Valkyrie shook her head, and managed to get to her feet. Skulduggery stood beside her.

“So what are you doing?” she asked. “Teaching me a lesson? Is that what this is?”

“Indeed it is,” he said brightly.

“OK, lesson learned. I shouldn’t wander off. Got it.”

Skulduggery’s head nodded happily. “Excellent.”

“Now get these shackles off me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

Skulduggery turned, showing her the shackles that bound his own wrists.

Her eyes widened. “You got captured too?”

“It’s the only way you’ll learn.”

“You got captured on purpose?”

“Don’t be silly. When I triggered the alarm, I did my level best to run away, but I couldn’t find you, so…”

“Ah,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” he shrugged. “I managed to punch some Necromancers, which is always fun. What was less fun was when they started punching me back. And then the White Cleaver arrived and joined in. It was, if I do say so, an epic battle, but I was heavily outnumbered. It’s a pity you slept through it.”

“I was unconscious.”

“You were asleep.”

“Don’t annoy me, OK? I have a headache. How are we going to get out of here?”

“Oh, escape is easy once you have the right plan.”

“Do we have the right plan?”

“Not yet.”

“Do we have any plan?”

“Not yet.”

“Typical. Still, silver lining. Wreath told me what the Passage is.”

“Oh?”

“They’re going to kill three billion people to stop the other three billion from ever dying.”

Skulduggery hesitated. “That… I’ll be honest, that doesn’t sound too great for the first three billion.”

“Can they do it? Is it possible?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Skulduggery said. “I doubt they have much in the way of hard facts to support this theory, but who needs facts when you have faith?”

“So they could be killing three billion and it’d have no effect whatsoever on the lifespan of the others?”

“Very possibly. Of course, I think we can both agree that killing three billion people anyway, no matter what the supposed benefits might actually be, would still be a bad thing to do.”

“Oh,” Valkyrie said with a nod, “we are very much agreed on that one.”

“But you’re right – silver lining. At least we know what their ultimate goal is. Now we can work to foil it.”

The door opened behind them, and High Priest Tenebrae stepped in. They stopped talking, and observed him as he smiled. “Ah,” he said, “the awkward silence.” He closed the door behind him. “How are you, Valkyrie? Things have changed greatly since the last time we spoke, have they not? It’s all very unfortunate.”

“I don’t know how you could have thought that I would ever have been the Death Bringer,” she said. “Did you honestly believe I’d be willing to kill billions of people for a theory?”