The Purple Menace pulled into Gordon’s estate, and Valkyrie took the door key from her pocket and slid it into the lock. The alarm beeped insistently until she entered the code.
Gordon’s house, for it would always be his house and never hers, not even on the day she turned eighteen, was big and quiet and empty.
“I’ll start in here,” Skulduggery said, walking in behind her and heading for the living room. “If you want to start in the study, hopefully we’ll find something by morning.”
“Hopefully,” Valkyrie said and climbed the stairs. She went into the study, closed the door behind her, then made straight for the large bookcase along the wall. She pulled back the false book, the bookcase swung open and she passed through into the small room beyond. For once, she didn’t even glance at the objects and artefacts on the shelves around her. The Echo Stone in the cradle on the table started to glow and a slightly overweight man in shirtsleeves shimmered into view. He grinned.
“Hello there,” he said. “I take it, by the serious look on your face, that this is business and you haven’t just dropped by because you miss your dear dead uncle?”
Valkyrie raised an eyebrow. “Is that who you are now? You’re Gordon? Not just a recording of his personality?”
“That’s who I am,” Gordon said proudly.
“And you’re sure about this? You’re not going to change your mind halfway through this conversation?”
“I have come to a decision. The flesh and blood Gordon may have imprinted me on to this Echo Stone, but I continue to learn, to experience, to evolve. I make my own memories now. I am as real a person as he was, and because we were the same person, I am now him, now that he’s not. It all comes down to philosophy really. I think, therefore I am, I think.”
“That’s good to know,” Valkyrie nodded. “To be honest with you, I see you as my real uncle too.”
“Well, that’s that then.”
“Does this mean I can tell Skulduggery about you now?”
“Ah,” he said. “Not yet. I… I’m not ready for other people to know what I have been… reduced to. But it won’t be long now before you can share me, I promise.”
“Well, good. I don’t like keeping this secret.”
“I understand and I appreciate it. So tell me, how are your parents?”
“They’re good. It’s their anniversary tomorrow so they’re heading to Paris in the morning.”
“Ah, Paris,” Gordon said wistfully. “I’ve always felt a real affinity for the French, you know. One of my books was set in France, among the cathedrals and along the Champs-Élysées.”
She nodded. “Braineater. It was one of your best. Gordon, have you ever heard of a man called Batu?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“We think he’s behind a series of murders, and he wants to use a Teleporter to open a gateway between this reality and whatever reality the Faceless Ones are stuck in.”
“Is that possible?”
“Skulduggery seems to be taking it seriously, so I imagine it is.”
“So what can I do to help?”
“If the Faceless Ones return, we’re going to need the Sceptre to stop them.”
“But didn’t you tell me that Skulduggery broke it?”
“The crystal doesn’t work any more, but if we got another crystal…”
“Ah. And you want to know if I found out anything about them in my research.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you’re in luck, because I found out a lot.”
“Do you know where we could get one?”
“I do as a matter of fact.”
“Really? Where?”
Gordon pointed down and Valkyrie frowned.
“In your shoes?”
“In the caves.”
She blinked. “Seriously? There are black crystals in the caves beneath this house? Mind telling me why?”
“This house was built over the mouth of the caves hundreds of years ago, by a sorcerer named Anathem Mire.”
“Skulduggery told me about him. He used to throw his enemies into the caves and let the monsters at them.”
“He was not, as you can imagine, a very nice man.”
“Did he worship the Faceless Ones?”
“No, but he studied them. He studied the literature and the history of the Faceless Ones and the Ancients because he wanted power. He bought the land, built the house and made some tentative efforts to explore the caves. He wanted the secrets the caves hold, and they do hold a lot of secrets.”
“Like what?”
“Why are the creatures down there unaffected by magic? Is it something in the air? In the rocks? Is it because of the mix of minerals? Is it something else? There is no explanation for it, Valkyrie. We simply do not know. According to his journals, Mire made seven expeditions into the caves. The first had a ten-man crew. Mire was the only one to return. In the second, fifteen sorcerers were lost. Again, Anathem Mire was the sole survivor. He realised that the larger the group, the fiercer the attacks. The creatures were drawn to the magic.
“Once he made this discovery, the expeditions became smaller and more successful. Mire continued to be the only one to emerge alive, but only because he was killing his colleagues to make sure they kept their mouths shut.
“On his sixth journey into the caves, he found a vein of black crystals. He instructed one of his party to take a sample, but when the sorcerer laid one finger on an exposed crystal, he was consumed by what Mire described as ‘black lightning’ and turned to dust.”
“Do you know where this vein was?”
“There’s a map in the last of his journals, on one of the shelves in here. That’s the journal that prompted me to buy the house in the first place actually, so I could explore the caves for myself. I never got as far as the black crystals, mind you. Because I had no magic, I was largely ignored by the creatures, but even so, there were a few close calls that convinced me to leave the adventuring to the adventurers.”
“That guy who tried to take a crystal was killed. How are we supposed to get one?”
“That is where your Ancient heritage will come in useful. It was the Faceless Ones who mined the crystal in the first place, this is true, but the Ancients made themselves invisible to its senses and thus immune to its power.”
“They weren’t immune. They used the Sceptre to kill each other.”
“Ah, but that was when the crystal was embedded in the Sceptre, when its destructive power could be directed at whomever and whatever the wielder desired. What we’re talking about is the crystal in its original form. I think it reacted the way it did and killed that expedition member because, unlike you, the expedition member didn’t have Ancient blood.”
Valkyrie looked at him. “You think?”
“I’m relatively sure.”
“Relatively?”
“Very relatively. Virtually positive.”
“And you’re willing to stake my life on that?”
Gordon smiled reassuringly, then the smile dropped and he shook his head. “God, no.”
“But it’s your opinion that I’ll be OK, right?”
“Don’t do it. It’s a silly idea.”
“But still, that’s your theory?”
“A theory is the academic equivalent of a guess. How would I know? Don’t do it.”
“Where’s the journal? Is that it on the shelf behind you?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Does it have The Journal of Anathem Mire written along the side?”
Gordon hesitated. “No.”
Valkyrie stepped towards it and Gordon barred her way. She took a deep breath, then put her hand through his face.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “Stop that!”
She brought her hand back, the journal clasped in her fingers and Gordon scowled.
“That wasn’t fair.”
“Sorry.”
“You just can’t go around putting your hand through people’s faces. It’s rude for one thing. Deeply unsettling for another.”
Valkyrie put the journal on the table, opened it and flicked through the yellowing pages. “Really am sorry.”
“Something like that, such an obvious demonstration of what is substantial, and what isn’t, what is real, and what isn’t – it’s enough to make you question yourself, you know?”
She took a folded piece of parchment from the book and opened it. The map of the cave system was incomplete, with vast areas of blank space between known trails and the supposed edge of the underground tunnels.
“A man is only as effective as the effect he has on his surroundings,” Gordon was saying. “And if a man is not effective, if his very being is as insubstantial as thought, then what is this man? Is he a man? Or is he merely the thought of a man?”
Valkyrie traced her finger from the words black crystals, captured in a circle, back along a trail and through all its intersections, back to the cave opening. By the scale Mire had provided, she judged it to be a little under two miles west.
“I suppose I couldn’t fool myself forever,” Gordon said, dejection in his voice. “I’m a fake. A fraud. A shadow of the real Gordon Edgley. I’m a mockery of a great, great man.”
Valkyrie folded the map into the journal. “What’s that you’re saying?”
“Nothing,” he grumbled.
“Thanks for this,” she said, leaving the room. The bookshelf closed behind her and she hurried down the stairs and into the living room.
Skulduggery was standing on a chair, looking through the books on the top shelf.
“Got it,” Valkyrie said.
His head tilted. “No. Impossible. You can’t have found anything.”
She grinned. “There are black crystals in the caves below us,” she told him. “Apparently, I’m the only one able to touch them because of the whole Ancient thing. I even have a map. How impressed are you right now?”
There was a moment of silence. “You’re such an unbelievable show-off.”
Skulduggery got off the chair and took the journal from her. “I don’t show off. I merely demonstrate my abilities at opportune times.” He examined the map. “It looks like we’re going into the caves.”
“Now? Just the two of us?”
“Too many people will draw too much attention, and we simply don’t have the time to waste. The Diablerie have been one step ahead of us all along. It’s time that changed.”
The key rotated in the lock and the floor of Gordon’s cellar opened. Valkyrie clicked on her flashlight and followed Skulduggery down the stone steps that led to the caves.
Skulduggery read the air around them at regular intervals to make sure they weren’t being tracked. Three times they had to turn off their flashlights and crouch in the darkness until the path was clear. Valkyrie kept a wary eye out for any dangling vines.
Narrow beams of sunlight, caught up above and cast down below, illuminated their surroundings. Mire’s map proved to be precise, but the further they travelled the colder it got, and Valkyrie was glad that she’d taken one of Gordon’s overcoats to wear over her sleeveless tunic.
They followed the tunnel as far as it went, then had to crawl through a gap in the wall. Valkyrie had images of the entire cave system crashing down on top of her. She didn’t like tight spaces. They made her want to lash out, to flail for no reason. She didn’t like them one little bit.
Skulduggery helped her out the other side and they consulted the map again.
“The crystals should be around this corner,” he said. They looked at the corner in question. “Bear in mind,” he continued, “that this is where things usually go spectacularly wrong.”
“I’ve noticed.”
They turned off their flashlights as they approached the corner. The only sound was their own footsteps.
“Do you want to go first?” Skulduggery whispered.
“Why would I want to do that?” Valkyrie whispered back.
“I just thought you might want to prove something to me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, maybe that you’re as brave as I am, or as capable, or maybe something to do with not needing a man to protect you.”
She shrugged. “I’m OK with all that.”
“Really?”
“Really. Poke your head around, see if there’s a monster waiting for us.”
Skulduggery muttered something, then peered around the corner. Valkyrie prepared herself to either hit something or run.
“Well,” Skulduggery said. “This is unexpected.”