He stepped on a pebble, put all his weight on it, and the floor beside him opened up, revealing steps leading down. Skulduggery motioned for him to go first, and they followed him into a long stone corridor lit by bare bulbs.

“This leads directly to the Temple?” Skulduggery asked.

Dragonclaw nodded. “There’s a door with a lever at the other end. It opens up into a room nobody ever uses. It’s how Solus transports all his best stuff.”

“No passwords needed? Nothing like that?”

“No. You just pull the lever.”

“Good to know,” Skulduggery said, then smacked him with the gun. Dragonclaw spun and fell to the ground, unconscious.

Valkyrie glared. “You could have warned me.”

“Of what?” Skulduggery asked, his arm encircling her waist. They lifted off the ground, started moving down the corridor.

“That you were going to hit him. It’d be nice to be told these things.”

“Did it give you a fright?”

They were picking up speed now and Valkyrie’s hair was being blown off her face.

“A little one, yeah,” she said. “You were standing there all normal and then you hit him. I jumped.”

“I do apologise.”

“Just a little warning, that’s all I ask.”

“In my defence, if I had told you that I intended to hit him, he probably would have overheard the conversation.”

“Then we should come up with a code or something.”

The bulbs were blurring into one long stream of light above them.

“We already have a code,” Skulduggery said. “It’s be brave.”

Valkyrie scowled at him. “Be brave is nothing. Be brave is you telling me to trust you, you have a plan, when we’re surrounded by enemies. Be brave tells me nothing other than you’re about to do something stupid. We should have another code for when you’re about to hit someone.”

“Very well. How about the sparrow flies south for winter?”

“Seriously?”

“What’s wrong with it? It’s a classic.”

“And how would you work that into the conversation?”

“With my usual aplomb.”

“So if that had been our code, and Dragonclaw had just told you that all we have to do is pull the lever, how would you have worked the sparrow flies south for winter into the conversation?”

“I would have said OK, Bison, so you’re sure we only need to pull a lever? And he would have said yes, and I’d have said excellent, thank you. Did you know, by the way, that the sparrow flies south for winter? And then I’d have punched him.”

“I’m going to do my best to ignore the ridiculous things you say from now on,” Valkyrie decided. “What are we going to do when we get into the Temple, anyway? Are we going to fight our way through the Necromancers on our own?”