“How should I know?”
“You didn’t do this? Or the skeleton? Or your friends?”
“This isn’t us. Maybe there’s a power cut.”
“In the Sanctuary? Sanctuaries don’t have power cuts. This is an attack. Maybe it’s my friends, breaking me out.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“Which would make it unlikely, but not impossible.”
She clicked her fingers, taking the spark into her palm and feeding it magic, letting the flame grow bigger and brighter. The light flickered off the walls.
She could hear someone shouting, and even though the shout was urgent, there was no danger in it. If Scapegrace was right, if this was an attack, then maybe it hadn’t begun yet. And maybe she could use this to her advantage.
They picked up their pace, jogging through the dark. Occasionally, they’d see another flame ahead of them or behind them, and they’d divert course to stay away. Valkyrie was struggling to keep her sense of direction, following a map in her mind that she hoped was accurate.
Something moved ahead of her and she jerked back, stifling a scream. It was a Cleaver, crossing their path and immediately disappearing into the gloom. Either he hadn’t seen her face or else he just didn’t consider her a priority. Valkyrie wondered if they could see in the dark.
There were voices in the next corridor, so they turned right in an attempt to circumvent any crowds. So far, Scapegrace hadn’t been a whole lot of help, and she was starting to think of the best way to abandon him.
She heard a familiar voice and stopped. Scapegrace ran into her, squashing his hands between them. He spun around and fell to his knees in muted agony.
“Quiet,” she whispered and extinguished her flame. Mr Bliss approached, talking with a slender woman holding a torch. Valkyrie recognised the Administrator’s soothing tones.
“With the respect due to your position,” the Administrator was saying, “security matters are handled by the Cleavers, not the Elders. Besides which, with the Grand Mage injured, you need to be kept safe.”
“By the time someone gets around to telling me what has happened,” Bliss responded, “it may be too late to do anything about it.”
Valkyrie straightened up. Bliss would help her get out and the Administrator would do whatever she was told. This would also be the perfect opportunity to send Scapegrace back to his cell.
“Sir,” the Administrator said sharply and they stopped walking. The beam of her torch had picked out something on the wall. Valkyrie could see a carved symbol. The Administrator edged forward curiously. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “I just can’t remember where.”
“Stay away from it,” Bliss ordered. “Symbols are my sister’s forte, not mine, but even so …”
“Sir?”
“It’s a warning sigil, a silent alarm. If we pass, it will alert whoever is waiting in the corridor ahead.”
Valkyrie frowned. If there were enemies lurking nearby, ready to spring an ambush, then she hadn’t seen them.
The Administrator stepped back. “We should go the other way and send the Cleavers.”
Bliss knelt by the symbol. “Shine the light here.”
“Sir, this isn’t safe.”
“Shine the light.”
Slowly, Bliss reached for the symbol and it started to glow. He shook his head.
“I was wrong. This isn’t a warning sigil.”
“No,” the Administrator agreed, “it’s not.”
She stepped back as a dozen symbols lit up, catching Bliss in a circle of blue light.
He tried to stand, but energy crackled and streams of light seared through his body, connecting the symbols to each other, with him at their centre. The Administrator, no longer needing her torch to light up her surroundings, flicked it off.
Valkyrie stared. The Administrator was the traitor – the one who had told Sanguine how to open the Grotesquery’s cage, the one who had told him how to find Baron Vengeous’s prison cell a year earlier. The Administrator, brought in by Guild, but working for the Diablerie.
Bliss grunted and fell to his knees. His strong shoulders sagged, and his head lolled forward.
“You’re not an easy man to kill,” the Administrator said. “Batu worked for a long time researching this. Another few minutes and then it’ll be over. He assured me it would be quite painful.”
Valkyrie turned to Scapegrace to try and formulate a rescue plan, and she caught sight of him just as he fled around the far corner. Seething, she looked back. Even if she somehow performed the miraculous feat of overpowering the Administrator, she didn’t know how to deactivate the trap. That meant she needed the Administrator conscious, which added another layer of the impossible.
She couldn’t think of anything clever to do, so she crawled, sticking to the shadows as much as possible. When there was no more room to sneak, she took a breath and launched herself forward. She pushed at the air and the Administrator whirled, her own hands open and flat. The spaces between them rippled and surged, the disturbance warping the Administrator’s smile.
Then the Administrator waved and Valkyrie was yanked off her feet. She slammed into a wall, and the Administrator raised her arm and Valkyrie slid upwards, to the ceiling.
“You’re a beginner,” the Administrator told her kindly. “You couldn’t expect to defeat me. But it was a noble effort.”
The air around her was heavy, too heavy to shift. Valkyrie strained to move her arms, but she was pinned tight. She turned her head to take a breath, but there was nothing to take.
“Sorry,” the Administrator said, “I can’t allow you to breathe. You have to die, just as Mr Bliss has to die. It’s all part of Batu’s plan, you see.”
Valkyrie gasped uselessly. She tried clicking her fingers, but with a gesture from the Administrator, the rest of the oxygen whistled away from her, and no flame would grow.
Her lungs, however, were burning fiercer than any fire.
She heard something beyond the blood pumping in her ears. Someone was screaming and the scream was getting closer. Her eyes flickered to the left as Scapegrace pelted out of the darkness, hit the wall and hurtled off again in another direction. Two Cleavers raced after him, and came to a sudden yet graceful stop when they saw Bliss in a circle of blue, Valkyrie pinned against the ceiling, and the Administrator standing between them, with a look of shock on her pretty face.
They unsheathed their scythes.
The Administrator released her hold and Valkyrie fell to the floor, gasping. The Administrator stepped back.
“Don’t. Just … Listen to me. Just … don’t …”
The Cleavers darted forward and the Administrator turned, tried to run, but Valkyrie stuck out her foot and she tripped. The Administrator toppled into the circle of blue and all those streams of energy branched off from Bliss and struck her. She screamed and her body twisted. There was a loud pop, a smell of ozone and the blue light vanished.
Darkness again, but for the hazy blue images that swam in Valkyrie’s vision. A torch was turned on. The Administrator was on the ground, unmoving, and one of the Cleavers was checking Bliss.
The second Cleaver was standing over Valkyrie. She began to crawl away and the Cleaver moved to stop her.
“Leave her,” Bliss whispered.
The Cleaver stopped and Valkyrie scrambled to her feet and ran.
She