PHRYNE AMARANTYNE EXPERIENCED A MOMENT OF disorientation, a quick change of light to twilight and outside to inside, followed by a loss of balance and a recognition that she wasn’t where she had been even a moment earlier. She stopped and tried to regain her sense of place and time, casting about for something familiar. There was nothing she recognized. The Belloruusian Arch, the Ashenell, the tombs and markers, the buildings of the city off in the distance, the day she had walked through only moments before—all gone.

She felt instant panic, fed by the realization that she had lost everything familiar and found in its place nothing she knew. She breathed in and out quickly, and her heart raced wildly. Be calm, she told herself. You’re all right. Nothing has hurt you, nothing will.

Maybe.

How could she know? How could she know anything?

Then her eyes adjusted to the change of light, to this new darkness, and she began to see where she was. She was in a broad cavelike tunnel, its rock walls rugged and rough, bits of roots and vines trailing from its ceiling, broken rocks and pockets of damp littering its floor. Veins of something phosphorescent glowed softly through its length, running on into the distance until they could no longer be seen clearly. From somewhere not too far away, water dripped in slow, steady cadence. When she breathed or scraped her boots on the stone, the sounds echoed loudly.

Otherwise, everything was silent.

She looked around, taking stock of her situation. The passageway in which she stood ran both ways for as far as she could see. There was no sign of how she had gotten here, nothing to indicate the portal that had allowed her to enter. She might have been picked up and deposited by a giant’s hand as easily as not. The walls about her offered no doors or alternative passageways. She could either stay where she was or go forward or back, but that was it.

She had retained enough presence of mind to know which was which, so she chose to go forward. But then she stopped herself, turned, and walked back for a short distance. Perhaps she could return to where she had been just by reversing her steps.

But when she’d gone twenty feet and nothing had happened, she realized there was no going back. Not that way, at least.

So she turned around and continued on. She walked for a long time, the sound of her breathing harsh in her ears, her footfalls echoing in the silence. She wished she’d thought to bring food and water, but then realized she hadn’t had any to bring in the first place. What she had were the clothes on her back, the long knife Xac Wen had given her, and a desperate need to find her grandmother.