratoath. Hopefully, they have a corresponding town here.”

      “So we’re going to traumatise a whole town now? Oh, goody. They’re going to love us.”

      Ratoath turned out to be a fair-sized town, the buildings a little bigger and a little sturdier than the villages they’d passed over to get there. Some of the houses were even nice, with gardens in the back, and there was a market and a pleasing bustle to the people. They still wore the dull browns that identified them as lowly mortals, but their backs were straight and their heads were up. These people had a confidence that others lacked.

      They landed unseen behind a tavern. Valkyrie frowned, looked up at the building. That’s exactly what it was. It was a tavern. It was the twenty-first century in this reality, the same as it was in her own, but it wasn’t a pub they had landed behind, or a bar. No, it was a tavern. What an odd, backwards world this was.

      Skulduggery stopped at the corner, and nodded to the large building across the square. “If anyone knows anything, that’s where they’ll be,” he said.

      She nudged him, pointed to the building to their right. It was a church, its roof sunken, badly in need of repair. It had those familiar two circles carved above the door, and looked like a place that nobody visited.

      “Each settlement has to have one, more than likely,” Skulduggery said. “But while you can make a town build a church, you can’t make them worship.”

      “What do the circles mean?” she asked.

      “The big one represents the Faceless Ones. All-encompassing, all-knowing. The little one is us, floating around the edge, barely intersecting. It means we’re little more than fleas, unable to even begin to comprehend the full majesty of existence. It’s very patronising, as far as religious symbols go, and somewhat self-pitying.”

      “This reality’s version of Eliza Scorn goes around in chains.”

      “They used to do that in our dimension as well. There’d always be one fervent believer who took it upon themselves to suffer for our sins. It was meant to be altruistic and selfless, but I generally found those people to be nothing more than attention-seeking martyrs. Hmmm... that’s interesting.”

      “What?”

      “There seems to be a gentleman walking towards us with a shotgun.”

      Valkyrie peeked out. Sure enough, there he was, a mortal in his sixties, walking with a shotgun levelled at belly height.

      “Hello there,” said the mortal.

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