Chapter 134

"Aren't you sweet," Corrival smile softly at the three day old infant in his arms. He was sat on the parlour sofa, Tanith next to him and wearing his Elder robes. "Yes, you'll be a very smart girl. Pretty, too. You have your sisters' nose."

Valkyrie smiled brightly. She'd noticed Laila's nose looked like hers too. Tanith rolled her eyes. She was convinced the nose was identical to her biological brothers, but Valkyrie knew better. Genetics definitely didn't work that way. Just as she knew her new haircut following her run-in with the burning building had left her with an awful haircut that was way too short and it didn't suit her face. Tanith didn't know what she was on about.

Laila chose then that she didn't like to be with Corrival, and he was very quick to hand the squirming baby back to her mother. Slapping his knees, Corrival pulled himself up. "She's a beau, Tanith. But I think it's time myself and Valkyrie get to the Sanctuary. Much to do, after all."

"Of course," Tanith said, pulling Laila's clothes off for a nappy change. "Have you found anything out on the Spiders?"

"We know they evacuated where they were," he said with a sigh. "We knew they would as soon as Mr Wreath was liberated, of course, but we have had a team go in and check. There was nothing but a few tools and an old furnace that was probably there in wartime, and a whole lotta blood. We suspect they've been capturing mortals for sport. They knew enough to stay away from the nearby town, so that's why we hadn't connected it with them previously."

"Hmm," Tanith said, wiping Laila clean while the baby did a big yawn. "I'm assuming there were no bodies then?"

"Nothing. I had expected them to leave some note, or warning, or something along those lines, but no."

"I'm surprised Craven wasn't there," Valkyrie said. "I mean, he didn't bring Skulduggery back when he should have, he was the last to see Solomon seconds before he was rescued, and I doubt he's making life easy for the Spiders with how annoying he is with his superiority complex. Seemed like they'd want to get rid of him."

"Maybe they need a Necromancer?" Nadia asked, giving Valkyrie her bag of food for lunch. She was so cute, giving her food and stuff. Valkyrie grinned at her.

"There is a chance, but Spiders are quite particular in how they do things. Manipulating the Necromancer Temple for a distraction, yes. Use others to do terrorist acts, yes. But work alongside someone for their magic when they could do everything themselves? I very much doubt that," Corrival said. "Regardless, we must look down every avenue, so your contributions, Miss Robin, are not unwelcome. Are you ready to leave, Valkyrie dear?"

.*****.

Valkyrie, some six hours of straight desk work reading and signing off on paper later, cracked her knuckles and sat back in her chair.

It had been a bad day. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened, but it had been hard on her. With the crimewave still happening, now about two months into it, Valkyrie had a ton of paperwork to keep on top of and with her having time off for so long, there was just so much. She wished she could bring people in to help her.

Her team had been debriefed a second time for the point of it in terms of her interaction with Skulduggery. They seemed slightly more satisfied that she wasn't going to help him escape the country, and they had concluded that he wasn't leaving for the foreseeable future.

Their predictions on that had been for these reasons, the ones stuck on the pinboard in the office: Skulduggery was in an awful place mentally and probably didn't want to leave home; Skulduggery kept vendettas and those he loved on equal priority and right now, all of those priorities were in Ireland; Skulduggery would likely try to contact Solomon again; Skulduggery may have become actually insane and may suddenly turn up at the house or the Sanctuary as if nothing happened, or else to continue to do mentally unstable things; or the worst of all, Skulduggery may turn evil on them.

The last one was more aimed at killing civilians in an insane fuelled rage from all the torture and confusion, but Valkyrie feared something along the lines of Lord Vile showing up. She couldn't mention it to her team, obviously, but it was a risk. The main gist of the ideas she and the team had made were that Skulduggery needed physic help, he needed to talk and vent and rage and get it out and be comforted. But all the said torture and his general personality meant they'd have to capture and restrain him first. Valkyrie had a feeling they could get him to be willing but only if they used the perfect amount of guilting and absolute, overpowering manpower to make him do that. Since it wasn't likely, they hadn't even bothered to write that down as an option. He was just so hard to predict they couldn't get the manpower near him fast enough to act out and it was killing Valkyrie inside.

Corrival and Grand Mage Meritorious were probably having a worse day. An English Sanctuary agent had turned up with a 'notice'. It had informed the Elders that if they didn't assign a new Elder in sixty days, they'd be an international meeting to assign one for them. They had informed her mostly for ideas on who she trusted but she had come up blank. China had been suggested but both Valkyrie and Corrival shut it down – Corrival despised her and Valkyrie knew Elder Crow had not liked the idea.

Sighing, Valkyrie stood up and stretched, deciding to take her paperwork to the Filers herself for the walk.

The office was quiet, most people concentrating in the late afternoon so they could go home, or out on actual work. Valkyrie left the department and went for the one down the hall, putting the thick stack on the counter.

"Evening," the red-haired man nodded, taking the files. "Catching up?"

"Yeah," Valkyrie smiled. "How's your department doing?"

"It's good. I like Roarhaven. I mean, it's dark and dirty, but it's quiet. I like that," the guy said, looking over her files to make sure they were good. "Don't like this Sanctuary yet. I like windows, me."

"It would be nice to see outside. I guess that would be hard, being as we're underground," Valkyrie commented politely. "Are the files good?"

"Just a second, detective," he said, muttering to himself as he looked them all over. A few were going to leave for other officials, that being the Elders mainly, but the rest would be filed in the new Cabinet room. "Alright, it looks good. Hey, did you ever, err, well, find out who that other person was?"

"What other person?" Valkyrie asked, standing a little taller.

"The one that came in and looked 'round the Receptacle," he said, putting the stack on his chair and leaning an elbow on the counter. "You know, Pleasant said there was that third guy, he went into the Receptacle and stole stuff? They never found a body for an assassin."

Valkyrie shook her head. "I had forgotten about him, but we think he was called Stolen," she said, thoughts quickly occurring. "Do you have the reports for the bombing written up yet? I need them."

"Sure thing, detective," he said and fetched them for her. Valkyrie immediately went to her office and started reading them.

She was interested in the Receptacle inventory. Next to each item name, there was a cross for it still being there, for it being damaged but identifiable as an object, or for being missing. For the most part everything had been destroyed, or rather, they assumed it had been destroyed as there was no recognisable proof of its existence any longer.

What Valkyrie wanted to do was discern how much time there had been between the bomb going off and what they believed to be the time Stolen went into the room. According to the files, detectives claimed it would be an eight minutes time span for the assassin to be in there and somehow escape. Assuming the thief got out alive.

Valkyrie knew there were only two real doors in and out – the double ones at the front. She knew of no secret ones. But she bet Meritorious would.

She went straight to his office, and he wasn't there. His secretary said he was in a meeting, with Corrival. After a few cute grins and carrying her paperwork, Valkyrie found out it was a meeting between the two of them solely and was able to find out where they were. The door was unlocked at her approach.

"Valkyrie," Meritorious welcomed. He had bags under his eyes and he looked noticeably thinner but had a full plate of sandwiches besides him paired with an orange juice. It looked untouched. "What have you found?"

"Not what I've found, more so than realised," she said, sitting down quickly while Corrival relocked the door. "No one ever investigated the whole Receptacle thief thing when the old Sanctuary was blown up. I need to know how the man, Stolen, could have gotten out of the room."

"You want to know the other doors," Meritorious nodded, understanding quickly. "Do you have a map?" Valkyrie pulled an old map that indicated where things were placed around the room out of the file. "There are three secret passages. One of them on the left middle area of the room on the wall. That one travelled past the offices, with access to them also, and then went down a slope and outside. The second was on the right at the very front, a blind point to the cameras also. It was a shoot that went straight into the ground. Only problem there, you had to get past the other doors and security points before you could get in or out once you went down."

"Skulduggery took them through a section of that system," Valkyrie remembered.

"He did. It wasn't the same doors and chambers, and we know he didn't unlock the ones necessary to get in and out of the Receptacle area and outside. But that doesn't mean he didn't do anything secretively, or that our thief Mr Stolen wasn't capable of getting himself through the security. The third option is through the ceiling. I find that unlikely, however."

"Where is the ceiling tunnel?" Valkyrie asked. Corrival handed her a cup of tea.

"Here. The very back, middle of the room. Just out of sight in practically every place except to the cameras. And the cameras saw nothing."

"He has a special Cloaking Sphere," Valkyrie reminded him. "It's unlikely we'll see him at all on camera, plus detectives have already checked the footage that was recovered. There was no sign of an unknown man anywhere. I only know it was Stolen from China. She spoke to Skulduggery right before the whole Nadia thing and you know she has other sources."

Meritorious shrugged uncharacteristically and took a long drink of scorching hot tea. "What's your thoughts?"

Valkyrie wondered that also and looked over the map, drawing crudely where the escape routes were. "Well, we know he didn't touch the door again. So, he had enough time, I think, to get something on the left and leave through the office tunnel that goes outside, but only if he got something from the left. I don't think he'd have escaped the blast otherwise and I get the impression this Stolen dude isn't stupid enough to not know his escape plan." She drew an oval over the area she thought he could have taken something from if he had used that escape route. "Option two is the underground system, and I think that would have been hard, and he would have needed a ton of inside knowledge, but there is a slim chance he could have gotten out that way. The underground system was only minorly damaged, right?"

"Right," Corrival nodded.

"But he didn't set the alarms off," Meritorious interjected.

Valkyrie shook her head. "But he turned the alarms off, right? Or messed with them somehow. That why he has such a short window after leaving the other two because we have to account for messing with the signals. He could have used his knowledge of signals to open the doors and close them to not trip the system later if he was confident the structure would protect him. But he wouldn't necessarily have wanted us to not know he was there. We don't know his style yet. Regardless, he could have gotten a lot of stuff with this method but was likely limited to this quarter of the room to get far enough into his safe zone." She circled a large chunk of the room. There was a ton of missing things from there.

"True," Meritorious nodded, taking a bite of his food.

"Or the third option in the ceiling, which I also find hard to believe. He grabbed things from this area," Valkyrie said, doing an oval essentially covering a beeline from the double doors to the escape with the two shelving units either side of the run. "He'd have to grab it, hoist himself to the ceiling somehow, making him a great jumper or somehow able to hover with magic, get the panel open to get in, and somehow climb into the shaft. Then he'd have to monkey climb to the roof or use magic again. Not impossible in itself, but where does he go? Did he jump down the back when we were looking at Skulduggery and Craven out the front? If he did do that it would explain his magic, but we know he was the one to mess with the signals so surely that would be his magic?"

"I agree," Corrival said with a nod of his head. "I've seen a lot of assassins and thieves and as long as he knew either of the other two routes, he wouldn't have chosen the roof. If he was an Elemental or our theory of being a Signal worker is proven wrong then I'd reconsider it, however, as it would be significantly easier if he had control of the air. Going through the office escape would work, but that leads to an open field. He could have used the Cloaking Sphere, but if he had the talent and skill, going underground would have been easier overall and less likely to leave him in the blast range as it was more completely sheltered from the fallout."

Valkyrie suddenly thought back to the file China had given her two or so weeks prior. She'd read it briefly. "Bliss had some correspondences with Stolen. In one of them, Bliss had questioned Stole on his 'technique'."

"What did he say?" Meritorious asked.

"I'm about to find out," Valkyrie muttered, pulling out her phone and calling Nadia. She picked up on the third ring. "Hi sweetie, could you do me a favour?"

"Sure, what is it?" Nadia asked. There was a spattering of laughter on the other end. "Are you at work?"

"I am, this'll be really quick," she said. She instructed Nadia to go to their bedroom and to Valkyrie's desk. After telling her to code to the safe, Nadia grabbed the right files for Valkyrie. "Could you please turn to the Stolen pages. And do not, and I mean this, do not look at anything else. There are pictures in there you don't want to see."

"Okay," Nadia said nervously, There were a few shaky breaths as she carefully flicked through the files and a moment later spoke again. "I've got it. What do you want?"

"Scan it and tell me when they start talking about Stolen's magic. What does he say about it? Read it directly, you're now on speaker."

There was a pause while Nadia scanned the pages for the part Valkyrie needed, and then she said "ah!" and read aloud. "It doesn't say who's speaking but it's a, I don't know, script or whatever it's called. It says: 'The Sanctuary is confused. The Grand Mage does not know how you got into his Sanctuary, but they are only going to tighten the security now. How will you complete your mission?' Next line, 'I can handle it.' New line, 'And the Dead Men?' New line, 'I will rip their arms off.' New line, 'How?' New line, 'Why do you want to know? Got work for me?' New line, 'No, I want to know how you will complete the work. If you fail, it will put plans behind schedule. My work will suffer and The Master, The Tormentor, will be displeased.' New line, 'Didn't think you'd care. I'll smash their faces and rip them apart. You leave it to me.' New line, 'Give me a reason to and I will.' New line, 'Do you remember that gang, the one that massacred the old African Sanctuary's Elder and her family? Remember what it looked like when you investigated? I watched you look over their bodies and laughed at your faces. So dumbfound, so stupid. I can't tell you how I kill. It would take the fun out of it.' Are they talking about Elder Kafele?"

"Yes," Meritorious said in a hard voice. "It essentially means he can pull people apart. We need to know if that's his magic, we can't make an assumption."

"Right, he could be a trained assassin," Corrival added.

"Does it say anywhere which of those it is, Nadia?" Valkyrie asked her.

"Give me a minute," she asked and they waited for her to read. "It says something about seeing Craven and wanting to, err, blow him up from the other side of the hallway… later one of them says that The Torment had hired the Wild Brothers or something like that, and it sounds like both speakers don't like them. Apparently, they have a personal goal to kill them. They say… they say 'if I had just a single second with them I'd start ripping their limbs off. You know I would, now, huh? You liked that Elder, didn't you?'"

"That might be it," Valkyrie said. "He said that he could do it in a second, and he's referring to his past crime. Is that enough to say he has additional strength as his magic?"

Corrival was already shaking his head. "I don't think so Valkyrie. I think you're onto something, I do, but not without looking at those logs in more detail or real proof one way or the other. I'd be happy to pick this up tomorrow."

Valkyrie could sense his dismissal now they knew she had unsubstantial evidence. "Alright. I'll talk to you soon Nadia," she said and hung the phone up before getting a reply. She'd call her back when she was out. "Thank you for talking with me," she told the Elders.

Meritorious waved her thanks away. "Just find our killers. I'm sure whatever he took is important to the Spiders, and through them, us."

Valkyrie gave her goodbyes and left, gathering her things and leaving for home.

She had a lot to think about. At least she had her helper now.

I hope you enjoyed all the detective-ing! If you didn't, just imagine how pretty Valkyrie is while she's doing it. That'll settle your nerves ;)