LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I’m very nice.”

      “You insult everyone you meet.”

      “Not every single person. I don’t have time to insult every single person. And have I insulted anyone since we got here? No, I have not, because I am, as I said, nice.”

      “I don’t think I’d be as nice as these guys if I’d been stuck here for the last thirty years. What kind of person do you think you’d need to be in order to spend thirty years in a mountain?”

      “I don’t know,” Skulduggery said. “The kind of person who loves mountains, perhaps?”

      “I don’t think I’d be able to handle it.”

      “Me neither. I’d say you’d be quite cranky. But Lament picked them for a reason. They each have the right temperament. They each have a little thing called patience.”

      Valkyrie snapped her fingers. “See, that’s why I’d be useless in here.”

      “It’s definitely one of the reasons.”

      She scowled at him.

      The corridor split and they veered left until they came to the only room in there that didn’t have natural rock for walls. The laboratory was all stainless steel and polished surfaces, as precise and detailed as anything Valkyrie had ever seen in the Sanctuary. It was sleek and so compact that she almost missed the fact that the room was packed full of machinery and monitors. Lament sat in the corner, drinking tea.

      “Hi,” Valkyrie said as they approached.

      “He can’t hear you,” Skulduggery told her. “See his eyes? See the way they move? He’s working.”

      “He’s drinking tea.”

      “His body is drinking tea. His mind is in the circuitry.”

      She looked around. “What, in all this?”

      “Why bother looking at a computer when you can be the computer?”

      “That’s... kind of creepy.”

      Lament stood up. “Indeed it is.”

      “Oh! Sorry...”

      “No need to apologise. When I was your age, my mother did her best to persuade me to study a more conventional discipline of magic, but science was always too dear to my heart. Thanks for waiting. I just had some tests I needed to finish up. Did you sleep well?”

      “I did,” said Valkyrie. “Thank you.”

      “I have to ask your forgiveness, actually, for last night. You caught me unawares, as you can imagine. You came all the way here to see how we managed to contain Argeddion, and it would be churlish of me to deny you. Please, this way.” He led them through a door, standing to one side and presenting his creation with a flourish.

      The room was a mass of alloy and wood, with magical symbols carved on every surface. Four steel arms protruded from the corners, stretched towards the middle where they almost met. Hovering between the tips of these arms was a cage of energy that crackled with power, and within that cage was a man. Dressed in a white bodysuit, Argeddion rotated gently in mid-air, his eyes closed and his expression peaceful. He looked young, maybe around thirty years old. He had black hair, cut short, and a clean-shaven face. He didn’t look like the kind of man who would destroy the world if he woke up.

      Directly beneath the cage was a metre-high glass pyramid, in which raged a small storm of energy. The pyramid had wires and cables running from its base to a padded chair set into a metal arch, decorated in sigils and circuitry.

      “Six hours every day,” said Lament, “one of us sits here, strapped in and hooked up.”

      “What’s the pyramid for?” Valkyrie asked.

      Skulduggery answered instead of Lament. “Their magic is drawn out of them and stored in there, am I right? Presumably to power Argeddion’s cage.”

      “Very good,” Lament said, clearly impressed. “We call it the Cube, though. A cage is something you keep an animal in. The pyramid is called the Tempest. Our magic is collected inside it, pretty turbulently but not dangerously so, and then siphoned off to maintain the Cube’s integrity.”

      Skulduggery nodded. “And is one person a day really all it needs?”

      “A lot of power was required when the Cube was first created,” Lament said, “but only a minimal amount is needed to keep it going. That’s the beauty of it.”

      “And what if something goes wrong?” Valkyrie asked.

      Lament nodded towards a big red button. “This,” he said, “is the Big Red Button. If there’s an emergency, I press this and the Tempest empties itself into the Cube, reinforcing it. It means it wouldn’t have to be recharged for three days. Hopefully, that would give us enough time to fix whatever emergency had occurred and get back to our normal routine. We haven’t had to use it yet. Hopefully, we never will.”

      “This is quite a machine,” Skulduggery said, examining the chair. “If all gaols had this level of technology, there’d be no more break-outs.”

      “But then we’d have the Nadir problem,” Valkyrie said. “What’s the point of sending criminals to prison if they’re going to sleep their way through their sentence?”

      Lament shook his head. “They wouldn’t have to be asleep,” he said. “Roughly a third of the power we collect is dedicated to making sure Argeddion stays in a coma-state, but he could just as easily be conscious. Naturally, with Argeddion, that would be a bad thing, as the Cube itself wouldn’t be enough to contain him. But for anyone else it would be more than sufficient.”

      Skulduggery approached the Cube. “Has there been any ageing?” he asked. “That long without magic should have had some effect by now, no matter how slight.”

      “He doesn’t appear to have aged,” said Lament. “We didn’t expect that, to be honest. Maybe it’s because of his evolved state of being or maybe it’s a side effect of keeping him in a coma, but according to our tests he hasn’t aged even one day.”

      “So what’s your plan? You’re going to keep him contained until you all die of old age? Then what?”

      “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

      “You’ve obviously considered killing him.”

      “That is not an option.”

      “Destroy the brain, Tyren. Destroy it before his survival instincts kick in.”

      “We didn’t go to all this trouble just to end the life of the man in our care.”

      “It may be mean-spirited but it’s a practical solution to a problem that has precious few.”

      Lament shook his head. “There is always another way.”

      “But there’s not always a better way.”

      “Skulduggery, even if we wanted to end his life, I’m not even sure that we could. His mind is asleep but his body could still heal itself. And someone of Argeddion’s power... I’m not sure there’s any wound we could inflict that would be enough to kill him instantly.”

      “Then how do we stop him from spreading the infection? We had a werewolf in Ireland, Tyren. It has to stop.”

      “We’re not even agreed that Argeddion is responsible. The man is comatose.”

      “The subconscious is more powerful than you know, Tyren. I’ve seen it myself, firsthand. It’s possible that Argeddion’s subconscious is infecting the minds of those susceptible and actually transferring magic to them remotely. And if this did all start a few weeks ago, then it leads me to only one possible conclusion.”

      Lament frowned. “Argeddion is waking up.”

      “His

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