Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Cole (18 page)

There was no warmth in the carriage. Three people sat opposite, looking at her with blank eyes. A part of her wondered briefly where all the others had gone. She had expected, after all, a carriage filled with the dead. But no, there were just these three, and that idle curiosity faded from her mind before she could ask them any questions.

She looked away. She didn’t care what they were wearing, or what they looked like. A man and two women, that’s all she saw before she lost interest. The carriage trundled along uneven ground. The seats were red leather, but the colour was muted. She parted the black curtain with a hand so pale it was turning blue, and she looked at her reflection in the window and saw the face of a corpse, framed by dark hair.

She took her hand away, the curtain falling back into place. She sat on the red leather seat, opposite the three dead people, and the dullness in her mind became a thick and heavy blanket that suffocated her thoughts in their infancy.

And time did what time did – it passed.

*    *    *

Valkyrie was gazing blankly at the shoe of a fellow passenger when she became aware of the carriage slowing to a stop. She dragged her gaze upwards, to the window, but the curtains were still drawn and she felt no urge to part them now. The door to her right opened, and the three dead people left without speaking. Moving without energy, she followed them.

They were in a warehouse of some sort. It was as cold here as it had been in the carriage. The Dullahan was waiting for her, and she followed him away from the others, into a room of tables. The head of a woman blinked at her from where it lay, on its side, beside a body separated from its limbs. Dead people, in various stages of dissection, hung from the walls on hooks and large iron nails. They looked at her as she passed, but made no sound.

The Dullahan stopped before a creature wearing a grubby smock, its arms and legs impossibly long, hunched over a corpse on a table. It swivelled its head as Valkyrie approached. In the gap above the surgical mask and beneath the cap, she could see the oily pallor of its skin. Its eyelids were punctured with broken bits of black thread, and its pupils were small and yellow.

It put away the knife it had been using to poke around inside the corpse, and pulled the mask down to its chin. It had a large
scab where the nose ought to have been, and a mouth, like the eyes, that had once been sewn shut, but which now gaped at her with a smile like an open wound.

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” it said, its voice high-pitched and breathless. It was impossible to tell whether this creature was male or female. “Do you know who I am?”

Valkyrie nodded. “Your name is Nye.” Her voice sounded odd to her.

“Indeed it is. I’m the only living thing in this place. Do you know what that makes me?” It didn’t wait for an answer. “It makes me
better
than you.”

Valkyrie didn’t say anything. None of this mattered.

Nye looked at the Dullahan, and annoyance flashed across its face.

“I know, damn it. I will. Well, I’m not
going
to deviate, am I? I learned my lesson!”

Seemingly satisfied, the Dullahan turned and walked out.

“But just to be sure,” Nye called after him, “if she doesn’t make it, I get to keep what’s left, yes?”

The Dullahan didn’t slow down.

Once he was gone, Nye stood up straight, its head nearly brushing against the lights hanging from the ceiling. It looked at her. “You’re here to get your true name sealed,” it said. “It
isn’t easy, you know. Not many people ever find out what their true name
is,
so people like me don’t get a lot of practice doing what we have to do. What did the banshee tell you?”

“She said I’d have to die,” Valkyrie answered.

“Which you have already done,” Nye nodded. “You died in the Coach-a-Bowers, and you’ll be dead until you leave this place and life returns to you. Did she say anything else?”

“You’d need to operate.”

That open-wound smile again. “Yes. It’s a delicate procedure, requiring me to carve three symbols on to your heart in an impossibly precise fashion. I would ask you if you are prepared to accept this risk, but I honestly don’t care. The fact is, you’re dead, and you’re here, so your free will is a little compromised, isn’t it? You’re not thinking too clearly. Even if you changed your mind right now, I’d still go ahead with the operation and you wouldn’t be able to stop me. I haven’t done this in years, so I’m mildly curious to find out if I can do it without killing you forever. Undress now, please.”

No argument occurred to her, so Valkyrie did as she was told while Nye wiped its instruments on old rags and laid them out on a small tray. When she was done, she lay on a table and Nye strapped her wrists and ankles tight. It spat on the blade of its scalpel, and looked down at her.

“The truly tragic thing about all of this,” it said, “is that you won’t feel any of the great pain I’m about to put you through.”

Nye pressed the tip of the scalpel to Valkyrie’s shoulder and slit her skin all the way to the breastbone. Blood, with no functioning engine to pump it, trickled lazily.

“This ought to be excruciating,” Nye said, its voice straining with effort as it continued to cut down to her belly. “If you were alive right now, you’d be screaming. Begging me to stop. I’m going to be cracking open your ribcage in a minute, so that would
definitely
be sore.”

Nye stood back, putting down the scalpel and shaking its hand loosely, like it was getting rid of a cramp. “That wasn’t easy,” it told her. “You’ve got an impressive amount of muscle around the abdomen.”

Valkyrie didn’t want to see this – didn’t want to see what Nye was doing to her. She tried telling it, but she possessed no energy to speak. Nye looked into her eyes and its own eyes widened, as if it understood.

“Oh, my!” it said suddenly. “Oh, you’re quite right! I am being
very
unprofessional!” Nye took a moment to fix its surgical mask back over the lower half of its face. “Hygiene is most important in the operating theatre. I’m terribly sorry.”

Nye peeled the flaps of skin away from the chest wall, and
Valkyrie looked down at herself as her flesh came apart as easily as a zipper being undone.

“Some people use an electric saw to get through the ribs,” Nye continued, “but I find it somewhat unsatisfying.” It held up large pruning shears, the kind Valkyrie would have found in the garden shed at home. “And these are much more effective.”

Valkyrie closed her eyes as Nye bent over her again. She heard a loud crack, and looked around, craning her head, seeing all the dead people on the walls around her. None of them seemed to care about what was going on. There was another crack, and when she looked back at herself, Nye was lifting her sternum away from her body.

“Almost at the heart,” Nye told her. “Now, I
am
going to have to remove it so that I can carve in some symbols, which will take a little time, but I’m fairly confident that I can reattach all the necessary arteries and such afterwards. Heart surgery isn’t
brain
surgery, after all,” it added with a chuckle. “Little medical humour for you there.”

It went back to work and Valkyrie lay there, knowing she should be filled with pain, yet unable to escape the dullness that had settled over her mind.

Nye lifted her heart from her chest and showed it to her.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t make any jokes about how I’ve
stolen your heart,” it said. “I’ve used them all up on previous patients, I’m afraid. Rest assured, every last one of those jokes was suitably morbid and witty.”

Valkyrie watched her heart being placed on a tray beside the pruning shears. Nye’s yellow eyes narrowed as it smiled beneath its mask.

“There,” it said. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it? I didn’t drop anything. I didn’t nick the kidneys or put my thumb through a lung. The first part of this operation, I think you’ll agree, has been a resounding success. And now it’s time for supper.”

Nye turned and walked away on its impossibly long legs, leaving Valkyrie strapped to the table.

N
ye returned an hour later and put Valkyrie’s heart in a vice. She watched the vice being tightened, and a part of her mind started to scream, fearing the heart would burst. Nye’s hand came away from the vice and she relaxed, settling back into the dullness that death brought. Nye spoke to her while it held a scalpel over a flame, telling her about past glories, about the life it had had outside these rooms. The words meant nothing to Valkyrie, forgotten as soon as they reached her ears.

Nye hunched over the vice and gently pressed the red-hot
scalpel against her heart. A book lay open beside it, and before every stroke of the scalpel, Nye would consult the pages, measuring the length and breadth of the symbols detailed within, calculating depth. The scalpel went from her heart back to the flame, then to her heart. Again and again, this process was repeated. Slight trails of smoke rose from the lines being carved. Valkyrie could hear the soft sizzle of the meat.

An hour, it took Nye, to complete the first symbol. The second one, a simpler pattern, took half that time, but the third one took twice as long.

“Once this heart is back inside you,” Nye said, yellow eyes fixed on its work, “and once it begins beating again, these symbols will inhabit you. Do you understand me? Do you understand anything I’m saying? The dead here are so dim-witted.”

Valkyrie grunted.

“Oh, good, you
can
understand me. When you walk out of here, you will
own
your true name, instead of your true name owning you. Armed with this knowledge, you can do great things. You could be the greatest sorcerer this world has ever seen.” Nye glanced at her. “Or you could be the most terrible.”

The door opened, and Nye’s eyes returned to the heart as the Dullahan strode in.

“Almost finished!” Nye called. “I can’t be rushed on things like this, you know! One wrong stroke, one part of a symbol too thin or too thick or too deep or too shallow, and it’s not going to work! I am a professional and I must not be hurried!”

The Dullahan stood still, and Nye straightened up, uncoiling its long body. “Oh,” it said, in response to whatever the Dullahan was silently saying. “Of course. No, no, I completely understand. Your duties take you elsewhere. You are a busy man, after all. Have no fear, when the operation is complete, I shall send this girl on her way, back to the land of the living. Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of such a… Now, listen, as I’ve said before, those experiments are over, and you
know
that. That part of my life is behind me. I realise now that I was misguided and… I learned my lesson. Yes. Well, if you can’t trust a surgeon, who
can
you trust?”

Nye listened for another moment, then nodded gravely, and the Dullahan turned and strode out. The door closed behind him.

Nye returned its attention to the heart, and didn’t speak for fifteen minutes.

Finally, it straightened up again. “Done,” it said. “And a splendid piece of work it is too, if I do say so.”

It took the heart from the vice, and showed it to Valkyrie.

“You see the precision?” it said. “See the craftsmanship? China Sorrows herself could not have constructed these symbols any better. A work of art, don’t you agree?”

Nye pulled the surgical mask down off its face. “But I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news. The Dullahan has been called away. You may have heard me agreeing to look after you, to deliver you back to the living. But the bad news, the truly unfortunate and tragic news, is that I was lying the whole time.”

Nye dropped the heart on to the tray beside the table, disturbing the instruments, making them jangle.

“No one will know you never left. I can hide you among the corpses here. You’ll never be found. I’ll tell the Dullahan, and I’ll even tell the banshee if she comes to investigate, that I waved goodbye and watched you leave. Who knows what could have happened to you after that? You could be lying in a ditch for all we know.”

Nye leaned down over Valkyrie, its face centimetres from her own. “You’re mine now,” it said. “You’ve been delivered to me to help with my research. I know you have. All these corpses around you? All these dead people, and many more besides? They’ve all helped me. They’ve all
tried,
at least. But you… I have a good feeling about you.”

It stalked off, with great loping strides. Valkyrie turned her head to watch it.

“What do you know about the soul?” it asked from the other side of the room, as it pulled a sheet off a large instrument cart. “Not much, I’d wager, but you’ve undoubtedly seen it in different forms.”

Nye pushed the cart over. Its wheels creaked and the blades and saws and clips clattered. “Ghosts, Remnants, even gists, are forms the soul can take. But none of them are its
pure
form.”

The cart banged into the table. The blades were caked with old blood.

“The pure soul resides somewhere in the body, somewhere it can’t be disturbed. I’ve narrowed it down to the likeliest places, but as yet I haven’t found it. I do, however, feel like I am on the cusp of a breakthrough.” It picked up a long breadknife. “I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to dissect your brain last. That way, if I find your soul among your innards or inside your organs, you can at least partially share in my moment of glory.”

Nye pulled the mask up over the scab of its nose. “This is going to get messy.”

T
he country roads started out plump and healthy, before narrowing as they came closer to Roarhaven, finally becoming little more than starving veins that twisted through a dead and frozen landscape. The town squatted between a stagnant lake of foul water, a few desiccated trees bordering its banks, and a hillside of frosted yellowed grasses and gorse brush. The main street, if that’s what it was, possessed a gnarled handful of shops and businesses necessary for survival, but this was not a town that attracted visitors. Roarhaven was the town where sorcerers lived.