Valkyrie got to her hands and knees and peered in. It was dark. Very dark. She flattened herself to the floor and crawled into the shaft. She let her eyes adjust, feeling the thick layer of dust under her hands. She moved forward on her elbows, banging her head against the roof of the shaft and gritting her teeth against the pain. She could hear the words now.

“…nice of them to give me a plaything, don’t you think? So thoughtful. They don’t want me getting bored, you see.”

Valkyrie moved on, feeling a cobweb break against her face. With a controlled franticness she cleared it away, trying to dam her mind against the images of spiders scuttling in her hair. Ahead of her was a junction, a break in the darkness, where the ventilation shaft opened into the room where the voice was coming from. Valkyrie squirmed up, laid her face against the cold stone and peered in.

Tanith wasn’t chained up or shackled to a wall, as Valkyrie had expected. Instead she was sitting in an armchair, hands flat on the armrests, legs crossed. An old man sat opposite in an identical armchair. His white hair stood out in clumps and he had dark rings under his eyes. It took her a moment to recognise Kenspeckle.

Beside both chairs was a small table. On Tanith’s table were a cup and saucer, and on the table beside Kenspeckle was a teapot and a bowl of sugar cubes. The room was stone, but the armchairs were on a rug and there was a frayed tapestry hanging on the wall. There was a lamp, minus a lampshade, in the far corner of the room. The bulb was broken. It was a feeble attempt at introducing warmth and normality to the stark and bizarre, and it was even more unsettling for it.

Kenspeckle drank his tea and returned the cup to its saucer with a delicate plink.

Tanith’s face was strained and wet with sweat. Her eyes were unfocused and her body rigid. Valkyrie searched for a shackle or a sign that Tanith’s powers were being bound, but she couldn’t see anything.

There was a small pool of dried blood beside the armrest closest to the ventilation shaft. Valkyrie followed the course the blood would have had to have taken, and noticed for the first time Tanith’s hands. On first glance nothing was out of the ordinary, but it was as if someone had taken a cloth to them and wiped them quickly and without care, not bothering to clean away all the blood.

Valkyrie saw the way the light hit something metal on the back of Tanith’s hand, and she realised with a lurch in her stomach that Tanith’s hands had been nailed to the armrests.