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A New Era (5)

Chapter 5: The Dark Spirit

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Rumours of a new airbender are percolating through the Earth Kingdom. Again.

At first, they pass right by the arbiters, who are more concerned with trying to outswim the giant sea serpent attacking them en route to Ba Sing Se. Survive they do though, and head on home, Valkyrie nodding off on Skulduggery’s shoulder as the monorail glides through the city rings.

Once a week, during the ‘stay’ part of the leave-stay rota, Valkyrie and her parents have Skulduggery over for a meal at their house. It’s become a tradition for the first of these to take place the night of their return, if their return isn’t at an unreasonable hour. It is at this dinner, specifically right as Valkyrie cools the pot of tea with a small whirlwind, that the arbiters hear about the new airbender from Desmond and Melissa.

Valkyrie and Skulduggery usually spend their time off in the city assisting law enforcement or training, but this news is more important. While heeding Skulduggery’s warnings that it may not turn out the way they hope, Valkyrie can’t stop thinking- what if there is another airbender? She could learn from an actual airbending master- not that Skulduggery isn’t a great teacher, she adds hastily, but it would be good to learn techniques not derived from firebending or other bending moves. Skulduggery is the first to agree.

They do need some kind of official permission to investigate, though.

Mr Bliss visits the Earth King a lot, Valkyrie notes as they approach the palace. On most occasions she wonders whether it’s really necessary, but not this time. Mr Bliss can provide the closest thing to an official license to investigate they are likely to get in the Earth Kingdom. Ever since Skulduggery accused King Thurid of treason last year, things have been decidedly frosty between the arbiters and the palace.

They explain to Bliss that there are no other matters that require their attention; the only reports of disturbance the local city police have thus been unable to contain are that of some sort of acrobatic thief. Skulduggery cheerfully decides not to involve himself. Mr Bliss acquiesces.

‘Why is Mr Bliss here all the time now?’ Valkyrie asks as they head down the palace steps. ‘He’s got his own kingdom to run.’

‘Interesting question. Why do you think that is?’ Skulduggery’s been turning questions back around on her like this more and more often lately.

She sighs. ‘Because Guild’s asking him. He probably needs help.’ She snorts. ‘Shows how much of a king he is.’

‘Doesn’t it just,’ says Skulduggery enigmatically, with a slight tilt of his head that she knows means he wants her to think on that more.

‘Guild might be the ruler of the most powerful nation in the world, but Mr Bliss is the strongest earthbender in the world. He should be in charge.’

‘Who says he won’t be someday?’ Skulduggery muses.

‘Are you… are you implying that Mr Bliss is trying to make a move for the throne of Ba Sing Se?’

‘No, of course not. He barely wanted the throne of Omashu. He has no desire to rule.’

‘Oh.’

‘Which is why it’s so interesting that he’s making a move for the throne of Ba Sing Se.’

‘He is?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Shut up.’ Valkyrie thinks for a moment. ‘Well if we know, Guild definitely knows, right? And he can’t just be sitting around, letting it happen.’

‘No. I suspect there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we aren’t privy to anymore.’

‘Were we ever?’ Valkyrie mutters.

‘If we were nosy enough. My guess is Guild is trying to turn this to his advantage.’

‘Which he would do how?’

‘I don’t know. How do you think?’

Rolling her eyes, Valkyrie makes an effort. ‘I suppose… he could try and bring Mr Bliss under his influence. Which would mean… he’s trying to bring Omashu under his rule.’

‘Most likely under a lot of language like “forming closer ties” and “bridging interstate gaps,” but yes, essentially.’

‘Huh. Wow. So what’s for lunch?’

‘You are fascinating. I tell you a major shift in the Earth Kingdom powers is brewing that would surely make the city explode into monarchist riots if it was common knowledge, and that’s your response?’

‘Well it’s not our job to play pai sho with kings. We’re arbiters. We just have to keep people safe.’

At this, Skulduggery does, unexpectedly, give her a smile. ‘Hah. Yes. You’re wise beyond your years, you know that?’

‘Yes. Yes I do.’

The sheer vastness of the Earth Kingdom means that while the Earth King does technically have dominion over all of it, he cannot be as effective a ruler for the areas too far from Ba Sing Se. As such, there are several other kings and state leaders with their own semi-autonomous rule.

Omashu and the surrounding villages is one such subsidiary. Guild’s attempt at ‘forming closer ties’- whether by stretching his power and attempting to diminish Mr Bliss and Omashu further, or by granting Mr Bliss further autonomy to appease him- is risky, but Guild is not a popular king. Especially not since his actions after the previous year’s incident at the North Pole.

Communication between Guild’s palace and the two arbiters has all but ceased since Skulduggery accused the king of treason. This leaves only people who are personally loyal to Skulduggery willing to help him in Ba Sing Se. It is not an official policy that no assistance be given to him and Valkyrie- that would be a spectacularly bad look for Guild, and would upset relations with the Fire Nation significantly- but things have certainly turned frigid towards the arbiters. And while not as bad for Guild as it could have been, this is still not good for his image: he is practically exiling the First Airbender and her teacher.

One of the consequences Skulduggery and Valkyrie now face has been a great lack of cooperation from Ba Sing Se’s law enforcement. Chief of Police Remus Crux acts in the way that Guild wishes he could: with hostility and borderline threatening behaviour towards them. Needless to say, Valkyrie and Skulduggery do not spend a second more of their time in Ba Sing Se than necessary.

‘On the bright side,’ Desmond is prone to saying, ‘no more being peer pressured into climbing the social ladder!’

It is true. Valkyrie’s parents are no longer bombarded with party and dinner invitations from socialites. Skulduggery, on the other hand, never seemed to have that problem in the first place. Valkyrie gathers that high society generally disapproves of people who dress like they do (with style), talk like they do (with class), and are respected war heroes with the favour of the Fire Lord, but who nevertheless persist in speaking their mind regardless of the company they keep, especially when that mind has such differing world views.

It seems like a really good example to follow, Valkyrie decides.

Following the whispers, she and Skulduggery travel to a village in the far east, along a peninsula between the Eastern Sea and the open ocean. At their arrival, the arbiters are met by the head of the village. He informs them that yes, the rumours are true. Several airbenders did escape the genocide at the Eastern Air Temple, much like Valkyrie’s great-grandfather escaped from the Southern Air Temple. The village hid them, and over the years the culture and teachings of those air nomads were secretly passed down to their children, and their children’s children.

At hearing news that another had deemed it safe to resurface, the last airbending descendent revealed herself. She had heard about Valkyrie’s inability to learn airbending in its original form, and was ready to train her.

Just as Valkyrie is thinking that this is the best news she could have hoped for, the ‘was’ registers. The community confirms that the airbending master died two months ago, succumbing to an illness she had long battled. This is the worst news Valkyrie could have heard.

But! The airbending master had a son- and he too is an airbender!

‘That’s great!’ Valkyrie exclaims.

Unfortunately, he ran away after his mother’s death.

‘Oh.’

The village knows that he ran away to Ba Sing Se, however!

‘Well, I suppose that’s okay-’

But they don’t have any information more specific than that.

She waits expectantly, but that seems to be it.

Back to Ba Sing Se it is. As they are walking back to their ostrich-horses, Valkyrie mid-moan about the five-day journey they took to get here, Skulduggery receives a message. It isn’t from one of the usual Earth Kingdom birds, nor from a Fire Nation messenger hawk: instead the little scroll is carried by an arctic kite fox. Apparently, they must make a stopover at Chameleon Bay, by the site of an old battlefield.

The man who wants to meet with Skulduggery is unsettling, and dresses strangely. He wears clothing reminiscent of that of the Water Tribe, but adapted for warmer climes, and in much darker colours than is traditional. Blue so deep as to be almost black. No fur or bead adornments. His name is Solomon Wreath, and Valkyrie gets the impression that Skulduggery doesn’t like him; it may have been the way he punched him.

Skulduggery says he’s a bloodbender.

Wreath starts the conversation off casually enough- talking about the way blood has soaked through the earth here, the power it brings this place. You know, normal stuff like that. In the face of Skulduggery’s distinct waspishness however, he moves on.

‘I take it you’ve been to the airbender’s village?’

From the ensuing back-and-forth, Valkyrie surmises that Wreath is an investigator for the bloodbenders. He tells them that this business with the new airbender is mixed up in his own case at the moment: the Diablerie.

‘You’re saying the Diablerie are after the boy?’ Skulduggery said.

‘Oh, they’re doing much more than chasing after him. I examined his mother’s body a few days after she died. It wasn’t illness that took her life. Tea made of a poison root, not native to this area. Unsurprising the village didn’t recognise it.’

‘And why are you telling us this?’

‘Because this is the Diablerie. I’d like to pool our resources. Whatever they are planning will be far easier to stop if more people than just myself are involved. In fact, I’ve already reached out to a friend of yours, I believe: Tanith Low. She is investigating reports of Jaron Gallow’s presence in the west.’

A thousand or so kilometres away, Murder Rose stabs Tanith through the hand. Apparently there are more members of the Diablerie in town than just Gallow.

‘You’ve put something together about what Wreath said,’ Valkyrie states as they head off again, Skulduggery in a thoughtful silence.

‘I might have, yes.’

‘Do you know what the Diablerie’s plan is?’

‘Perhaps. Do you remember Billy-Ray Sanguine? Or more to the point, do you remember his unexpected disappearance from the North Pole last year?’

‘Vaguely,’ Valkyrie replies, glancing at the scar on her hand.

‘About three months ago I got a tip he’d been seen moving east, with friends.’

‘The Diablerie?’

‘Maybe.’

‘So whatever the Diablerie’s planning is why he abandoned Vengeous?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You just fill me with confidence, you do.’

The only reason Skulduggery can think of as to why the Diablerie (Vengeous’ old war unit) in collaboration with Sanguine (Vengeous’ hired hitman) would want an airbender is for the same reason that Vengeous wanted Valkyrie last year. Someone wants to awaken the Grotesquery and reopen a spirit portal.

Unfortunately, three months ago there were only three airbenders in existence: Valkyrie, the now-deceased airbending master, and her son. Valkyrie was not a viable option to go after, not with Skulduggery alert to the danger she could be in every lunar eclipse from people who might want to awaken the Grotesquery. An airbending master would have been too risky as well, especially with a far easier target available: her son. The Diablerie would have killed her to stop her coming after them. Obviously, they weren’t counting on the boy simply running away before they found him.

On the journey back, Valkyrie wonders how they are going to find this airbender boy when they have no location more precise than ‘somewhere in the giant city encompassing the vast majority of the North-East Earth Kingdom.’ She does brighten up at the thought of the missing boy perhaps being able to teach her some pure airbending. Skulduggery speculates that it will probably involve a lot more flipping about the place, utilising air currents and whatnot. Valkyrie agrees; her attempts to pick up some inspiration for new moves from Tanith’s fighting style have only been moderately successful. Acrobatics don’t come that naturally to her.

Skulduggery pauses, tilting his head.

As soon as they arrive back in Ba Sing Se, they go to China’s library and ask for all the information she has on the acrobat who’s been causing trouble for the police. China obligingly presents them with several sightings’ locations, all situated around one of the classiest hotels in the city.

They walk in. They walk up. They walk along a hall. They walk into Billy-Ray Sanguine.

Punching ensues, rather horrifying the boy with the carefully tended bald head who comes out to investigate. Valkyrie shoves him back into his room, locking the door behind them.

Sanguine comes through the wall at speed, obviously having been thrown. He stands, angrily wiping blood from his nose, his tinted glasses missing to reveal the scarring around his blinded eyes, and pauses. Valkyrie glances down. The floor they’re standing on is stone.

In a matter of seconds has his razor on her throat. Skulduggery strides in from the blackened and smouldering hallway, fire blazing in his fists, but stops upon seeing the tableau.

The bald airbending son of a monk who is, of course, Fletcher Renn, is even more horrified. He and his bald head aren’t convinced at all by either man’s attempts to persuade him to come with them. The blind guy with the knife does not at all appear to be a better option than the firebender.

When Valkyrie employs a new airbending move she’s been practising, whipping up a spherical gale around her to force Sanguine’s blade away and send him stumbling, it is officially too much for Fletcher. He grabs a staff sitting by the window, jumps out and swoops away on the extendable glider wings, his bald head shining briefly in the sun.

‘I really hate you guys,’ mutters Sanguine.

Once Sanguine has skedaddled, they find Fletcher dazed in the alley below. He crashed his glider into the building opposite about three seconds after launch.

Not long into conversation with Fletcher, Valkyrie decides that she doesn’t need another airbending teacher after all. Fletcher is a dismissive, arrogant teenage boy who is not dealing well, or at all, with his mother’s passing. He is extremely resistant to the idea of teaching anyone anything about his mother’s culture. The emphasis is made plain for Valkyrie and Skulduggery. He does not consider himself an air nomad. He does not want to be involved with any monk business.

As Skulduggery points out, this stance is at odds with the traditional yellow and orange robes Fletcher continues to wear, and the staff he continues to carry, not to mention the shaved head he has kept in preparation for an arrow tattoo. His mother would have made him a master, if she had lived. She wanted to train Valkyrie next.

‘Yeah, well. Look what that got her,’ Fletcher responds in a dead sort of voice.

Fletcher knows his mother didn’t die of her illness. She’d been getting better, not worse. The fact that she was murdered doesn’t seem to really hit him until that moment, though. It might not even have occurred to him until Skulduggery said so. Valkyrie is suddenly reminded that even if he is disrespectful and uncooperative, he’s not that much older than her.

It is still pretty satisfying to watch Skulduggery intimidate him into coming with them, though.

They drop Fletcher off at the Sangian, a private research facility in the Lower Ring. It is also a hospital for those who have some desire to keep out of the Earth Kingdom’s official way. After the events at the North Pole, Kenspeckle Grouse was entrusted with supervising the delivery of the Grotesquery to Ba Sing Se, where it was placed in the Earth King’s palace for safe keeping.

Planning to egress the freezing tundras of the Northern Water Tribe anyway, which despite taking great strides in recent years was nevertheless limiting his ability to practice healing with its rigid cultural gender divide, Kenspeckle decided to stay in Ba Sing Se. He has a number of people frequently in his care, most often Valkyrie, who it is always a pleasure to see, and Skulduggery, who it is not. They find the healer treating Ghastly Bespoke, who has not woken from his coma since Serpine’s attempted coup.

Lying in a pool of water a few inches deep, Ghastly’s body is surrounded by the blue glow of curative energy. He remains motionless. With a sigh, Kenspeckle suspends the session for the day, and the arbiters eventually get him to agree to house Fletcher for the time being.

Valkyrie goes home. She tells her parents all about Fletcher, and Skulduggery’s idea about the Diablerie possibly trying to open one of the portals again. Her parents react… unexpectedly.

She distinctly sees the blood drain from her mother’s face, and her father stops dead in his aimless wandering about the house. What comes next is almost twenty minutes of Desmond and Melissa grilling her for answers about what Skulduggery is doing to keep her safe, what the Earth King’s stance on all this is, and how much danger she is in. A bit blindsided, Valkyrie nonetheless recovers quickly. Despite being more than a little unsettled, she reassures them that no one is after her, that she’s better than ever at airbending and hand-to-hand combat, and, when they press, that Skulduggery is, yes, always nearby.

‘Fletcher’s the only one who’s really in danger and he’s safe with Kenspeckle-’

‘But you always have to get involved, Val! Meanwhile, where are your father and I? Stashed away somewhere else while you inevitably go off into danger with Skulduggery.’

She thinks about that a lot, later that night.

It takes some doing, and her parents exchange looks when they think she won’t notice, but they’re eventually a bit calmer. With their wedding anniversary coming up, Valkyrie suggests that they take a vacation to Gordon’s mansion. Even her dad picks up on that blatant attempt at deflection. Neither think it’s a good idea while this situation is going on. Valkyrie is frustrated, which is more than probably just a reflection of her parents’ same feelings at her apparent nonchalance, but she keeps it off her face. She doesn’t want them to worry about her, and she doesn’t want to have to worry about them worrying about her. It’s a ball of unpleasantness, and it sits in her stomach.

Then she thinks of Fletcher. It’s good if the worst thing she can say is that her parents are too protective.

The next morning, Skulduggery comes to pick her up. Walking their usual route to the Upper Ring, he says their first stop is to get the Grotesquery out of the Palace.

‘Steal it, you mean?’

‘Pre-emptively steal it,’ he corrects. ‘If we’re correct, the Diablerie are going to make a play for it.’

Skulduggery doesn’t trust Guild, and suspects he may be colluding with whoever has hired Sanguine, be it the Diablerie or someone behind the scenes. He doesn’t want to be caught off-guard like last year, especially if they end up needing to make a sudden dash to one of the poles before the lunar eclipse this month. As such, he sent a message to the Sun Warriors the previous night, requesting Bentley.

Entering the palace will be easy, but keeping out of sight of the Dai Li so they don’t alert Guild to their presence will be impossible. Therefore, the plan is to nonchalantly but rapidly make their way down to the lower levels, where there will be less eyes watching them.

The Grotesquery is kept under the Palace, locked away and under guard in a maze of stone corridors dimly lit by guttering flames. Skulduggery extinguishes them with a gesture.

As they enter the tunnels, with no alarms having been sounded so far, Skulduggery leaves her at the base of the stairs and disappears into the darkness.

When Valkyrie ventures forwards, heart thumping, she almost trips over something. Light flares again, this time in Skulduggery’s hand ahead of her, and she sees the obstacles are several palace guards sprawled on the floor, out cold.

They enter the doorway they were guarding, and find a chamber containing a cage. The ancient slumbering spirit is inside. Skulduggery tosses flames into the torch brackets, and they approach.

The floor opens in front of the cage and Billy-Ray Sanguine tunnels up with Gruesome Krav, the largest and strongest member of the Diablerie, by his side.

Krav launches himself straight at Skulduggery, swinging punches fast and hard, relying on pure strength to keep the firebender busy.

Sanguine pulls out his razor and once again tries to settle the grudge he’s formed against Valkyrie.

She switches into a mindset that’s becoming familiar: he can sense her movements through the earth, so she softens the impact of her motions with the air. He sends lumps of rock flying but can only half-sense her as she evades each one, right up until the moment she gets in close and breaks his nose.

Swearing and bloody, he sinks through the ground. There’s a breathless moment. Then the floor under Valkyrie tilts dramatically, sending her sliding right to where Sanguine wants her. He plunges out of the wall. She twists away. As such, he only breaks her wrist.

The pain blocks out everything for a moment, leaving her helpless to stop the blow to the head. Suddenly Valkyrie is dazedly staring at the ceiling, seeing the glint of Sanguine’s razor in the half-light, his snarl as he reaches down- and the blinding wash of fire that sends him stumbling back. Looking back, she sees Skulduggery take a solid hit for the lapse in concentration during his own fight.

Beating out smouldering clothes and swearing, Sanguine refocuses on the mission and stomps on the ground. A square of dust flies up around the cage, and the section sinks. Sanguine jumps into the hole, on top of the cage, shouting out to Krav, who shoves Skulduggery away and follows. The floor closes up behind them.

The room is revolving for Valkyrie, but she still hears a whirring and clicking in the walls. The chamber was booby trapped, and something has been triggered by the Grotesquery’s removal. There’s shouting, running footsteps. She hears Skulduggery curse, and the slam of the chamber’s reinforced metal door being closed. Then thumping, and a hideous screech. Skulduggery must have sealed it somehow, and the Dai Li are struggling to get in.

Valkyrie feels hands helping her up and gasps as more white-hot shards of agony flicker up her arm. She jerks away from Skulduggery as he tries to examine her wrist, teeth clenched hard to stop herself from crying, throat and eyes burning, shaking her head to stop him from checking, asking.

Bang. Bang. Skulduggery looks past her to the door, his expression hard and tense, the way he gets when he’s calculating and throwing out plan after plan because options and time are running out. Coming to a decision, he leads her to the back of the room, telling her to keep an eye on the door while he finds the secret exit.

‘There’s a secret exit?’ Valkyrie mumbles.

‘There’s always a secret exit.’

The door flies off its hinges, a battering ram following through. Remus Crux is the first person inside.

‘Get them!’

Everything goes black as the torches go out.

‘Secret exit time!’ she shouts over her shoulder.

The passage Skulduggery pulls her into has a mechanism that Valkyrie would have sworn was actually earthbending, if either of them had been an earthbender.

Rock gives way before them and fills in behind them, the sensation very like Sanguine’s burrowing technique. It sets her heart beating faster and faster and her legs pound their way to sunlight ahead of Skulduggery, spurred on until she has to stop running or collapse. They surface in a park in the Middle Ring. It seems strange that the Earth King would have a secret passage leading from his palace to a random park that isn’t even in the Upper Ring, but the throbbing in Valkyrie’s wrist has reached new heights after the run and she can’t bring herself to care about anything but making the pain stop. She’s never been this badly hurt before.

A great mass of ruddy vines, covered in purple flowers, unfurls itself and lopes happily towards them in the deserted park. It’s Bentley. They are in the meeting place. He happily shows off his florid new ornamentation, the vines swinging cheerfully, the flowers rustling, the sleek, beautiful black of his scales utterly concealed under the garish arrangement. The sight is enough to knock Valkyrie out of her pain for a moment.

She finds enough breath to groan in dismay. Skulduggery laughs, guiding her over with a hand on her shoulder. As they get close, Ben sniffs at her worriedly. She flinches. The pain comes back full force.

Ben accepts Skulduggery’s deterring words and draws back before lowering himself as much as he can to let Valkyrie climb on as easily as possible. He rumbles soothingly. He keeps carefully level upon rising into the air, far above the city but with all the security of being a few feet aboveground. Something about his gentleness makes Valkyrie’s throat close up. And then suddenly she’s sobbing, and her body won’t let her stop. Skulduggery tangibly stiffens behind her, all but rearing back.

The thing is, they are flying a couple hundred metres above the city. Even if Valkyrie does want nothing to do with Skulduggery, there’s nowhere else for him to go. Even if it is his fault, which is not an inconceivable stretch of the imagination, what’s done is done and now the most important thing is what to do next. Skulduggery has seen her eager, miserable, playful, homesick, cheerful, scared, shocked, sarcastic, giddy, and damn near dead, but somehow her crying has passed him by, and he’s not fool enough to think that after two years of sticking to him like glue this is the first time she’s had cause.

The thing is, she shouldn’t have to feel like she needs to prove anything to him; by the spirits, he knows how tough she is (it’s a fact that is particularly hard to escape when she’s constantly throwing herself into danger rather than listening to him).

There’s no one else at hand. And there’s nowhere for him to give her space. And there’s two other things he knows.

How to deal with injuries (so what if he risks exposure? He’s already done that today too).

How to deal with a child’s tears (so what if it’s been longer than Valkyrie’s been alive since he’s had to? Those are the kind of skills that tend to stick).

In the space of a few seconds, Valkyrie has decided that maybe holding her breath will teach her body who’s boss and force her to start calming down. The unsuccessful idea is put on hold, however, when Skulduggery starts talking. He’s rooting around in Ben’s decorations for one of the bags usually saddled onto him.

‘Do you know, Ghastly once threw a rock at me so hard it split in two? Hit me right on the shoulder and shattered. I can assure you, nothing quite compares to the pain of your best friend suddenly turning on you in the middle of a battle like that. I mean, nothing other than the pain of a broken collarbone, that is.’

There’s a pause in which Valkyrie hears a watery, drizzling sound.

‘It was completely out of the blue, too. Honestly, it was mostly shock that made me break down.’

At his gesture, Valkyrie hesitantly extends her arm to him a little. Skulduggery carefully wraps a freezing wet cloth around her wrist. The cold bites and she looks away but Skulduggery’s story provides a distraction.

‘Yes, I suppose I did betray him first. Turned on him just when he needed my help. Left him to the soldiers’ mercy. And yet, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking he went a little overboard in his reaction.’

The cold is almost hurting her skin, but as Valkyrie concentrates on Ben’s flowers waving in the wind, she finds that the pain is dulling more and more, and the cold becomes more soothing than not.

‘You and Ghastly forgave each other eventually, didn’t you? It was just a ruse, right?’ she asks.

‘Oh yes. Forgiveness took a while. Almost the whole afternoon. And we both had to stop panicking first, of course. Luckily it didn’t take long for the healer to fix me up, and then we were both back to playing Bandits and Soldiers in no time.’

Valkyrie pauses. ‘What?’

‘We were eleven. How’s the wrist feeling?’

‘What?’

‘Looks like the trembling’s stopped, so I’d say the shock’s worn off.’ He whistled suddenly and Ben took a downturn. ‘We’ll be at Kenspeckle’s in no time, even so.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’

‘I know. My medical acumen astonishes even me sometimes.’

When Fletcher, aimlessly wandering the halls of the Sangian, sees them enter, he is not (hypothetically) shut up thunderstruck at the sight of a seriously injured, shocked, pained girl. Instead, he does not even realise Valkyrie’s wrist is broken as he follows her and Skulduggery to Kenspeckle, making comments neither of them listen to.

To Valkyrie, all she can feel of her wrist is the relief of soothing cold. There’s even some ice formed on the outside of the rag from the altitude. Skulduggery keeps a hand on her shoulder all the way in, talking idly to her as if they aren’t probably the Earth King’s Most Wanted by now. Kenspeckle has just finished treating an impaled hand belonging to one Tanith Low by the time they show up, and Valkyrie’s calmness and her happiness to see her friend do a lot to mitigate Kenspeckle’s reaction to Skulduggery’s latest escapade with her.

‘Who’s that bald kid?’ Tanith asks.

Fletcher leans against a wall and grins cockily at her. ‘Fletcher Renn. You may have heard of me. The Last-’

‘New airbender,’ Valkyrie says as Kenspeckle sits her down beside Tanith on a bed, before fetching a long wooden tray, bound and waterproofed. It looks specially designed for resting limbs in.

The wards of Kenspeckle’s clinic are quite different to most other Earth Kingdom hospitals, because most other Earth Kingdom hospitals do not have waterbender healers working in them. Each room contains several beds around the border. The mattresses are covered in oilskin, which is not porous, and a cloth sheet is tucked firmly over the top for the patient’s comfort. The oilskin lessens the difficulty of bending water out of the mattresses later. Each bed can be separated into its own curtained-off area, but the curtains are all drawn back in this room, exposing the central feature of the ward: a wide and shallow circular pool, large enough for a tall adult to lie in comfortably and a healer to tend to them without difficulty.

With smooth fluid motions, Kenspeckle bends water from the circular pool into the wooden tray. Carefully, he guides Valkyrie to rest her arm in it and soon a blue glow and a strong soothing sensation surrounds her wrist, although most of the pain had already waned.

Tanith frowns, resuming the conversation once the process has started. ‘He’s the reason I was stabbed?’

‘Yeah,’ said Valkyrie, adding irritably, ‘And I still don’t like this “Last Airbender” business.’

The issue of the epithet bothers Valkyrie. Practically everything about the situation does, now. She maintains that the rumours calling Fletcher ‘The Last Airbender’ sound too similar to her legendary ancestor’s title. Actually, it was her legendary ancestor’s title. Skulduggery agrees that yes, while Fletcher holding the mantle does seem to be a significant step down from her indeed legendary ancestor-

‘Right here,’ Fletcher says grumpily.

-it is still of value. Skulduggery insists that it’s symbolic of there still being a remnant of the Air Nomads’ culture left, not just an airbender, which is why Valkyrie on the other hand is called the First Airbender: Fletcher is carrying on a legacy, whereas she is not.

The conversation moves on, but Valkyrie notices Fletcher leave the room.

With rumours of the Last Airbender’s reappearance circulating, there was the possibility that Valkyrie would no longer have to be the Earth Kingdom’s and Air Nomad’s prodigal daughter of sorts, or the Fire Nation’s poster-child of peace (‘Look! It’s one of us teaching her! We’ve taken such great strides since that whole trying-to-conquer-the-world thing!’).

Reluctant to begin with, Valkyrie quickly grew fed up with having to be present for all sorts of official occasions, of having to sit through talks from Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation officials about matters of state that really had nothing to do with her. The officials were just interested in the self-congratulations that came of interacting with the only representative of the new Air Nation. The symbol of her was important, but she wasn’t. She hadn’t even gotten to meet the Fire Lord.

Her and Skulduggery’s continuous excursions around the world helped detract attention from her, but now with her maturing age, and now that she has saved the world, more and more attention is coming her way. What direction is rebuilding the Air Nomads going to take? How is she going to manage it? Has she got a ‘special someone’ in her life yet? Valkyrie has become quite good at speaking up for herself (better to be blunt and plainspoken rather than subjected to hour-long discussions regarding policy change in Shu Jing, or inappropriate prying into her personal life). She had also been hoping, though, that this could all be passed on to Fletcher. After meeting him, it doesn’t look likely.

‘I think the Water Tribe’s my favourite nation at the moment,’ she tells Tanith and Skulduggery. ‘They don’t expect anything from me.’

‘What about the Air Nomads?’ Skulduggery asks.

‘The only other air nomad on this earth is a moody, bald, seventeen-year-old boy who wants an arrow tattooed on his forehead. No thanks.’

Tanith snorts.

The boy in question is wandering without paying attention where, as his head and heart fill with dark clouds like they are wont to do these days.

He finds himself in the room with that scarred sleeping guy. He’d been taken out of his private ward’s pool after his healing session for the day, and was lying on the only bed in the room. What was his name? Horrible Spokes? The one who’d been comatose for like two years. It was impressive the old healer had managed to keep him alive, really. Fletcher doubted he’d be waking anytime soon. Probably for the best. What a world to come back to. Plus, he might not want to, what with… like… all those scars. Fletcher wouldn’t, that was for sure.

Fletcher is looking morosely right down at the man when his eyes flick open.

The first thing Ghastly hears is a very loud scream. He sees a yellow and orange blur shoot into the ceiling, hears a thump, a second thump as the blur returns to earth, a lot of groaning, and some swearing.

Soon after, the commotion brings several familiar faces running into the ward. To the consternation of the old healer, Valkyrie throws herself at Ghastly in joy, and the expression on Tanith’s face makes him feel like he’s floating for a moment. Skulduggery of course initially projects indifference, and Ghastly plays along until they’ve both had enough of winding up the others. The hug his friend gives him is the warmest Ghastly can remember.

Feeling just a little tense at the idea of being wanted for questioning by the Earth King while the Grotesquery is in the hands of Mevolent’s remnant Fire Nation, Ghastly’s reawakening is just the good news Valkyrie needs. Ghastly is relieved to see her alive and well too: the last thing he remembers is the White Cleaver’s sights locked onto her like a canyon crawler onto food. While he is still uneasy about Skulduggery making Valkyrie his partner/apprentice, he acknowledges that they weren’t much older than her when they went off to fight in a war.

‘We were a couple of desperate teenagers, Skul. And Valkyrie isn’t in the middle of a war,’ Ghastly argues once they have a moment alone.

‘Granted. But I ask you this: if you’d had all the perspective you do now when we were that age, would you have made a different choice?’

‘No,’Ghastly admits.

Coupled with Valkyrie’s determination not to sit on the sidelines, this is enough to appease him.

Tanith confirms that all four living members of the Diablerie are involved in the brewing situation. She recounts how Solomon Wreath tracked her down (and it occurs to Valkyrie to wonder what Tanith actually does when she isn’t helping Skulduggery and herself) and recruited her, knowing she fought alongside the arbiters at the North Pole and would be interested in hearing about the splinter Fire Nation’s activities. Now, with the Grotesquery in their hands…

‘They’re definitely planning to open a spirit portal,’ Tanith concludes.

Another lunar eclipse is due to occur within the month, so the conclusion is a sound one, and it will probably be for the same reasons as Vengeous: to summon Vaatu and attempt to make a Dark Avatar. The fact that such a plan has failed twice before- once with Vengeous the previous year and once with Avatar Vile himself- doesn’t seem to bother them. They are fanatics, after all.

‘We need a weapon,’ Skulduggery decides.

Fortunately, they know someone even better than an arms dealer.

China took possession of the Sceptre of the Spirit World soon after Serpine’s attempted coup d’état. It has been inactive ever since he tried to use it on Valkyrie, and the best China can figure is it shorted out from the sheer incompatibility of what Serpine was demanding of it. The Sceptre, designed not to harm spirits, was being used to target an airbender, the most spiritual culture to ever exist. China suspects that it could work again if the focusing crystal was replaced, however. But where to find a Spirit World crystal?

Surprisingly, it’s Fletcher who knows. The North and South Air Temples had most of them, he confides. The airbenders collected them from the ground surrounding the spirit portals in the poles, the creation of which scattered them everywhere, apparently.

Under cover of darkness, Ben takes off from his concealed place in Kenspeckle’s grounds and Skulduggery and Valkyrie spend that night flying to the Northern Air Temple.

‘Are you sure you want to come?’ Skulduggery asks suddenly, some way into their flight.

‘Hm? What?’

‘Are you sure you want to come to the air temple?’

‘Yes? Wait, you’re not worried about it being dangerous, are you?’ Valkyrie says, dismayed and impatient. ‘We’ve been there before, it was fine.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Kenspeckle and Ghastly may be right, you know. It is rather irresponsible of me to keep bringing you into situations like this. You’re allowed to say no.’

‘What? No! I mean- I bring myself into all this. This is what I want to be doing, and you’ll have a harder time from me than Kenspeckle and Ghastly if you try to stop me from coming. I’m meant to do this. Is this about my arm? It’s fine, look. Completely healed. You don’t have to go easy on me, it’s all back to normal. Okay?’ She’s obviously blabbering, but her discomposure is a secondary consideration compared to Skulduggery deciding she can’t handle being an Arbiter of All Nations.

‘Okay. Just thought I’d check.’

‘Okay.’ Valkyrie relaxed slightly.

That night, Desmond and Melissa receive a message via hawk from Valkyrie that she is fine, but lying low with Skulduggery. They don’t have to worry about her, she says, but in fact they do.

They have a visitor.

Chief of Police Remus Crux stops by to inform them that their daughter and Skulduggery Pleasant broke into the Palace Vaults that morning and stole the Grotesquery. The Earth King has branded both arbiters traitors to the crown and issued warrants for their arrest. As such, keeping any information from Crux about the whereabouts of their daughter is at best impeding an investigation, and at worst, treason.

Deciding not to tolerate the incompetent accusations of Remus Crux as to their airbending daughter’s collusion with rogue Fire Nation elements, the Edgleys eject him from their house with as much politeness as they can muster. In return, he offers a warning that their daughter’s age will not deter the swiftness of the law’s punishment. Desmond punches him.

They start packing half an hour later. Their anniversary is coming up, after all, and they feel like a vacation back to their hometown- not visiting Fergus and Beryl (as some cover stories truly would be unbelievable) but instead staying in Gordon’s mansion near the Cave of Two Lovers. Coincidentally, this is also the same place they picked with Skulduggery and Valkyrie a few months ago as a rendezvous point in the event of a crisis.

Valkyrie and Skulduggery didn’t notice this on their last visit to the Northern Air Temple, but now they do: it is not uninhabited. Upon scouring the place for spirit world crystals, they find a real piece of work, a creepy old man named Anathem Mire. He was an inventor who built weapons for the Fire Nation once upon a time before escaping the fall of the capital and using his devices to maroon him at the furthest, most inaccessible reaches of the world. Absently, Mire directs them to the crystals, not taking his eyes off Valkyrie. He is seemingly fascinated with the new airbender, unable to stop drinking her in.

When they try to leave with the crystal, things go about as well as expected. Steel doors with old but functional mechanisms lock Skulduggery out of Mire’s wing of the temple, trapping Valkyrie. Mire is insane, twisted, and saying all sorts of stuff along the lines of how he’ll keep her with him forever, how he can sense such power within her, how yadda yadda yadda. Valkyrie hits him with a gale so strong it blasts him through two walls of thousand-year-old masonry. Incredibly, he gets back up, but Skulduggery has melted through the door by then and they take off, Mire’s screams of how he’ll find her following them far out of range of his voice.

But aside from All That, the recovery operation goes smoothly.

China receives a visit from two tired-looking arbiters a few hours later. Valkyrie is happy to see her, as always, and recently China has been finding, rather exasperatedly, that she also looks forward to their sporadic appearances. China agrees that they will need the Sceptre to beat the Diablerie- and as the Sceptre’s owner, that must mean she’ll fight with them this time.

Once Valkyrie revives the Sceptre however, comes a certain amount of disappointment- China’s help will not be necessary.

‘Hm,’ China says as she sights along the Sceptre’s length to no avail. The crystal remains dark and unresponsive, and its heavy wooden case, which she was aiming at, remains intact.

‘I killed Serpine. Maybe I’m the owner,’ Skulduggery volunteers. China hands the weapon over, but he too manages nothing.

‘It seems I was wrong,’ smiles China ruefully. ‘Changing the crystal didn’t revive it.’

‘It has a semi-sentience,’ Skulduggery said, examining it. ‘Perhaps Kenspeckle can heal it.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘No. But the world, especially the Spirit World, refuses to comply with what I believe of it quite often. It’s worth a shot.’ Skulduggery shrugs and passes the Sceptre to Valkyrie while he collects his hat and coat from China’s couch.

As soon as it touches Valkyrie’s hands, the crystal lights up and a purple blast is unleashed, giving everyone, particularly Valkyrie, a fright.

Skulduggery looks at the hole in the floor. ‘Well,’ he concludes, ‘it works.’

And then it happens again, striking a bookcase.

‘My books!’ China rages. Valkyrie swears violently.

‘Calm down! Stop firing!’ Skulduggery shouts, and then pulls China out of the way of the next blast. Valkyrie gives a shriek and shoves the Sceptre into his hands as he darts towards her. It has claimed her as its owner.

‘I can’t use it! Skulduggery, I can’t use it! I tried not thinking about it firing but it just kept coming into my head!’

‘It’s alright, no one was hurt,’ Skulduggery says in a soothing tone somewhat undercut as he catches his breath.

‘My books!’

Valkyrie gets as far as, ‘China, I am so sorry…’ before words fail her.

Well, it’s not like China is capable of, or willing to, hold a grudge against a fourteen-year-old. Still speechless, she turns to her other target instead.

‘I’ll pay for the damages,’ Skulduggery says quickly.

‘The damages?! Some of those volumes were irreplaceable!’ She spins away, the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes, and counts to ten in her head. When she feels less ready to crumple the walls of the apartment into scrap metal, she turns back to the arbiters. With an exhale, she hitches a slightly strained smile onto her face. Sweeping away dismay and irritation and the dust of her recently-vaporised bookshelf courtesy of a mortified Valkyrie, China wishes them luck, as they are no longer required to trust her- a difficult task, she knows.

‘We could still do with your help,’ Skulduggery says unexpectedly. She meets his eyes and smiles.

‘Nonsense. You’ll do fine without me.’

After they leave, with the sun edging up over the horizon, she receives another visitor. The only thing less welcome than Remus Crux’s face is the secret he tells her he knows.

‘Where are they, China?’

She answers.

There is a rather… bad… confrontation at the Sangian.

Earth King Thurid is not as confined to the Palace as many of his predecessors preferred to be. He was a soldier and an officer, not born into a sheltered royal life as he was never actually expected to take the throne. But then Serpine murdered King Eachan, along with all the other members of the royal family residing in the palace, and take the throne he did. He maintains his hands-on approach to situations, as if running a kingdom was only a larger and more complicated battlefield with the added satisfaction of actually being able to remove Skulduggery Pleasant from his list of problems.

Once Crux informs Guild of the arbiters’ whereabouts, the Earth King himself takes the Dai Li to arrest them at Kenspeckle’s facility. Aside from a few key problems, this confrontation goes well.

The problems:

The Diablerie capture the Earth King

Kenspeckle refuses to allow his hospital to be used as HQ

Remus Crux becomes certain that Skulduggery and Valkyrie are working with the Diablerie and helped to kidnap King Thurid

So really, the only part that went well was when no one captured Fletcher. Ghastly suggests they make a new base of operations at his tailoring shop.

The Sangian is in Ba Sing Se’s Lower Ring, right up next to the Inner Wall- built onto it, in fact. It’s an area where there is no concept of a common ground level. Some people’s roofs are level with other people’s patios, and there is a complicated network of trestles and steps to reach the stone pavement below. If you step outside on a good day, you can see all the way to the Middle Ring wall and over the cramped, crowded arms of streets that embrace it. On a great day, which, despite the feeling, this day actually is, you can even see into the Middle Ring itself. Fletcher asks where Bespoke Tailor’s is, and Ghastly’s points towards it.

Fletcher nods brightly. ‘Alright. Meet you there.’

Then he wraps an arm around Valkyrie and steps off the terrace into open space.

The only reason Valkyrie doesn’t scream is because the rush forces all air back into her lungs. Fletcher’s glider snaps open though and the downward drop becomes an upward swoop in a split second. Fletcher loses his grip on her and she drops abruptly until his hand catches hers. Then she screams. With rage.

They barely clear the wall. Valkyrie kicks a banner and she distinctly sees sentries and officials gawking as they shamble lopsidedly through the air. The flimsy glider is not meant for passengers, but as the flight is sustained, Valkyrie begins to laugh as much as she swears.

When they touch down outside Ghastly’s, Fletcher does his fancy look-at-me-I’m-an-airbender staff-spin to fold the glider wings. Valkyrie punches him.

‘Ow! Why’d you do that?!’

‘Shock, mostly!

‘I thought you’d enjoy it.’

Now that her feet are back on the ground and she isn’t on the verge of plummeting into the paved streets of Ba Sing Se, she realises she did. But she won’t tell him that.

‘It’s okay,’ Fletcher says compassionately. ‘Flying can be scary, the first time.’

Narrowing her eyes, Valkyrie replies, ‘My transport of choice is a dragon, Fletcher. I’m not exactly inexperienced.’

He shrugs and grins. ‘Still better when you can do it yourself. For airbenders, the sky’s literally the limit. It’ll take a few years, but you’ll get there. Probably.’

She rolls her eyes and sends a blast of air his way, which he swerves away from, and comments that she airbends like she’s trying to sling rocks. This earns him another blast. He ends up behind her this time.

She steps smartly on his foot and he stumbles, to his surprise. Fletcher’s not used to people being quick enough to trip him up. Although, he can’t be sure if she managed it because she sensed the air shift, or because she’s just better at fighting close-quarters than he is. Or both.

Either way, it’s… good. It’s good to have another airbender around, even if she isn’t anything like the Air Nomads.

Valkyrie regards him stiffly with her arms crossed, prepared for more comments about how improper an airbender she is. If there’s one thing that’s become abundantly, and infuriatingly, clear to her in the limited amount of time she’s known Fletcher, it’s that she is definitely not as good an airbender as him. He opens his mouth, she prepares a retort, and he gives her some advice.

She should try moving in the breeze, following it around. Her new style’s not bad exactly, Fletcher says, just different, and ‘living in the air more’ will help refine it.

When the others arrive, she and Fletcher are having a mock sparring session- essentially just showing each other what they can do (she has some moves he doesn’t, Valkyrie notices). Then Skulduggery arrives. His actions are thus:

Grimly stalking up the street.

A cursory glance over Valkyrie to check she’s alright.

Advancing on Fletcher like the almighty harbinger of the world’s darkest thunderstorms and looming over the boy as such.

‘Never. Do that. Again.’ (Fletcher nods quickly, terrified.)

Abruptly pausing at the sound of movement from within Ghastly’s supposedly deserted shop.

Restraining Ghastly and Tanith from launching themselves at Solomon Wreath, the two other bloodbenders he’s brought along, and the White Cleaver. It’s impolite to attack your allies.

Ba Sing Se may have fallen to Avatar Vile’s siege during the war, but it would have surely held out longer if it weren’t for the Dai Li’s betrayal. The sway the organisation held over the city’s population through hypnotism and fear ensured that the kingdom was brought down just as much from the inside as the outside in the end.

When the city was liberated once more, the secret, brainwashed prisoners of the Dai Li that most people didn’t even know existed were at the bottom of the priority list. The White Cleaver was one such prisoner who slipped through chinks in the chaos, who was never rescued but somehow escaped; whose conditioning was never broken; who, somehow, found himself at the bloodbenders’ doorstep and was pieced back together by them, a phrase which sounds much gentler and more wholesome than the process was.

Returning to them for the same reason (albeit a far more literal piecing together) two years ago after Serpine’s command of him almost got him killed, the bloodbenders regained the White Cleaver’s services. Wreath assures Skulduggery that he is on their side- or at least, under their control.

Meanwhile, frantically searching for a lead that will get him the Earth King back and the arbiters in chains, Remus Crux returns to the Library barely half a day later to extort more information from China Sorrows, only for the Diablerie to show up at the same time looking to recruit her.

Crux does not take this well. He does not take this well at all.

The burgeoning cracks in his mind are accentuated by the breaks in his legs when he throws himself out the window to escape.

As the day dwindles and the sky darkens, Valkyrie flies Bentley to Gordon’s house. She has gone long enough in a highly tense situation without letting her parents know in person that she’s safe. The plan is to spend maybe an hour there and then fly to the Serpent’s Pass, where the exchange of Guild for Fletcher is scheduled to take place the next morning. Skulduggery, Ghastly, Tanith, and Wreath remain at Bespoke Tailors’ to work out the exact details of how they will come out of the exchange with both targets safe and the Diablerie in custody.

Bentley is flying low between the rocky crags of the mountains when there’s a distant shout. A second later a boulder the size of Valkyrie’s house in Léi slams into Ben and knocks him out of the air.

Valkyrie is flung off his back. It’s pitch black. The only things she can sense are the rush of the air, the pull of gravity, her own terror, and the pained shrieks of Ben echoing throughout the mountains.

A second before she hits the ground head first, Valkyrie flings out her hands and funnels the air into a cushion. She flips, feet catching the ground, but slips. Her recently-healed arm jars on impact. A massive crunch as of the snapping of fifty tree trunks seems to vibrate straight through the earth. The dragon cries out again.

‘Ben!’

Torches send shadows scurrying back through the rocks and trees. Desperately trying to reorient herself, find her feet, find her focus, Valkyrie sees an empty catapult, sees Earth Kingdom soldiers- no, policemen, Ba Sing Se guards near Omashu- and a hurry-up wagon with an iron door, bars on the single window.

She lurches up and blasts the whole thing onto its side. The reins snap, the ostrich-horses rearing and providing even more of a problem for Crux’s men than a scared, angry airbender. There are thrashing sounds from beyond the ambush. Bentley.

Valkyrie charges right towards the men, sliding on her knees and bending over backwards as one of them takes a swing at her with a baton. The heavy wood passes over her and she comes up, firing an elbow into another man’s belly, following the air currents into dodging between the narrow space left by two more men and sprinting as hard as she can towards the darkened trees.

A fifth man steps out of nowhere. Suddenly she’s sprawled on the ground, her head ringing, blood in her mouth from her bitten tongue. Muzzily, she tries pushing herself up, the world swaying under her good hand…

She couldn’t have passed out for long, but when she wakes up, being dragged across the ground, her hands are shackled behind her back and the wagon is righted, door gaping ahead of her like an open mouth complete with metal teeth. She’s tossed unceremoniously inside. Inside, she’s not alone.

Vaurien Scapegrace was being transferred to a low security jail in the outlying Earth Kingdom regions when his (one-man) security detail received instructions to wait for further instructions. These came in the form of four more guards and a catapult, the Earth King having obviously realised what a credible threat he was. But no. Of course, it had to be the Cain girl who would steal his glory yet again. He harbours a great deal of resentment to her by this point, especially after she flipped the damn wagon with him inside.

He is not, however, suicidal. Beyond being her usual degree of pain in his backside, he is not incensed enough to incur Skulduggery Pleasant’s wrath by attempting to kill her. He is, however, a little stupid, and a lot unlucky, and not above trying to scare her.

The world is still spinning and lines of light are flashing across Valkyrie’s retinas and she feels like she’s going to be sick and she can’t tell what’s going on except she’s been locked in a cage with the dark shadow of yet another man standing up and snarling her name-

-she twists her hands. The air pressure drops, then bursts outwards in a brutal wave of force from the little space cupped in the centre of her palms. Valkyrie shoots off the floor, Scapegrace flies back, hits the wall, and then her knee catches him on the side of head for good measure, knocking him out cold instantly. Valkyrie lands on her feet, her knees go weak, and she falls yet again.

Unable to process so many things, least of all how she did that, she allows the static in her brain to take over once more, and slips into blackness.

It is well past dawn on the rocky ridge jutting out over the Serpent’s Pass. The water far below is brilliant in the light, only serving to remind Fletcher that they can’t wait any longer. Time is up, and that blind guy is already on his way over to start negotiations for the exchange. Tanith’s pacing makes him feel even sicker, and Ghastly’s urgings are the only ones thus far that have managed to get Skulduggery to calm down enough such that the air stops sizzling around him. None of them know where Valkyrie is.

Ben is not a happy dragon. He has been shot down, crash-landed, injured, and now his charge has been hit and locked in a box. Ben is not a happy dragon.

Crux’s men are even less happy. They did not expect a fourteen-year-old girl to almost beat them in a fight. Wasn’t air supposed to be a soft element? She wasn’t even supposed to be properly trained. But at least she’s locked in the wagon now. Sure, the walls did buckle and splinter a while ago, but the private went and looked, and both prisoners were unconscious, so no harm done. All they have to do is get back to Ba Sing Se and hand her over to Crux, and that would be th-

The ground drops away, and the bolts between the cage and the cart snap. The guards plummet back down in the smithereens of their cart, and Bentley breathes a plume of fire at them to discourage any attempts to get back up. He hefts the cage in his claws, snarls at the aches in his body, and soars for the horizon as fast as he can, the scent of the big city drawing him on.

Dragons are intelligent, but do not think like humans or spirits. Now that a human he cares about is in danger he elects to take her to the extremely fortified safe place he knows she often inhabits: Ba Sing Se.

The population of which Remus Crux has by now convinced she helped kidnap the Earth King.

Tanith watches Sanguine come over to greet them. The waters far below the knife-edge cliffside reflect in his dark glasses and the grin he flashes at her is as sunny as the cloudless sky. At least, right up until Skulduggery, his own expression as stony and sharp as the ridges of the Pass, puts him in cuffs and hands him over to Ghastly, telling him to break Sanguine’s arms if he even thinks the ground shifts. Then his attention is back on Fletcher.

The boy is pale and jittery. When Skulduggery promises that he won’t let anything happen to him, Tanith thinks treacherously of Valkyrie. Then she pushes those thoughts away. She should know better than to let her fears overcome her before a fight.

‘Funny, the girl not bein’ here,’ Sanguine muses, as if following her train of thought. ‘Didn’t want to risk us gettin’ two airbenders, did you?’

Tanith ignores his prying and the building tension in her body, only meeting Ghastly’s eyes briefly. They watch Fletcher walk shakily out onto the narrow ridge.

Guild is on his way from the opposite direction. She doesn’t allow her focus to falter even for a moment, attention fixed on the party on the other side of the natural bridge. As yet, the Diablerie have not made any moves. Sanguine, on the other hand, seems happy to talk, relaxed as it is possible for a prisoner to be.

‘You seem awfully keen to get your hands on another airbender,’ Skulduggery comments, ‘considering you didn’t even stick around to see whether she could open a portal for you last year.’

‘Well, you know how it is,’ shrugs Sanguine. ‘It’s cold, you’re tired, and your boss is a fanatic who didn’t bring enough backup and is bent on getting himself killed when there’s another perfectly reasonable, higher-paying offer just waiting for you to take it.’ He grins. ‘And what’s even better is, these people do know how to arrange backup.’

Skulduggery lunges but Sanguine has already jerked his head sideways. A spray of dust and rock from the cliff-side pelt Ghastly and instinctively making him recoil. Cuffs dangling from one hand, Sanguine pulls something out of his pocket just before Skulduggery reaches him-

BANG.

The light flares everywhere, searing Tanith’s eyes before she can look away. Everything burns white. Her ears ring. Disoriented, she doesn’t dare move, very aware of her position on a cliff-edge a hundred feet above the water. Scuffling. The sound of a fight. She blinks furiously, her sword out, her senses coming back far too slowly. She can make out blurry figures in the distance. Fletcher. Guild. And something huge, looming out of the water…

Yelling at Ben to turn around proves fruitless. It’s apparently too hard to get a message across to a dragon when you’re shouting through the bars of a box and hurtling through the sky faster than wind. Valkyrie is instead condemned to watch as not only Ba Sing Se, but the palace itself, looms closer and closer.

The cage is set down carefully. Palace guards rush in. Valkyrie tries to ignore her throbbing head and aching body, and readies herself for another fight as the guards prise off the door and see who is inside.

The fight is very short. Nonexistent, really. The guards are on red alert, they suspect her of aiding in the kidnap of their king, and a dragon has just landed on their doorstep. There’s a lot of them out there, and her hands are still bound. She is seized immediately.

‘No, no, Ben STOP!’

The dragon does, exhaling a waft of superheated steam instead of flame, glaring menacingly at the guards holding her and Scapegrace.

‘Go get Skulduggery!’ Valkyrie yells as the guards haul her away, weapons still aimed at the dragon. She’s trying not to resist, but Bentley isn’t moving and she needs him to go.

‘I swear I didn’t do it!’ Scapegrace gabbles in the back. ‘I’ve never met Valkyrie Cain in my life!’

‘Skulduggery! Get Skulduggery!’ Valkyrie screams. Bentley stays planted on the stone tiles of the massive pavilion, getting further and further away, luminescent yellow eyes fixed on the retreating group. The lack of flowers or any other kind of decoration on his sleek black scales only enunciate his sharp bared teeth and reptilian presence.

‘Do you understand? SKULDUGGERY, Ben!’

Just as the great palace doors are about to close, Bentley takes off.

In summary, the exchange did not go well. The giant sea serpent was an ample distraction for Sanguine to snatch Fletcher away and escape with the Diablerie. Ghastly’s quick thinking sped Guild and the patch of earth he was standing on out of their (and the serpent’s) reach, however.

After retreating into the cliffs where the serpent can’t chase them, it seems as though Skulduggery’s temper, on a simmer all day, has reached boiling point. That is, until Bentley arrives, late, sans Valkyrie.

Then Tanith understands what boiling really looks like.

‘Let’s go,’ he says shortly. Flames flicker in his teeth. Likewise, Bentley blows a fiery plume before take-off.

The guards lead Valkyrie and Scapegrace, despite his protestations, down to the cells. Vaguely, Valkyrie wonders who’s giving the orders with Guild missing.

Walls suddenly slide down in the hall, blocking it off section by section, effectively trapping them. By the guards’ reactions, this is unexpected for them as well. Moments later, Dai Li agents drop down. They are informed that the Palace has gone into lockdown. No personnel in or out.

The guards begin to tell the Dai Li their business, when one of the newly shut walls spirals open- much more forcefully and roughly, without the smooth grinding of stone on stone characteristic of the Dai Li.

Mr Bliss steps through. He locks eyes with Valkyrie immediately.

‘I wasn’t informed that Arbiter Cain had been arrested.’

‘Sorry sir, must be an administration error. We were just taking her to the cells for deten-’

‘We found the airbender,’ Valkyrie blurts, managing to make her voice work. While it is a bit of a relief to see a familiar face, she has no idea whether or not Bliss believes she and Skulduggery were involved with Guild’s kidnapping.

The guards are silent though, and Bliss’s attention is on her, so Valkyrie quickly relates the information about the hostage swap and the Diablerie’s plan to open a portal.

Bliss regards her. Eventually, he decides, ‘I’ll take custody of her.’

‘The palace is in lockdown, my lord-’ begins a Dai Li agent.

‘I know,’says Bliss coldly. ‘And I didn’t order it. Find out who did.’

The agents nod and melt away into the shadows. The walls are lifted, and the guards move on, which Scapegrace is happy about until they take him with them.

Bliss turns to Valkyrie and reduces the earthen restraints on her wrists to rubble with a gesture. ‘This way.’

She doesn’t argue.

The palace seems much darker and quieter without people bustling through its corridors. The halls they travel dwarf Valkyrie. The journey is awfully reminiscent of Serpine’s coup. She doesn’t know where they’re going, but she doesn’t ask either. She wonders what it means that Mr Bliss, the Earth King’s advisor and the man making a move for the throne, was not informed about either her arrest or the lockdown.

Bliss stops in a dark corridor just like all the other dark corridors they have passed through, looking around. He motions her towards a shadow. She steps into it silently.

A section of wall opens, revealing the Administrator, who Dai Li agents wave through before closing it again.

‘You asked for me, my lord?’

‘Did you order the lockdown?’

‘I did,’ the Administrator answers, looking around the corridor and missing Valkyrie’s hiding place.

‘Why?’

‘I was informed that Skulduggery Pleasant’s dragon had arrived at the Palace entrance. I assumed that it was a threat to the personnel stationed inside, including yourself sir.’

‘Were you aware that Valkyrie Cain was brought into this palace a short while ago?’

‘Yes sir. I sent my assistant to inform you immediately. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have been notified.’

‘Where is your assistant now?’

‘All staff should be headed to the East Wing, sir.’

‘Then let’s see if he’s there.’ Bliss turns and a burst of lightning from the Administrator’s fingers hits him in the back.

Valkyrie manages to stifle her gasp. The Administrator moves around Bliss’s prone, smoking, groaning form, her eyes cold as she readies more lightning.

Valkyrie takes a running leap out of the shadows and pushes both hands at the Administrator, the torrent of air nearly bowling the woman head over heels. She sprawls but rolls to her feet, lightning ready impossibly fast. Time seems to slow down as she watches the Administrator’s fingers extend towards her in a very familiar fashion.

Valkyrie jerks to the side. Lightning sizzles past her cheek. She kicks her leg straight up like a door latch, unlocking a gale of wind from ground level that blasts the Administrator into the ceiling. She falls to the ground on her knees, dazed but still able to get back up.

Heart thundering, Valkyrie readies another fistful of air and-

‘Stand down!’

Skulduggery’s shout echoes from behind her. He’s at the end of the corridor, his hand full of warning flames. ‘Stand down, Administrator,’ he repeats.

Tanith and Ghastly run in behind him, fighting stances also ready. Valkyrie grins widely and turns back: the traitor sways, and slumps unconscious.

‘Good enough,’ Skulduggery says, and extinguishes his flames. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he adds casually.

‘I had it covered,’ Valkyrie shrugs.

The presence of a self-admitted member of Mevolent’s rogue Fire Nation in the Earth Kingdom’s palace, a trusted member of the court no less, is a shocking one. Even Thurid Guild doesn’t try and chalk this up to somehow being Skulduggery’s fault. Finally, the Earth King is willing to listen to what they tell him.

If there was only one portal, located a moderately close distance to these events, the pressure would be on to rush to it straight away. As it is, two spirit portals are possible targets. The closer one in the North is the least likely option: the Northern Water Tribe has increased security around it tenfold since the events of the Grotesquery’s awakening the previous year. That leaves the Southern Spirit Portal as the Diablerie’s most viable choice, all the way on the other side of the world.

Unlike the previous year’s attempt to summon Vaatu, there is some leeway with time. The lunar eclipse is a week away, and with the help of Solomon Wreath and the other bloodbenders who volunteer, the ships that go to battle can be assured of a speedy passage across the ocean.

After a rather angry Kenspeckle, as the only waterbender healer in the city, has been summoned to the palace to get Mr Bliss back on his feet, the Earth King’s war room fills with people.

Guild, lesson learned from his last excursion outside the realms of his immediate control, hands over command of a contingent of soldiers to Mr Bliss for the duration of the emergency. Their orders are to travel to the South Pole, apprehend the Diablerie by any means necessary, and stop the portal from being opened- also by any means necessary.

‘If possible, retrieve Fletcher Renn alive,’ Guild adds. Valkyrie thinks scathingly that it sounds like an afterthought. Mr Bliss however, accepts these terms without question.

Valkyrie watches them closely as this handover of power between kings occurs, but neither Bliss nor Guild exhibit any trepidation, satisfaction, or notable behaviour. They are both good politicians: moreover, they are both good commanders.

Skulduggery, Tanith, and Ghastly also volunteer for the mission.

‘Accepted,’ Guild nods. ‘However, your student will remain here, Arbiter Pleasant.’

‘What?’ exclaims Valkyrie.

‘Airbender blood is needed to awaken the Grotesquery, as was discovered last year. If two airbenders are present at the South Pole then that is double the likelihood of Jaron Gallow and whoever he is working for being able to open the spirit portal. Arbiter Cain, you will remain here in Ba Sing Se for the duration of this mission.’

‘In the dungeon?’ Valkyrie narrows her eyes.

‘Under the protection of the Dai Li,’ Guild snaps.

‘Respectfully, Thurid, you’ve spent the past few days hunting us from one end of the Earth Kingdom to the other,’ Skulduggery says bluntly. ‘I don’t have any reason to think you won’t arrest my student as soon as I’m on a ship out of here.’

‘The warrants for you and your companions’ arrest have been rescinded,’ says Guild stiffly.

‘Oh good. I’m sure the Fire Lord will be very glad to hear that.’

‘I couldn’t give less of a damn what the Fire Lord thinks of the policies I enact in my own kingdom against-’

‘Against a special envoy of another nation?’

‘Yes! Particularly when that envoy commits crimes of espionage, theft and endangerment of the populace, and especially when that envoy may well be acting on the orders of the Fire Lord! The head of a rival nation in possession of a particularly reprehensible history!’

‘A history that ended fourteen years ago. You were there, you should remember.’ At this, Skulduggery’s voice becomes hard, and seems to knock some rationale back into Guild. Valkyrie knows the look that passes across his face- she’s seen it on other soldiers, ones who fought with Skulduggery at the Fall of the Capital.

‘Yes. I do remember,’ he says tightly. ‘But thankfully this isn’t fourteen years ago. Today no governments are in need of toppling, so I wouldn’t think there is any reason for you to recruit an exiled prince and form an army this time. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Thurid, Caisson had nothing to do with my actions in the catacombs and you know it.’

‘What I do and do not know is not up to you to decide, special envoy. Regardless of your intentions, you have perpetuated an international incident, and the brewing situation between our nations will be resolved between the Fire Lord and myself.’

‘Resolved or escalated,’ Skulduggery says. ‘You don’t seem to be trying very hard to avoid a war. As I recall, Meritorious also found it to be quite the unifying force, having a kingdom focused on a common external enemy- instead of its leader.’

Valkyrie, and everyone else in the room, has been totally silent for the whole exchange. Had anyone dared to speak to the Earth King, any Earth King like that before? She knows Skulduggery doesn’t hold a particular regard for people in positions of power, and doesn’t have a problem telling them when he thinks they’re wrong, but this borders on dangerous behaviour. If things really are as tense between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom as Guild is saying (and how had she missed that? Skulduggery hadn’t said anything, but he didn’t seem surprised now, so he must have known the possible consequences for breaking into the catacombs), then Valkyrie half-expects Guild to throw Skulduggery into prison right now without a trial.

When the Earth King finally speaks, he is as cold as the icy waters in the North.

‘After this mission is complete, the Earth Kingdom’s borders are closed to you, arbiter. Set foot here again and you will face consequences.’

At this moment, Remus Crux bursts into the chamber as fast as a manic, hobbling man can. Ignoring his protestations of Valkyrie Cain and Skulduggery Pleasant’s collusion with the enemy, Guild sends Crux away and dismisses them all.

The forces head to the Southern Water Tribe as fast as possible. Solomon Wreath, his White Cleaver in tow, volunteers along with several other bloodbenders to help speed the ships on their way. Valkyrie, Skulduggery, Ghastly, and Tanith fly ahead on Ben.

For the entire week it takes to travel to the South Pole, Valkyrie thinks of Fletcher. Regardless of what awaits her and Skulduggery after the mission (what with the possible war, Skulduggery’s ban from the country, and what that means for her) and the confrontation that is coming at the end of this journey, Fletcher is alone. Last year, she was only in Vengeous’ hands for the greater part of a day, and that was horrible enough.

She hopes he is okay.

The cold in the South is just as biting as in the North, Valkyrie finds, but disembarking onto the crunchy snow is far more bearable. This time, she is dressed for the weather- and nor is she a prisoner. Still, the wind finds every opening it can in her clothes, and the sun reflects blindingly off the white landscape all around her.

‘I see tents,’ she announces, and stamps off towards the village with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, face buried in her collar under her hood. Tanith laughs.

The Southern Water Tribe is far less grand than the Northern Water Tribe. The settlements, decimated by decades of Fire Nation raids, have only just begun to rebuild and expand, but after years of living as they have, the chance for recovery has made the people stronger, and ready for war should it come to them again.

‘We haven’t finished unloading,’ Skulduggery calls, and sighs when she continues stubbornly onwards. He shoulders two packs and catches up quickly.

‘It’s too cold,’ says Valkyrie.

‘Stop complaining. You’ve been to the Northern Water Tribe.’

‘It’s too cold there too.’

‘You’re just tired from the flight,’ Skulduggery dismisses cheerfully. ‘You’ve got dragon-lag.’

‘How are you so chipper?’ Valkyrie complains. ‘You’ve got less layers on than me. Why aren’t you suffering?’

‘I’ve got more fortitude.’

‘Hmph.’

‘Take a deep breath! Can’t you feel it refreshing you?’

‘Oh yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely keeping me fresh. Like meat in an icebox.’

‘Feel that breeze!’

‘Oh, I feel it.’

‘This is where you should be coming alive! It should be energising you! I grew up here, you know, I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What?’

‘I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What? You grew up here?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve told you before.’

‘You definitely haven’t.’

‘You just don’t pay attention.’

‘Of course I don’t, because you’re always going on about fresh air and feeling the freezing wind.’

‘Maybe if you’d hitched a ride on Ben you wouldn’t be so freezing.’

‘What?’

Behind them, Bentley lumbers along, carrying Tanith and Ghastly. They have rearranged all his packs, saddles and cushions so they can sit on him bareback, and look far less chilly.

‘Ben’s warm?’

‘Of course he’s warm, he’s a dragon,’ said Skulduggery.

‘And you didn’t tell me?!’

‘Well I thought you would have noticed.’

‘I can’t feel him through all these layers! Wait. Stop. Wait. You’re a firebender. Is that why you’re not as cold? Are you doing some sort of firebending thing?’

‘Do you see any fire?’

‘You’re such a cheater!’

‘As an airbender, you should be able to change the air currents to keep yourself warm.’

‘Oh I should, should I?’

The Earth Kingdom soldiers and bloodbenders will not arrive in their warships for several hours, so the intervening time is filled up making preparations for the trek to the portal and coordinating with the Chief of the Southern Water Tribe.

The Chief, Renato Bisahalani, knows Ghastly and Skulduggery from the war. He is a charismatic, forceful man who has already organised most of the required preparations for the Earth Kingdom contingent’s arrival. He has gathered warriors and waterbenders from every settlement that has some to spare, and messages by polar dog come in often bearing reports of the Diablerie’s movements, but very little sightings have been made, and their current whereabouts is unknown. It is guaranteed that they will be heading to the spirit portal however, and so Bisahalani has alerted Aranmore, the portal’s closest settlement, to be on guard.

Ghastly and Skulduggery take all the activity in their stride, appearing completely in their element as they tour the bustling encampment bivouacked outside the main coastal settlement. Unfazed, they survey the herds of arctic camels and snow leopard caribou that will be used by the troops for rapid transport. It is the sight of this that brings home to Valkyrie the magnitude of force that has been mobilised for this mission. This isn’t even the full extent; the Earth Kingdom’s own soldiers are only just now beginning to filter in.

‘Isn’t the Diablerie only four people?’ Valkyrie dimly hears herself ask.

Bisahalani overhears her. ‘According to King Thurid’s reports, there have been sightings of the rogue Fire Nation moving across the Earth Kingdom ever since Fletcher Renn’s capture. We expect they’ll have boarded ships and reached the South by now. We’ve been patrolling the waters, but there are many that are too dangerous to risk losing ships. If the enemy has landed or is going to land, it’ll be in those places that only the crazy and desperate go.’

‘You have ships modified specifically for waterbender use. They can’t navigate these areas?’ Skulduggery says.

‘You overestimate the number of fully trained waterbenders we have. They can’t be everywhere at once,’ Bisahalani replies dryly.

‘What about the king tides?’ Tanith says unexpectedly. Bisahalani and Skulduggery look at her, surprised. ‘I saw the ocean patterns as we were flying over. The king tides are due now, aren’t they? They could be used for passing over rapids and ice shelves.’

A grin tugs at Ghastly. ‘I’m glad someone can keep up with the sailing jargon. These two enjoy confounding the rest of us far too much.’ He nods at Skulduggery and Bisahalani.

‘You grew up by the water?’ Bisahalani inquires.

‘Kyoshi Island,’ Tanith nods, smiling briefly back at Ghastly.

‘Ah. Well again, the problem comes down to our waterbender numbers…’

The discussion goes back and forth. Valkyrie keeps up as best she can, but mostly she is distracted. Looking around at the preparations being made, she can’t help a trickle of fear that shivers down her spine. The White Cleaver, blank-faced as ever, sharpens his scythe with a whetstone.

It looks like everyone is expecting a pitched battle.

The combined Earth and Water forces reach Aranmore by nightfall. The lunar eclipse is due in a few hours.

Aranmore is a tiny village, mostly empty as all the civilians were evacuated as soon as word came that the Diablerie and Mevolent’s Fire Nation were on their way. The landscape is more ice than snow, rising and dipping erratically, strewn with great twisting glacial mounds which on one hand provide good cover and on the other are great for concealing ambushes. Somewhere in the centre of these warped ice structures jutting out of the snow lies the Southern spirit portal.

The head of the village, a crabby old man named Batu, greets them upon arrival and reports no activity. Bisahalani and Bliss set to work organising scouting parties and perimeter patrols, dividing up the troops as efficiently as possible. Skulduggery takes Valkyrie aside to talk with Batu.

Despite the man’s age, he refuses to be evacuated, insisting that no one knows the area like he does and that they’d be fools not to use him. Skulduggery subsides, but manages to wrangle a promise out of him that he’ll stay under cover and away from most of the fighting.

He does this by saying, ‘I’ll need someone to keep an eye on Valkyrie for me.’

Before Valkyrie can object, Batu seems to notice her for the first time. ‘‘Ere, what’s your kid doing out here?’

‘Student.’

‘Partner,’ says Valkyrie.

‘Partner,’ corrects Skulduggery.

‘I don’t need to be looked after,’ Valkyrie protests.

‘This place is about to become a battlefield,’ Skulduggery points out. ‘I won’t be able to make sure you’re safe out there.’

‘You think I can’t handle myself? I told you, you’re not making me do anything I don’t want to do-’

‘I don’t think that at all, I just know what being in a battle is like, and whether or not you want to accept this fact, it is my job as your partner and your teacher to see that you stay as safe as I can keep you. There’s not much I can do if you don’t want to listen to me, and spirits know I’d rather have you by my side than not, but you need to understand that this is not like we’re on our usual travels.

‘Nineteen years ago I lost my family to war. I’d rather not have to explain to your parents that I didn’t learn from my mistakes the first time around. So please, think about them before rushing in after me.’

Valkyrie falls silent at the tone of his voice. ‘Alright,’ she says eventually. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

Skulduggery nods, acknowledging that’s the best he’s going to get out of her. ‘There’s another reason we need you to stay in reserve.’

‘Because I can open the portal,’ Valkyrie guesses.

‘You can what?’ Batu interrupts. They both look around, having mostly forgotten about him. ‘You’re an airbender too?’

At Valkyrie’s nod, Batu says reflectively, ‘Popping up all over the place now, aren’t you? Good thing the firebenders aren’t here yet. Saving your presence, of course,’ he adds to Skulduggery.

This is precisely the moment at which known very unfriendly firebender Jaron Gallow tries to fry them all.

Skulduggery blocks the incoming fire blast. Through the sudden rush of people, Valkyrie can see Gallow leaping into their midst, whipping up fire all around him. Like ants out of a hill, more firebenders come pouring from the icy structures all around.

‘They’re already here!’ someone shouts.

Valkyrie takes off running as Skulduggery orders her and Batu to get to cover. The ambush overtakes everyone in sight within moments.

Valkyrie has never been involved in a battle so fierce- or, she’s starting to realise, been present on any kind of battlefield. By comparison, the Northern confrontation last year was a small skirmish.

Dodging through the maze of ice and fighting, clearing hillocks and sliding down snowy embankments, Valkyrie glimpses people she recognises. She leaves Skulduggery behind as he heads for Gallow. Firebenders twist and contort where they stand, screaming like an orchestra as Solomon Wreath conducts them with his hands. Ghastly is fist fighting Gruesome Krav, Bliss coming in to back him up. Bisahalani directs waterbenders from an elevated position to send an avalanche down on a group of Mevolent’s forces. The White Cleaver, a blur of movement in the midst of an overwhelming number of foes.

Batu pulls her into a secluded hollow out of the way of the fighting. Heart pounding, Valkyrie tries to calm down by fixating on the icy structure providing them cover instead of the battle. It looks like a tree encased in centuries worth of ice. There’s a blue glow beyond it.

Instead of running towards the village, they’d been headed towards the spirit portal, Valkyrie realises.

The closed Southern portal is almost identical to the one in the North, except it emits blue light instead of red. Not far from it lies the slumbering form of the Grotesquery, and with it, a struggling Fletcher Renn. Sanguine is holding him down while a woman who Valkyrie assumes is Murder Rose leans over him, about to cut his throat.

Batu pulls Valkyrie back before she can intervene. As Rose brings down the knife, Tanith pelts out of the frozen trees and tackles her to the ground. Fletcher yells in pain.

Sanguine mustn’t be able to see any better here than in the North, but he snarls and draws his straight razor nevertheless. Valkyrie shoves Batu off and blasts Sanguine onto his back with a burst of wind, running into the open. She grabs Sanguine’s arm as he blindly swings the razor at her, then twists under it and uses his own momentum to drive it into his stomach.

Sanguine roars, an expression of utter fury and disbelief on his face. He wrenches the blade out, blood spattering the snow, and with a few parting promises of vengeance upon her, disappears into the frozen depths of the forest. Another enemy for life made, she guesses.

Valkyrie crouches by Fletcher, who is shaking and groaning, and notices that there is too much blood on the snow just to have come from Sanguine.

Rose opened up Fletcher’s shoulder and upper arm before Tanith pulled her off him.

Fletcher’s own scared eyes meet hers, then slide past in horror. The blood splatter has landed on the Grotesquery, and its shrouded, injured form is rising to its feet behind her.

Before Valkyrie can so much as shout, an arm has wrapped around her neck and pulled her away. Batu is surprisingly strong, and more than a little insane it seems. He’s been working with the Diablerie for years, tracking down possible airbenders to awaken the Grotesquery and summon Vaatu so that he can become not just a bender, but the Dark Avatar, the most powerful bender in the world. He probably would have kept talking, but at this point Valkyrie is losing consciousness and can’t break his grip and Tanith is still fighting and Fletcher can’t get up so she reaches under her heavy layers and blasts Batu with the Sceptre of the Spirit World.

His ashes crumble to the snow. This radiant display of power is nothing compared to the spirit portal opening though.

In the chaos, the Grotesquery made its slow, painful way to the portal, and placed its hand on the cold blue hemispherical surface.

An awe-inspiringly massive blue jet pierces the night sky, casting a blinding light over the whole South Pole. The Grotesquery lets out a piercing cry, deafening everyone on the battlefield. Somehow, Valkyrie knows this is the signal to summon the dark spirit. Purpose fulfilled, it stumbles into the light and does not return.

There’s a shocked moment of silence, and then the sounds of the battle resume even fiercer than before. Valkyrie barely notices.

The sound of the cry bore her to the ground, setting a ringing in her ears that dazes her. She is completely unable to rise. Her eyes fix on the light: shapes coalesce within the spirit portal. There are so many of them, too many to be just the one dark spirit the Grotesquery wanted to bring forth…

The next thing Valkyrie is aware of is Skulduggery trying to get her to focus on him. His sword is bloody. Behind him, Tanith and Rose are lying in the snow, but only Tanith is stirring, red matting her hair. Ghastly is hauling her upright, simultaneously checking over the still-prone Fletcher.

‘Valkyrie! Valkyrie, look at me. I need you with me,’

She manages to, but remains disoriented. ‘I’m with you.’

Something flies out of the vertical strip of light that is the open spirit portal. Something dark with glowing eyes, sharp teeth, and batlike wings. Valkyrie’s heart stops, and cheers echo throughout the dark icy forest as the rogue Fire Nation roars their approval.

But then several other dark spirits fly out, and proceed to attack everything in sight.

The good news is there is no sign of Vaatu. None of the spirits seem to be significantly more powerful than the others, and while violent and vicious, they don’t live up to the tales of soul-destroying terror that describe Vaatu. The summoning is yet again a failure, and three attempts shows it as statistically significant too.

The bad news is, there doesn’t seem to be any attack that works against the dark spirits. Not ice, not fire, not metal or fists, and the Sceptre is useless. They don’t seem to be solid beings, amorphous and even intangible if they so choose. Bentley is the only one able to make any headway, flying overhead breathing fire and clawing at any that stray too close.

Ghastly and Skulduggery manage to get Tanith and Fletcher, both semi-conscious, to a place of relative safety in a hollow beneath an icy overhead canopy. Valkyrie, her head clearing more with every passing minute, keeps her hands pressed firmly to Fletcher’s shoulder, staunching the hot flow of blood. Tanith’s arm is broken, and she is breathing shallowly. Valkyrie doesn’t object when Skulduggery tells her to stay with them, he and Ghastly rejoining the battle as soon as they’re safe.

The battle is now against fleeing rogue Fire Nation soldiers and dark spirits alike. Valkyrie watches it progress, on the edge of panicking. Then something amazing happens.

A glimmering golden coil lights up the night, wrapping around a screeching, struggling spirit with more eyes than legs. As the coil tightens, the spirit changes. It becomes a lighter colour, sharp edges and claws rounding into paws and softness. It ceases struggling, and becomes more docile. When the coil retracts, the spirit flies away.

Beneath is Solomon Wreath, bending streams of water in a way that Valkyrie has never seen before.

Over and over he directs the winding streams around spirits, gold lighting them up once the transformation begins, and dissipating once finished. He shouts directions to the other water- and bloodbenders, who copy him. Soon the chaos begins to die down, the golden pulses lighting up the dark here and there almost soothing.

No spirits return to the portal. They are here to stay, apparently.

Before Valkyrie can breathe a sigh of relief at the winding-down battle, arms yank her backwards and drag her through the icy hollow, which is more of a tunnel as it turns out.

Valkyrie throws her head back and crunches someone’s nose. He yells, and she does it again. The hands release her, and she whips around, using the Sceptre like she’s seen Fletcher use his staff to slam a wall of air into Remus Crux.

He flies out of the tunnel, snow spraying up, but is on his feet again within moments, diving back towards her.

‘You did this!’ he hisses, hands on her throat. ‘You’re part of it! All of it!’

Another guy who has completely lost it, Valkyrie notes distantly. She twists out of his grip, kicks his knee, and runs- straight into three enemy firebenders.

What follows is a blur of movement. The firebenders attack and Valkyrie dodges between, following the air currents to slip inside their movements. She can’t take all three head on, but fortunately airbending is the most useful element for evasion. Fletcher did say she should practice ‘living in the air’ more; well, there’s nothing quite like learning on the job. She ducks under fiery punches, finds herself with her back pressed to someone else’s and follows them whenever they try to turn around and grab her. Coming face to face with another firebender, she sidesteps and they punch her back-to-back partner instead.

She keeps running, and when she realises she’s being chased towards a dead end of glassy ice, speeds up, plants her feet firmly and runs straight up it, flipping over the firebenders’ heads as she comes down behind them in a roll. Flicking the Sceptre, she sends up a torrent of snow and takes off running again, but it doesn’t slow them down for long. Soon enough she has to turn and face them; she can’t both run away and dodge fireballs. She spins the Sceptre to disperse most of the blasts, but now she’s being driven back to somewhere she can’t see.

Valkyrie steps off snow onto sheer ice. She glances down and sees they’re now standing on a dark frozen lake.

A bright flash and a swathe of fire herald Skulduggery’s arrival. He pelts down the bank and enters the fray like she knew he would, and as far as Valkyrie’s concerned, the fight is all but finished at this point.

Then Remus Crux tackles her, still insensible to reason, still convinced she’s working with the Diablerie despite the firebenders visibly trying to kill her. The ice they struggle on cracks, and together they plunge into glacial water.

The bitter cold has her instinctively gasping. Icy water floods her lungs. Her muscles- all of them, it seems- clench up. Crux is having a similar response, dragging her down as he tries to claw his way to the surface. Below the ice it is dark. She cannot see the surface. She cannot breathe. Her limbs are failing her. The cold is within her and without her, and it is fading as she loses consciousness.

And then she can see again. Move again. The water is within her and without her. It bends to her will.

Solomon follows the sounds of the fight in the direction Pleasant ran.

There’s a battle taking place on a frozen lake in the midst of a clearing of twisted ice pillars. A dangerous place for a fight between firebenders, and yes, he can see the ice already thinning and cracking underneath them. There is already a hole where someone went through, in fact. He starts forward to assist Pleasant against the three opponents he’s facing, and the lake explodes.

Solomon is thrown back into the forest. On the other side of the lake he sees Pleasant get struck in the head by icy debris and slump.

The black water surges, a massive, terrifying whirlpool that decimates everything in its path, ice, trees, and people alike. The flood races at Solomon like a tsunami, a wall of water that smashes apart solid objects. With a slash of his hands Solomon diverts it around himself, creating a momentary pocket of safety, but there’s others on the battlefield not so fortunate to be a waterbender.

There’s a finite amount of water in the lake, thankfully. But when the torrent begins to slow, something yanks the current straight back, and this time spears of ice as long as a man fringe the waves. More screams are added to the night over the roar of water, some cut off suddenly, some dissolving into gurgles. Solomon liquifies a spike that drives at his chest, but with his hands full stopping the second flash flood from consuming him he can’t prevent the Earth Kingdom soldiers nearby from being impaled to whatever icy trees still stand. Once it passes, Solomon looks up.

A towering spire of swirling water spins overhead. There is a figure suspended at its tip, hands lowering from where they instructed the flood to expand and withdraw and turn to ice and kill. With swift motions, they direct the spire to lower them to the bank, not twenty feet away. The water coil collapses with a splash.

Solomon looks into the glowing red eyes and snarling teeth of the Avatar.

Like a switch is flipped, the glow winks out and Valkyrie Cain falls to the snow.

Valkyrie opens her eyes and starts shivering. She is soaked to the bone, colder than she’s ever been in her life, but she’s not shaking from the cold. After a brief moment of blissful ignorance, she remembers what happened only a few seconds ago.

It felt like she could do anything, and after she shot out of the water all she wanted to do was destroy. It was like she had one hand on the reins, and something else was guiding her. She did things without knowing how. She’d felt unstoppable and relished it and she can’t stop trembling from the terror.

She’s a waterbender. But she hasn’t been hallucinating her time as an airbender for the past two years either.

This can’t be happening.

Another memory hits her between the eyes like a hammer, and she lurches up with a crackle of ice from the water freezing to her skin and clothes to find Solomon Wreath already crouching over her. His expression is wary and calculating as he asks if she’s alright and tries to help her up. She shoves him off. She needs Skulduggery. Where is Skulduggery. Wreath says he saw him by the bank before the flood.

He’s not there now.

She stumbles up and takes off shakily into the forest. There’s blood and bodies everywhere. She passes several soaking people gathered around a groaning Bisahalani, whose legs are definitely not supposed to bend that way. It’s among one of the better sights. Jaron Gallow, motionless, missing an arm. Mr Bliss, the King of Omashu, her king, impaled on a two-metre jagged spike of ice, eyes open, not breathing. Shouts for help echo all around. She still can’t find Skulduggery.

She hears Ghastly’s voice and runs towards it. He’s near the hollow where she hid with Tanith and Fletcher. They’re okay. They’re all okay. Ghastly grabs her when he sees her, asking if she’s alright, but she can only stammer if he knows where Skulduggery is. He doesn’t. She takes off again, but Tanith and Fletcher are losing blood and consciousness and Ghastly can’t leave them to go after her. Instead she hears Wreath pelting through the slurry and snow at her heels.

Skulduggery isn’t on the battlefield. He isn’t at the healing tents set up in Aranmore. He isn’t among the wounded brought in on stretchers, or the dead brought in on more stretchers. The bloodbenders don’t find him buried in the snow and ice like so many others, or in the lake they dredge by lifting spheres of water into the air, where one of the firebenders who was after her is still alive. In fact, Skulduggery’s not the only person missing in the aftermath.

Dimly, information filters through to Valkyrie about the occasional soldier, or waterbender, or warrior who can’t be accounted for. The firebender prisoner laughs, coughing blood out of battered lungs. He laughs because Mevolent’s Fire Nation still takes prisoners of war. And now they have Skulduggery Pleasant.

#skulduggery pleasant #fanfic #avatar au #fusion #every few years someone reinvents summoning spirits #and it never works #or does it?

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