The Dying of the Light Read Free Page B

after that. Three more trundled into view and she dispatched them with equal ease. Then the only sounds in the place were coming from Skulduggery.
    She hurried back to the open area, in time to see Rhadaman pull Skulduggery’s arm from its socket.
    Skulduggery screamed as his bones clattered to the floor. A blast of energy took him off his feet, and Rhadaman closed in, ready to deliver the killing blow.
    “Freeze!” Stephanie yelled, the Sceptre aimed right at his chest.
    He looked at her and laughed. “That doesn’t work, remember?”
    She shifted her aim, turned the door behind him to dust. “It only works for its owner, moron. Now, unless you want your remains to be swept into a dustpan, you’ll shackle yourself.” She kicked the shackles across the floor at him. They hit his feet, but he didn’t move.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘Can I kill this girl before she fires?’ Well, seeing as how this is the Sceptre of the Ancients, the most powerful God-Killer in the world, and it can turn you to dust with a single thought, you’ve got to ask yourself—”
    Skulduggery swung the butt of his gun into Rhadaman’s jaw and Rhadaman spun in a semicircle and collapsed.
    Stephanie stared. “Seriously?”
    Skulduggery nudged Rhadaman with his foot, making sure he was unconscious.
    “I was in the middle of something,” Stephanie said. “I had him, and I was in the middle of something. I was doing a bit. You don’t interrupt someone when they’re doing a bit.”
    “Cuff him,” Skulduggery said. He holstered the gun and picked up his arm, started to thread it through his sleeve.
    “I’d almost got to the best line and you … fine.” Stephanie shoved the Sceptre into the bag on her back, walked over and cuffed Rhadaman’s hands tight. She stood as Skulduggery’s arm clicked back into its socket.
    “Ouch,” he muttered, then looked at her. “Sorry? You were saying something?”
    “I was being cool,” she said.
    “I doubt that.”
    “I was being really cool and I was quoting from a really cool movie and you totally ruined it for me.”
    “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
    “No you’re not. You just can’t stand it when other people get to say cool stuff while you’re too busy screaming, can you?”
    “He did pull my arm off.”
    “Your arms get pulled off all the time. I rarely get to say anything cool, and usually there’s no one else around to hear it anyway.”
    “I apologise,” Skulduggery said. “Please, continue.”
    “Well, I’m not going to say it
now
.”
    “Why not? It obviously means a lot to you.”
    “No. There’s no point. He’s already in shackles. Also, he’s unconscious.”
    “It might make you feel better.”
    “I’d feel stupid,” said Stephanie. “I can’t say cool things to an unconscious person.”
    “This isn’t about him. It’s about you.”
    “No. Forget it. You’d just laugh at me.”
    “I promise I won’t.”
    “Forget it, I said.”
    He shrugged. “OK. If you don’t want to finish it, you don’t have to. But it might make you feel better.”
    “No.”
    “OK then.”
    He stood there, looking at her. She glared back, opened her mouth to continue the conversation, but he suddenly turned, walked away, like he’d just remembered that she may look and sound and talk like Valkyrie Cain, but she
wasn’t
Valkyrie Cain.
    And she never would be.

3
THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET
    oarhaven was a young city – barely more than three weeks old. It had grown from its humble beginnings as a small town beside a dead lake to a wonder of architectural brilliance in the blink of an eye. Constructed in a parallel reality and then shunted into this one, it overlaid the old town seamlessly. Roarhaven’s narrow streets were now wide, its meagre dwellings now lavish. Its border was immense, proclaimed with authority by the protective wall that encircled it, a wall that used tricks and science and magic to shield it from prying,