Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked (25 page)

“I... I want to hug you.”

“Hugging also keeps me warm.”

Valkyrie hugged her and Lenka laughed again.

“When you’re quite finished,” Skulduggery said, walking by.

Valkyrie got up. “See you around?” she said to Lenka.

Lenka held up her hands. “It’s kind of inevitable.”

Valkyrie caught up to Skulduggery. “These people are really nice. I’m not used to nice people. I’m used to you.”

“I’m nice,” he said.

“I can’t believe that
you
are what I now think of as normal, so that whenever I meet nice people they seem like weirdos.”

“I’m very nice.”

“You insult everyone you meet.”

“Not every
single
person. I don’t have time to insult every
single
person. And have I insulted anyone since we got here? No, I have not, because I am, as I said, nice.”

“I don’t think I’d be as nice as these guys if I’d been stuck here for the last thirty years. What kind of person do you think you’d need to be in order to spend thirty years in a mountain?”

“I don’t know,” Skulduggery said. “The kind of person who loves mountains, perhaps?”

“I don’t think I’d be able to handle it.”

“Me neither. I’d say you’d be quite cranky. But Lament picked them for a reason. They each have the right temperament. They each have a little thing called patience.”

Valkyrie snapped her fingers. “See, that’s why I’d be useless in here.”

“It’s definitely one of the reasons.”

She scowled at him.

The corridor split and they veered left until they came to the only room in there that didn’t have natural rock for walls. The laboratory was all stainless steel and polished surfaces, as precise and detailed as anything Valkyrie had ever seen in the Sanctuary. It was sleek and so compact that she almost missed the fact that the room was packed full of machinery and monitors. Lament sat in the corner, drinking tea.

“Hi,” Valkyrie said as they approached.

“He can’t hear you,” Skulduggery told her. “See his eyes? See the way they move? He’s working.”

“He’s drinking tea.”

“His body is drinking tea. His mind is in the circuitry.”

She looked around. “What, in all this?”

“Why bother looking at a computer when you can
be
the computer?”

“That’s... kind of creepy.”

Lament stood up. “Indeed it is.”

“Oh! Sorry...”

“No need to apologise. When I was your age, my mother did her best to persuade me to study a more conventional discipline of magic, but science was always too dear to my heart. Thanks for waiting. I just had some tests I needed to finish up. Did you sleep well?”

“I did,” said Valkyrie. “Thank you.”

“I have to ask your forgiveness, actually, for last night. You caught me unawares, as you can imagine. You came all the way here to see how we managed to contain Argeddion, and it would be churlish of me to deny you. Please, this way.” He led them through a door, standing to one side and presenting his creation with a flourish.

The room was a mass of alloy and wood, with magical symbols carved on every surface. Four steel arms protruded from the corners, stretched towards the middle where they almost met. Hovering between the tips of these arms was a cage of energy that crackled with power, and within that cage was a man. Dressed in a white bodysuit, Argeddion rotated gently in mid-air, his eyes closed and his expression peaceful. He looked young, maybe around thirty years old. He had black hair, cut short, and a clean-shaven face. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would destroy the world if he woke up.

Directly beneath the cage was a metre-high glass pyramid, in which raged a small storm of energy. The pyramid had wires and cables running from its base to a padded chair set into a metal arch, decorated in sigils and circuitry.

“Six hours every day,” said Lament, “one of us sits here, strapped in and hooked up.”

“What’s the pyramid for?” Valkyrie asked.

Skulduggery answered instead of Lament. “Their magic is drawn out of them and stored in there, am I right? Presumably to power Argeddion’s cage.”

“Very good,” Lament said, clearly impressed. “We call it the Cube, though. A cage is something you keep an animal in. The pyramid is called the Tempest. Our magic is collected inside it, pretty turbulently but not dangerously so, and then siphoned off to maintain the Cube’s integrity.”

Skulduggery nodded. “And is one person a day really all it needs?”

“A
lot
of power was required when the Cube was first created,” Lament said, “but only a minimal amount is needed to keep it going. That’s the beauty of it.”

“And what if something goes wrong?” Valkyrie asked.

Lament nodded towards a big red button. “This,” he said, “is the Big Red Button. If there’s an emergency, I press this and the Tempest empties itself into the Cube, reinforcing it. It means it wouldn’t have to be recharged for three days. Hopefully, that would give us enough time to fix whatever emergency had occurred and get back to our normal routine. We haven’t had to use it yet. Hopefully, we never will.”

“This is quite a machine,” Skulduggery said, examining the chair. “If all gaols had this level of technology, there’d be no more break-outs.”

“But then we’d have the Nadir problem,” Valkyrie said. “What’s the point of sending criminals to prison if they’re going to sleep their way through their sentence?”

Lament shook his head. “They wouldn’t have to be asleep,” he said. “Roughly a third of the power we collect is dedicated to making sure Argeddion stays in a coma-state, but he could just as easily be conscious. Naturally, with Argeddion, that would be a bad thing, as the Cube itself wouldn’t be enough to contain him. But for anyone else it would be more than sufficient.”

Skulduggery approached the Cube. “Has there been any ageing?” he asked. “That long without magic should have had some effect by now, no matter how slight.”

“He doesn’t
appear
to have aged,” said Lament. “We didn’t expect that, to be honest. Maybe it’s because of his evolved state of being or maybe it’s a side effect of keeping him in a coma, but according to our tests he hasn’t aged even one day.”

“So what’s your plan? You’re going to keep him contained until
you
all die of old age? Then what?”

“We’re still trying to figure that out.”

“You’ve obviously considered killing him.”

“That is not an option.”

“Destroy the brain, Tyren. Destroy it before his survival instincts kick in.”

“We didn’t go to all this trouble just to end the life of the man in our care.”

“It may be mean-spirited but it’s a practical solution to a problem that has precious few.”

Lament shook his head. “There is always another way.”

“But there’s not always a
better
way.”

“Skulduggery, even if we wanted to end his life, I’m not even sure that we could. His mind is asleep but his body could still heal itself. And someone of Argeddion’s power... I’m not sure there’s any wound we could inflict that would be enough to kill him instantly.”

“Then how do we stop him from spreading the infection? We had a
werewolf
in Ireland, Tyren. It has to stop.”

“We’re not even agreed that Argeddion is responsible. The man is comatose.”

“The subconscious is more powerful than you know, Tyren. I’ve seen it myself, firsthand. It’s possible that Argeddion’s subconscious is infecting the minds of those susceptible and actually transferring magic to them remotely. And if this did all start a few weeks ago, then it leads me to only one possible conclusion.”

Lament frowned. “Argeddion is waking up.”

“His mind is becoming active.”

“Impossible. No, I’m sorry, Skulduggery, but there has been no change in our readings. No unusual brain activity, nothing like that. Lenka is in here every day, scanning his mind. If anything was going on, surely a Sensitive would pick it up?”

“Not necessarily. It’s possible to throw up a false reading. It’s been done before.”

“But only by the most powerful of psychics.”

“And is Argeddion not the most powerful of everything right now?”

Lament hesitated.

“You’re right,” Skulduggery said. “There has not been one single Sensitive around the world who has even heard of Argeddion. But we visited a prison where the more unstable inmates, those more susceptible to this kind of thing, were scrawling his name on the walls. He visits people in their dreams, Tyren. He’s doing something to the mortals, something to do with a Summer of Light. We have less than four days to figure out what that is. He has to be stopped.”

“And I told you, I don’t know how to do that.”

“What about telling the Elders?” Valkyrie asked. “I know it wasn’t safe in the past, but now Ghastly Bespoke and Erskine Ravel are in charge, and you can trust them.”

“And can we trust Madame Mist, a Child of the Spider?”

“Well,” said Valkyrie, “no, but she can be kept at a distance. You can get back-up there. The Sanctuary can support you. It’d mean you wouldn’t have to live here any more, you could go back to your lives. We could all share the responsibility and, I don’t know, maybe make the Cube stronger.”

“That’s an idea,” Skulduggery said slowly. “If we do make the Cube stronger, it would block Argeddion’s subconscious from wandering off and infecting anyone else. I’ve seen the blueprints, and it seems to me that there’s absolutely no reason why the Cube couldn’t be reinforced two, three times over.”

“Now, just wait a second,” Lament said. “You’re both speeding on ahead.”

“It’s possible, though, isn’t it?” Skulduggery asked.

Lament hesitated. “Yes.”

“And a reinforced Cube would mean Argeddion does not wake up.”

“But the risk involved with acknowledging his existence...”

“Would immediately be overshadowed by the risk of Argeddion opening his eyes.”

“I don’t know. You’re asking us to abandon our plan.”

“The moment you realised he wasn’t ageing, that plan became null and void. The Cube can be reinforced, right?”

“Yes, of course it can, but the power needed to maintain a reinforced Cube would kill anyone who charged it. The Tempest would drain them in an instant of both their magic and their lives, and then you’d need another mage to charge it. No, sorry. It’s impossible.”

“I don’t see how the process would be any different to the way it is now. The Tempest is just a storage chamber, after all.”

Lament shook his head. “Not when you’re dealing with this level of power. There’d be no more storage – everything would be instant. The magic would be donated, sucked through the Tempest, and within nanoseconds it would be crackling around the Cube. In order for your plan to succeed, the Cube would have to be hooked up to a constant source of massive, massive power. And I’m sorry, but that cannot...”

He faltered.

“What?” Valkyrie asked.

“Nothing,” Lament said. “It can’t be done.”

“You were going to say something. What was it?”

Lament looked away. “I need to talk to my colleagues.” Without waiting for an answer, he walked out.

Valkyrie looked at Skulduggery, and shrugged. “
That’s
promising.”

lastic containers full of body parts threatened to nudge Scapegrace’s jar over the edge of the table. They were stacked six high and still Thrasher was bringing them in through Nye’s secret entrance. Scapegrace wouldn’t have thought that a human body would have so many little pieces to collect, but apparently it had – unless Thrasher had accidentally scooped up a load of pebbles when he’d collected the White Cleaver’s remains. Which, knowing Thrasher, wasn’t exactly unlikely.

Through the liquid all around him, Scapegrace heard the idiot’s slow, plodding footsteps, back with another few containers. Nye was going to have some job putting all this back together. Still, if there was one creature who’d probably appreciate a new hobby like that, it was Doctor Nye. And then suddenly Scapegrace was sliding over the edge of the table.

“Hey!” he screamed. “Stop!”

The jar started to topple, the liquid tilting him upside down, and then Thrasher was there, diving to catch him.