“It does make me feel better, actually.” A look of alarm crossed his face. “Famous last words! I need to say my famous last words! They must be at least on a par with those uttered by James French or Dominique Bouhours, and maybe even as memorable as those uttered by Oscar Wilde on his deathbed. You must promise me that when you get out of here, you’ll have these inscribed on my headstone, OK?”

“I promise.”

“Good, thank you. I actually came up with these years ago. They’ve gone through a lot of rewrites, but that’s what you get for being a writer, really. Always tinkering. Never satisfied. But finally, they’re perfect, and I get to use them.” He cleared his throat, puffed out his chest, opened his mouth, and then frowned. “No, wait—”

And then he disappeared.

Valkyrie stared at the space where he had just been standing. She shook the stone, smacked it into her palm again. But Gordon didn’t reappear. The stone was wiped. Her uncle was gone.

41

HERE BE DRAGONS

alkyrie emerged from the tunnel. She recognised this place, this chasm. On the opposite side, she had run from a dog-faced monster, had leaped off the edge, grabbed the vines that had turned out not to be vines at all but tentacles, and had been pulled upwards towards the gaping mouth of a monstrous, gelatinous thing. Now Skulduggery hung there, those tentacles wrapped round his arms and upper body, suspending him over the bottomless pit like he was on some invisible crucifix. His jacket was torn and his hat was missing. His head was down. Apart from the swaying, he did not move.

“Skulduggery,” she called, her voice guarded. He didn’t look up.

She stepped right to the edge, keeping her eyes fixed ahead of her, not allowing them to peer down into the darkness. Every few moments, the tentacles, all of them, would tremble slightly. There was a rhythm at work here, a gentle heartbeat, and suddenly Valkyrie understood why Skulduggery wasn’t being carried upwards. The thing that had once dragged her towards its long and many teeth had decided it would be better nourished by the magic it could drain from Skulduggery than by whatever nutrients it could scavenge by munching his bones. Valkyrie didn’t know how much magic could be sucked out before he fell apart, but she assumed that her bad luck would hold and that time was running out. She backed up, away from the edge, took a breath, then broke into a sprint, got a toe to the edge and leaped.