That must be the tree-sprite. Geryon must have come in to rescue me and killed the sprite himself. He’d never told her such a thing was possible, or that he could help her fight and bind a creature. He let me think I was going to die in there!

Opening her eyes again, she looked around the chamber. No one was in evidence, but that didn’t mean much. She cleared her throat and called softly.

‘Ashes? Ending? Is anyone there?’

There was no answer. But music filled the air, very faintly, as though from a phonograph playing in a distant room. It was a simple, repetitive melody, and though Alice couldn’t quite place it, she found it maddeningly familiar.

She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. There was a bad moment as the world turned sickeningly around her, but she closed her eyes and counted to ten, and when she opened them again it had settled into more or less its usual orientation. She padded across the carpet in her bare feet to the door, which was closed but not locked.

On the other side of it she found Ashes, curled into a tight ball. She waited for him to acknowledge her, and when he didn’t, she gave him a tentative prod with her foot. Nothing happened.

‘Ashes?’ Alice bent over him, beginning to worry. ‘Are you all right?’

She lifted him off the floor entirely. His whiskers twitched, but he hung bonelessly from her hands like a stuffed animal, eyes still firmly closed.

Geryon must have done something to him, Alice thought. She hoped he wasn’t being punished for her sake.

She set the cat down carefully and looked around. She was in the main hall of Geryon’s private suite, a shelf-lined room with a couple of fantastical statues matching those in the main hall. Four doors opened off it, two on each side. Apart from the one she’d come out of, only one was open. The carpet by the doorway was blackened and stained with mud.

Something felt wrong. The proper thing to do was obviously retreat to the bedroom, bar the door, and wait for Geryon to deal with it. Instead, Alice padded forward, skirting the stained carpet, and shifted her mental grip to the Swarm thread, ready to yank swarmers into being all around her. Beside the doorway, she stopped for a moment to listen, but there was no sound except for the faint, frustrating music.

Finally, she leaned over and looked inside. She’d been expecting another bedroom, or perhaps a study, but this looked more like a vault. The carpet stopped abruptly, replaced with slate flagstones, and the walls were unpanelled oak set with iron braces. There were shelves built directly into the walls. Sitting on these, at intervals, were a number of small chests of various sizes and shapes, constructed of more or less outlandish materials.