Skulduggery nodded. “His shoes are standard-issue prison wear. They leave a mark like no other.”

“He was right in front of us? So, if we’d just been faster, we would have caught up to him?”

“Maybe,” said Skulduggery. “Or maybe we’d have overshot and alerted him to our presence, and lost our chance forever. We did the right thing. We took our time and we made sure. He’s ahead of us, and I think you’re right – I think he’s already in the city.”

“So how do we get in?”

Skulduggery didn’t answer. He just led her away from the gates. When they were out of sight of even the sharpest of eyes, they approached the wall itself.

“OK,” Skulduggery said, “you can hug me now.”

She scowled at him. “We’re going to fly over the top?”

“Not quite. Come. Hug.”

Valkyrie sighed, and they hugged, and they leaned against the wall …

And the wall cracked and crumbled and they moved into it, into the cold and the dark and the dirt and the stone and the pebbles, and they were turning, revolving, the whole world rumbling, and then light burst through the darkness and they were out the other side, Valkyrie coughing and staggering and gasping. “Since when can you do that?”

“What do you mean?” Skulduggery asked, using the air to brush the dust from his suit. “We’ve done that before, when we were going to get the Hessian Grimoire from – oh.”

“That wasn’t me,” said Valkyrie. “That was Stephanie.”

“Yes. It would appear so.”

“Awkward.”

“Indeed it is. Let’s skip by it, what do you say? So, yes, I can walk through walls now. I can’t do it as well as Sanguine, and there are some materials I just can’t pass through at all. But it’s a neat little trick when you’re in a tight spot.”

“You are full of surprises, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. To some people, that may have been a modest gesture. But to Valkyrie, it was a shrug that said, “Yes. Yes I am.”

She had to smile. “So where to now? If Ravel’s in here, where would he go?”

“The first thing he’d do is look up old friends,” Skulduggery said. “The last time we were here we passed a peculiar church. Do you remember it?”

“Everything here is peculiar. A Faceless Ones church?”

“No, which makes it peculiar. Come on. We’ll have to stick to the back streets, but I think I know the way.”

He’d only been here once before, and already he was talking about short cuts. But Valkyrie didn’t argue. If Skulduggery thought he knew something, he generally did.