The little one nodded. The other put his stitching down, got up, and crossed the room to a corner where a number of barrels sat. On the way he passed the big chest, and gave it a reflexive, resentful kick.

‘What could be worth the bother,’ he muttered, ‘that’s what I want to know. Eating lizards, indeed. Oh, for the old days.’ He lifted the a lid off of one of the barrels, peered down, then bent over to reach inside.

A moment later the creature screeched, and a remarkable thing happened. The purple stuff he had in place of hair, thick fibres like threads of yarn, all went rigid at once. Violet spikes suddenly jutted out from his skull, a foot or more, and a crest of them encircled his shoulders, making him look a bit like an agitated purple porcupine. That comparison was more than merely casual – even from floor level across the room, Alice could see that the spines came to wickedly sharp points.

He muttered something that sounded impolite, groped further into the barrel, and came up with a droopy-looking green lizard about as long as his arm. He held it around the neck with thumb and forefinger, and though it thrashed and scrabbled desperately at the air, it couldn’t make any progress. The creature glared at the lizard with his huge purple eyes.

‘It bit me! Stupid vicious thing. Here.’

The creature tossed the lizard across the room, and the little one picked it out of the air with impossible grace. His tiny mouth turned upward in a smile, and then as Alice watched in horror the smile spread, wider and wider, until it split the thing’s head almost in half. In the light of the fire, Alice could clearly see hundreds of teeth like little needles, row on row of them, and a long, nimble blue tongue. The small creature crammed the lizard into his maw whole, ignoring its terrified scratching, and bit down on it so hard, the swarmer’s ears could hear the crunch.

Isaac tugged on her sleeve, back at her real body. She ought to be telling him what she could see, but she found herself rendered temporarily speechless, watching in awful fascination as the little creature slurped up the lizard’s tail that stuck out of his mouth like a stray noodle. His jaw worked from side to side for a moment, and then he spat something small and white onto the hearth. It was a tiny bone, licked clean of flesh, and it was rapidly follow by another and another, a rain of neat white vertebrae rolling across the stone.

‘Alice!’ Isaac hissed.

Alice let the swarmer’s senses go and opened her eyes. She found her heart was hammering fast. ‘I think,’ she said, a little shakily, ‘we may not want to try explaining.’