“She looks tired,” said Wreath, nodding. “She looks drained. From what I’ve heard, it was an unusually long Surge. What do you think those scars are for?”

“Cleric Craven says they are protection sigils, to guard her from her own power.”

“Do you believe him?”

The ghost of a shrug was all Quiver offered. “Our tests have shown extreme spikes and drops in her power level,” he said. “It is quite conceivable that she could hurt herself if careless. You don’t believe him, I take it?”

“I don’t know, to be honest. I don’t even know if it matters. If she gets the job done, who am I to complain? Have your tests told you when she’ll be strong enough to initiate the Passage?”

“Every spike is stronger than the one preceding it. If she continues in this fashion, a few days. Maybe a week.”

“With our dear friend Cleric Craven holding her hand every step of the way,” Wreath said, allowing the distaste to creep into his voice. “Are you ready for the world to be a better place?”

“I never really liked this world all that much to begin with, so any change would be an improvement. And you? You’ve always seemed to like things the way they are.”

“I got used to it,” Wreath admitted. “But I’ve lived my entire life waiting for the Passage – I’m not going to bemoan the fact that we’re finally about to get it. You know, I think this is the most we’ve ever talked, you and I. Why is that, do you think?”

Quiver shrugged. “Until this point, I confess that I was never sure if I liked you. Now I just don’t care any more.”

Wreath smiled.

Chapter 8 - Friends in High Places

Chapter 8
Friends in High Places

oarhaven stood like a dirty inkblot on a nice clean page. A small town, barely even that, beside a dark and stagnant lake, it was hemmed in on two sides by steep banks of brown grasses. It had its main street and its offshoots, its houses and bars and grim-windowed shops. Sorcerers lived in this town, but only the truly bitter, the genuinely resentful. The outside world was a world gone wrong, a world of ignorant mortals with their squabbling ways. In the bars of Roarhaven, of which there were two, the citizens were known to whisper of some future time when the mortals would fall and the sorcerers rise. And when the drink gave them the courage, these whispers would grow louder, turn to muttered oaths punctuated by fists pounding on tabletops.

Change, they said, was coming.

Roarhaven, Valkyrie knew, was many things. One thing it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, was a tourist town. So when the Bentley passed a rental car stopped outside what passed for the town’s corner shop, Valkyrie frowned.

“Pull over,” she said.

Skulduggery looked at her as they slowed. “Here?”