Skulduggery clicked his fingers, summoning a ball of fire into his palm. Serpine frowned. “I hope you don’t think you’re going to burn through it. This is protected by an Arietti Sigil.”
“Which forms the strongest seal in existence,” Skulduggery murmured. His hand moved, manipulating the flames, and Valkyrie watched the fireball shrink, but grow hotter as it did so.
“Fire has no effect on it,” Serpine said. “There is nothing that will break this seal. I thought you knew some way past it.”
The fire constricted to the size of a golf ball, and then smaller, to the size of a marble. It hovered in space, cupped by Skulduggery’s hand, and then his forefinger straightened and the fire moved up along it. With the white-hot fireball balanced on his fingertip, Skulduggery scorched a broken triangle on to the glass.
“You don’t know how to break the Arietti Sigil,” he told Serpine. “But I do.”
“Impossible. If anyone had found a way to break it, we would all know.”
“You forget,” Skulduggery said, adding to the sigil as he spoke, “we’re not from around here. Where we’re from, the secret to getting by the Arietti Sigil was revealed decades ago. By Arietti himself.”
The sigil complete, Skulduggery extinguished the flame and stepped back. The scorch marks sizzled.
Serpine folded his arms. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”
“Give it a moment,” Skulduggery answered. “Wait for the melting to stop and the form to settle.”