Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 7 – 9: The Darquesse Trilogy. Derek Landy

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      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 mind is becoming active.”

      “Impossible. No, I’m sorry, Skulduggery, but there has been no change in our readings. No unusual brain activity, nothing like that. Lenka is in here every day, scanning his mind. If anything was going on, surely a Sensitive would pick it up?”

      “Not necessarily. It’s possible to throw up a false reading. It’s been done before.”

      “But only by the most powerful of psychics.”

      “And is Argeddion not the most powerful of everything right now?”

      Lament hesitated.

      “You’re right,” Skulduggery said. “There has not been one single Sensitive around the world who has even heard of Argeddion. But we visited a prison where the more unstable inmates, those more susceptible to this kind of thing, were scrawling his name on the walls. He visits people in their dreams, Tyren. He’s doing something to the mortals, something to do with a Summer of Light. We have less than four days to figure out what that is. He has to be stopped.”

      “And I told you, I don’t know how to do that.”

      “What about telling the Elders?” Valkyrie asked. “I know it wasn’t safe in the past, but now Ghastly Bespoke and Erskine Ravel are in charge, and you can trust them.”

      “And can we trust Madame Mist, a Child of the Spider?”

      “Well,” said Valkyrie, “no, but she can be kept at a distance. You can get back-up there. The Sanctuary can support you. It’d mean you wouldn’t have to live here any more, you could go back to your lives. We could all share the responsibility and, I don’t know, maybe make the Cube stronger.”

      “That’s an idea,” Skulduggery said slowly. “If we do make the Cube stronger, it would block Argeddion’s subconscious from wandering off and infecting anyone else. I’ve seen the blueprints, and it seems to me that there’s absolutely no reason why the Cube couldn’t be reinforced two, three times over.”

      “Now, just wait a second,” Lament said. “You’re both speeding on ahead.”

      “It’s possible, though, isn’t it?” Skulduggery asked.

      Lament hesitated. “Yes.”

      “And a reinforced Cube would mean Argeddion does not wake up.”

      “But the risk involved with acknowledging his existence...”

      “Would immediately be overshadowed by the risk of Argeddion opening his eyes.”

      “I don’t know. You’re asking us to abandon our plan.”

      “The moment you realised he wasn’t ageing, that plan became null and void. The Cube can be reinforced, right?”

      “Yes, of course it can, but the power needed to maintain a reinforced Cube would СКАЧАТЬ