“Best to save it,” Pilgrim told her. “I’m sure many dark places await us.”

He fell to slumber shortly after, as the last of the green-tinged light fluttered and died and one of his companions gave voice to a faint but fearful whimper. For himself, he slept soundly. The dark had never scared him.

H e awoke to the sword’s insistent thrum, accompanied by an irksome prodding from the voice. Kindly rouse your royal arse, my liege! Something’s here, and I greatly dislike its stink.

For a second he saw only darkness but rapid blinking revealed a dim line of burgeoning light below the door. A quick survey of his companions found them all still asleep, save two.

“Seeker?” he whispered, the hiss of it echoing long through the empty interior. There was no answer from the beast charmer, nor any yelp from Chena. Pilgrim rose and went to the door, finding it still locked.

Look up, the voice told him. It held an uncharacteristic edge of impatience, leaving him in little doubt of the scale of the threat it sensed. His gaze tracked the winding spiral of the staircase into the shadows of the spire’s lofty reaches, seeing nothing, but his ears did detect a very faint sound. “A child?” he wondered aloud as he gained an impression of a forlorn, sorrowful wail.

No, the voice stated. It most definitely is not.

He kicked Priest awake as he rushed to the foot of the staircase. “Trouble,” he said, starting to scale the steps. “Wake the others.”

Judging by the number of steps, his most conservative guess as to the height of this structure was somewhere close to a hundred and fifty feet. It made for a laborious ascent that birthed a plethora of aches throughout his body by the time the stairs levelled out. Getting old, my liege, the voice said, its urgency apparently insufficient reason to resist a jibe, one it had been making for several decades now. Pilgrim ignored it with accustomed ease and made for the tall arched opening in the wall. It led out onto a walkway of impressive breadth, but stunted length, having been tumbled to ruin some fifty paces from the archway. He could see Chena pacing back and forth, head moving from side to side in agitation, pausing frequently to nuzzle the side of her mistress who seemed not to notice.

Seeker knelt at the ragged edge of the walkway, arms outstretched as she voiced whispered, tear-choked entreaties in her own language. Although he couldn’t speak her tongue, Pilgrim detected several words it shared with the less obscure dialects from the southern shore of the Second Sea. “Please…I searched…my love…”

Careful, the voice cautioned as Pilgrim moved closer. If a shade has learned her name… The sword’s thrum was like a throb now, but he resisted drawing it. Chena, he suspected, might not react well to so patent a threat.