Valkyrie ran on, aware that the ground was now slanting upwards. Her legs were getting tired. Her footsteps on the stone ground were uncomfortably loud in her ears. She couldn’t see anything now. It was pitch black. She focused on the energy inside her then clicked her fingers and caught the spark. The flame grew and flickered in her palm, and she held it at arm’s length to light her way. She didn’t like the fact that it made her an easy target, but neither did she like the idea of falling into a pit full of metal spikes or something equally nasty. And then she came to a junction.
“Oh, come on,” she muttered, in between gasps for breath.
She could go straight on or turn either right or left. She had no idea which direction Skulduggery had taken. She tried to stop herself from imagining lethal traps, or getting lost in a maze of corridors and dying down here, in the darkness and the cold.
Valkyrie cursed. She had to turn back. She decided to head up and look around the town, try and find where these tunnels would surface. It was better than standing around being useless, she figured.
It was at this exact moment that she heard a rumbling.
The path to the cellar was closing up. The walls were shifting back together. Right, left or straight ahead. She chose straight ahead and she ran.
Her lungs burned like they used to do when she was swimming off Haggard beach. She liked swimming. It was much better than being squashed. And then, a light ahead of her, a flickering flame in the hand of Skulduggery Pleasant.
“It would be a tad redundant,” he called out over the rumbling, “to encourage you to hurry up, wouldn’t it?” She let the fire in her own hand go out and concentrated on sprinting.
“Whatever you do,” he continued loudly, “do not fall over. Falling over, I think, would be the wrong move to make at this moment.”
She was close, close to Skulduggery, close to that wide open space he was standing in. The walls ahead of her shook and rumbled and started to close and she dove through, hit the floor and rolled to her feet as the corridor closed behind her and the rumbling stopped. She fell to her knees and sucked in air.
“Well,” Skulduggery said cheerfully. “That was close.”
“Hate …” she gasped.
“Yes?”
“Hate … you …”
“Breathe some more air; the lack of oxygen is making you delirious.” Valkyrie got to her feet, but stayed bent over while she controlled her breathing.
“We better be careful,” he advised. “The Torment may be old, but he’s fast, and he’s agile, and he still has my gun.”
“Where … are we?”
“One unsavoury aspect of Roarhaven’s chequered past was an attempt, some years ago, to overthrow the Council of Elders and establish a new Sanctuary here. We’re in what was supposed to be the main building.”
Valkyrie saw a switch on the wall and thumbed it. A few lights flickered on overhead. Most of them stayed off. Skulduggery let the flame in his hand go out, and they followed the corridor, then turned right and kept going. They walked through small patches of light and larger patches of darkness. The floor was covered in dust. He turned his head slightly. She knew him well enough to know when something was wrong.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Keep walking,” he said quietly. “We’re not alone.”
Valkyrie’s mouth went dry. She tried to read the air, like Skulduggery was doing, but even on her best day she couldn’t sense more than a few metres in any direction. She gave up and resisted the urge to look around. “Where is he?”
“It’s not him. I don’t know what they are, but there are dozens of them, relatively small, moving as a pack.”
“They might be kittens,” she said hopefully.
“They’re stalking us.”
“They might be shy.”
“I don’t think it’s kittens, Valkyrie.”
“Puppies then?” Something scuttled in the darkness beside them.
“Keep walking,” Skulduggery said. There was scuttling behind them now.
“Eyes straight.”
And then they broke from the shadows ahead, into the light: spiders, black and hairy and bloated, as big as rats, legs tipped with talons.
“OK,” Skulduggery said. “I think we can stop walking now.”
The spiders emerged from cracks in the wall, moving across the ceiling, clacking as they came. Valkyrie and Skulduggery stood back to back, watching them close in. They each had three eyes, wide and hungry and unblinking.
“When I count to three,” Skulduggery said quietly, “we run, all right?”
“All right.”
The spiders clacked as they moved, closing in, drawing in tighter, the clacking becoming a din.
“In fact,” Skulduggery said, “forget about the count. Just run.” Valkyrie bolted and the spiders attacked.
She jumped over the spiders in front, landing and kicking out as one of them got too close. It was heavy against her boot, but she didn’t wait to see if she had done any damage. She ran on as Skulduggery hurled fireballs. They swerved off course when the corridor ahead became alive with hairy, bloated bodies then ran into a room with a large conference table in its centre, the scuttling mass behind them quickly growing in size.
A spider scuttled on to the tabletop and sprang at Valkyrie as she passed. It struck her back and clung on, trying to pierce her coat with its talons. Valkyrie yelled out and swung round, stumbling as she did so, rolling and feeling the spider beneath her. She came up and the spider was still holding on. It darted up to her shoulder, towards her face, and she saw fangs. She grabbed it, tore it from her and flung it away. Skulduggery hauled her back and then she was running again.
They ran for the double doors ahead, and Skulduggery snapped out his hand, the air rippled and the doors were ripped from their hinges. They sprinted through and kept going, into a room that must have been the foyer. Skulduggery threw a few more fireballs and Valkyrie got to the main door, slammed her shoulder into it and burst into the warm sunshine. The light hit her eyes and blinded her momentarily. She felt Skulduggery beside her, tugging on her sleeve, and she followed him. She could see fine now, she could see the dark lake ahead and blue sky above.
They stopped running. They heard the spiders, the click-clack of their talons, the frantic scuttling in the doorway, but the spiders were unwilling to leave the darkness for the daylight and eventually the scuttling went away. A few moments passed and Valkyrie breathed normally and noticed for the first time that Skulduggery was looking at something over her left shoulder.
“What?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
She turned. The Torment was standing there, his long grey hair tangled in his long beard, with Skulduggery’s