Free Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked by Derek Landy Page A

the open door. “Age before beauty.”
    “So kind,” he said, and walked through. He looked back at her. “Well? Are you coming?”
    Valkyrie hesitated. The doorway shimmered. She licked her lips, then turned sideways and inched forward into the house.
    Skulduggery stood watching her. “What are you doing?”
    “Being careful,” she said under her breath.
    “You walk through doorways every day and manage not to bounce off one side or the other.”
    “Stop distracting me.”
    “You could walk in with your hands on your hips and you still wouldn’t touch the sides.”
    She took a deep breath and took the last step as a hop, then gasped in relief.
    “You puzzle me,” Skulduggery said.
    It was a one-room house. There was a tattered armchair and a tattered rug and peeling wallpaper. Something beeped, and the floor started to descend.
    “Cool,” Valkyrie whispered.
    They left the peeling wallpaper above them and descended through a brightly lit steel shaft, picking up speed as they went. Just as Valkyrie was beginning to enjoy the experience, it was over, and a door slid open to reveal a man in a suit and tie and a smile.
    “Hi,” he said. “I’m Delafonte Mien, I’m the warden here. Can I get you folks some lemonade?”
    Their tour through Hammer Lane Gaol took them through gleaming corridors and steel doors. The main body of the prison was a vast cylinder, at the base of which was the mess hall and social area. There were five levels of cells built into the walls, each one with a circular perimeter walkway that was bordered with a clear material that sounded like glass when Valkyrie knocked on it. They were standing on the Observation Deck, the sixth and highest level, allowing them to overlook the whole structure.
    “It sounds like glass,” Mien told her, “because it is glass. Reinforced, of course. It’d take a rocket launcher to even make a crack in one layer of this thing – and it’s four layers thick. Impenetrable.” He waved his hand along the metal barrier, and a section of glass retracted. They leaned over, looking straight down. Valkyrie felt a touch of vertigo.
    “Your prisoners are very well behaved,” said Skulduggery. Far below them, the convicts sat in their bright orange jumpsuits at their tables in perfectly ordered groups.
    Mien chuckled. “Ah, I wish I could say they’re always like that, but any minute now one of the inmates is going to be rejoining them from a month in solitary confinement. He’s a bit of a troublemaker, so I have extra security down there to deal with any messing.
    “You know, before I came here, this was the worst gaol in Europe. Disruptive behaviour, riots, inmates escaping... I was assigned here seventeen years ago, I looked around at what we had at our disposal, and I made changes. Within two years, this place had become a fortress. No prisoner has escaped in fifteen years. Even attempted breakouts have dropped to almost zero.”
    “How did you manage it?” Skulduggery asked, stepping back from the barrier, casting his eyeless gaze to the pipes that ran in crazy zigzags across the high ceiling.
    Mien waved his hand again, and the glass sealed over. “You may have noticed a slight flickering on your way in. That was the entire building oscillating between dimensions.”
    Valkyrie looked at him. “I’m sorry?”
    “As we’re talking here,” Mien said, “we’re travelling through eight dimensions a second. Forty dimensions in all, and then back again. A continuous loop. If anyone were to breach the walls, they’d be torn to pieces and scattered through half a dozen realities. There really is no escape except through the front door. The inmates know this. They know it’s hopeless. Because of that, I’ve been able to cut back on the amount of sorcerers and Cleavers needed to run this facility. We operate with a skeleton staff, if you’ll excuse the expression, Detective.”
    “Expression excused,” Skulduggery murmured. “So how do you do