Skulduggery Pleasant: Raising Cain

Chapter 115 - Saving Solomon

Chapter 115

The drive was intense as Skulduggery told her things she should and shouldn't do or look out for while Nadia tried her hardest to remember it all but was so worried about the mission, as Skulduggery called it, that she wasn't retaining any of what he said.

They travelled for hours, Skulduggery only stopping once so she could go to the loo and get something to eat so she wouldn't, as he said, "pass out during the mission." She'd ignored his words but had used the loo and bought a sandwich which she put on the floor by her feet. She was far too stressed to eat.

The last hour of the ride, she thought over her plan and tried to memorise some of the map he'd drawn out and by the time they came to a jarring stop, she knew the map by heart which helped solidify some of the points she needed to remember.

"And you promise we can go to Kenspeckle's after?" She asked him, taking one last deep breath.

"I swear," he told her solemnly, holding out a hand. "Thank you, Nadia. You're the best shot we've got."

She took his hand lightly, barely even touching his fingers, and gave him the smallest handshake that hopefully let him know she didn't like any of what she was doing but understood she had to do it.

The first part of her mission was to travel to the town which was the other side of a large cluster of trees, too small to be a woods, but somewhat large. That took her half an hour. Then she was in a small town, which she had to go around, and that took the best part of forty-five minutes. By then, she had her personal plans down on what to do if bad things happened. Then was going across a farm filled with cabbages and corn which was the worst part because it had rained that night and she got covered in mud over the twenty minutes that took her, bringing it to the early evening. She could see the maintenance shed in the distance as Skulduggery had described it.

She could also see the seemingly abandoned and ruined castle that was essentially the top of a giant anthill. She could see between two hills the end of the sea where it met the sky in the far away distance.

Feeling her heart thud painfully, she walked carefully over to the maintenance shed, hunched behind a row of bushes, and looked around carefully before breaking the lock with a force of air in the mechanism and went straight in.

She held her breath at first, fearing she'd be immediately jumped on by Spiders, but when she clicked her fingers, she found the shed was blissfully empty. Just as Skulduggery told her, there was a bunch of rusted and old tools, and an extractor fan, a massive one with dust covering it. She didn't have much time until it was the evening, but she predicted another hour before the Spider's would be working since they lived nocturnally according to Skulduggery. Using the air, she blasted a hole in the dirt that acted as a floor and used her hands to dig out a hole around the tubing that would lead under the castle. Nadia shook her head, trying to imagine how Skulduggery could have possibly known where the vents and extractors where, before using some precision magic to make a large hole in the bend of the vent.

Some rats ran the opposite way.

Shivering and wishing she was at home, or Valkyrie's home anyway, she kicked off her mud-caked shoes, crawled into the hole and began army crawling in the narrow metal vent before she could talk herself out of this stupid plan. She'd do it for Valkyrie and her brothers. She'd prove she was strong enough to handle the pressure and save Solomon. So long as she didn't pass out with fear first.

The directions she had to take were very simple, so long as she kept to them and no one turned on any furnaces before she was done. She knew when she had reached the castle tunnels because the vent began to look rusty and she could see mesh and run off tunnels going to other parts of the building. As silently as she could, she shuffled along and passed the mesh hole in the vent, seeing nothing except a gentle flame on a desk.