Skulduggery Pleasant floated down from a higher tier, hands in his pockets. “Isn’t it great?” he asked.

Cadaverous tried to ignore the intrusion, but Pleasant landed right beside him.

“It’s very theatrical,” he continued. “There’s a wonderful sense of showmanship at work here. You don’t get that any more. Not really. Very few people build elaborate sets in which to kill people. I think it’s a lack of skilled labour as much as anything. Where have you been? Cadaverous?”

“What?”

“Where have you been?”

“Elsewhere.”

Pleasant grunted. “I would have been elsewhere, too, but Smoke instructed me to stay in the prison. I don’t much like taking orders, if I’m honest. At the first sign of his influence fading, I’m probably going to kill him.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because we’ve bonded, Cadaverous. We took a road trip together. We beat up some cops. You killed one. That brings people closer. Also, I’ve got no one else to talk to. I tried talking to some of the convicts, but I’m the reason a lot of them are in here, so conversation was awkward.”

“That must have been awful for you.”

Pleasant shrugged. “It’s just so hard to make friends here. And, speaking of making friends, I was thinking about our earlier conversation.”

“The one we finished, you mean?”

“Yeah, that one. I think it’s time you got back out there, Cadaverous. You lost a partner. That’s terrible. A few decades before Valkyrie came along I, too, lost a partner. The screaming, the flailing … It wasn’t pretty, and I was helpless to do anything to save him. But do you want to know what I learned from that?”

“No.”

“To employ a hideously overused idiom, I learned that you must get back on the horse. Somewhere out there is another homicidal lunatic who needs guidance. Go to that homicidal lunatic, Cadaverous. Go to him.”

“You mock me.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“No. No, you’re mocking me. You’re mocking my pain. I only hope, skeleton, that when I do kill your precious Valkyrie you are no longer under Smoke’s influence. I want to see you fall to your knees. I want to hear the despair in your voice as she dies.”

“Cadaverous, Cadaverous,” Pleasant said, shaking his head, “what am I going to do with you?”

Cadaverous snarled. “You’re going to stay out of my way.”

He went to push past, but Skulduggery grabbed and spun him and Cadaverous folded over the railing. The lake of energy crackled beneath him.

“Or I’m going to kill you,” Skulduggery said.

Fully aware that all the skeleton had to do was apply a little pressure, Cadaverous kept his voice even. “You didn’t do it earlier.”

“If I’d killed you then, Lethe would have known it was me. But if I make it look like an accident …”