AI The pendant burned against my breastbone hot enough to brand.
I hit the ground on my knees. Warm earth gave under my palms like proving dough, soft and faintly damp, and the smell hit me a half-second later. Bread. Fresh bread, and something under it, yeasty and sweet, the way my nain's kitchen smelled on Sunday mornings before chapel.
"Up." Nyx's whisper curled past my ear. "Swiftly, Aurora. The door is closing behind us."
I twisted round. The rift hung in the air three feet off the ground, a ragged wound in nothing, its edges puckering inward like a mouth pursing shut. Through it I glimpsed the grey concrete of the Deptford underpass we'd left behind, a crisp packet, a pigeon. Then the lips sealed. The air rippled once and went still.
Gone. No wind, no hum of traffic, no distant siren. Just the three of us and a silence so thick I heard my own pulse .
Isolde stood a few paces off with her silver hair lifting though no breeze moved it. She had her head tilted, listening to something I couldn't hear.
"Well," she said. "The table is laid, and we are early for supper."
"That supposed to mean something?"
"Everything means something, child. That is the trouble with meaning."
I stood and brushed my palms on my jeans. The soil left no stain. It left a smell, though, buttery and rich, and my stomach answered with a growl I felt in my teeth.
Then I looked up.
The sky was the colour of honey held to a lamp. Warm amber from edge to edge, no clouds, no sun, no single source of light at all. It glowed evenly, as if the whole dome of it were lit from behind. Under it the land rolled away in terraces, and every terrace grew something. Vines, heavy and black-green, strung along trellises of pale bone-coloured wood. Orchards of squat, twisted trees bowed under fruit I had no names for. Beyond them, far off, something like a city rose in tiers, domes and chimneys and long pale halls, and from every chimney drifted a thin ribbon of smoke.
Cooking smoke. I smelled it even from here. Roasting meat and caramelised sugar and cloves.
"Dymas," I said.
"Dymas." Nyx drifted beside me, their outline wavering . "I had read of it. The books did it no justice."
"You read about Hel for fun?"
"I was a sorcerer in a time without television. We all read about Hel for fun."
Something was wrong with them. It took me a moment to place it. Nyx usually pooled at the edges of things, gathering in corners, drawing darkness from under tables and behind doors. Here they looked thin. Watered down. Their violet eyes glowed weaker than I'd ever seen them.
I glanced at my feet. No shadow. Not a smudge. I held my hand out and turned it over. The amber light lay on every side of it at once.
"There's no shade here," I said.
"No." Nyx's whisper came out rough. "Nothing here is permitted to hide."
Isolde had already started walking. She moved down the first terrace between the vines, and where she stepped, the soft ground stayed perfectly smooth. Mine left deep prints, clear enough to cast in plaster. I followed hers, which was to say I followed nothing at all.
The vines grew close on both sides. Up near, the grapes were the size of plums, dusky purple, their skins so taut they shone. I leant in. Beneath the skin, something moved. A slow shift, like a sleeper turning over.
"Rory."
"I'm only looking."
"Looking is how it begins," Isolde said without turning round. "Then smelling. Then a taste, just to know. Then a second taste, to be certain of the first."
The nearest grape made a sound. I swear it did. A soft wet murmur, too faint for words, like someone talking in the next room with their mouth full. Then another answered it, further down the row, and another, until the whole terrace seethed with a low contented muttering.
I backed off. The crescent scar on my wrist itched the way it always did when my nerves ran high.
"They're whispering."
"They are *praising *," Nyx said. "Listen."
I didn't want to. I listened anyway. Under the mutter, the same word came round and round, soft and reverent. I couldn't catch it. It sounded almost like a name.
We came out of the vineyard onto a path of pressed white stone. Crushed shell, from the crunch of it, though there couldn't be a sea within a thousand miles of this place. The path wound down into the orchard, and the trees closed overhead in a low canopy of waxy leaves.
The fruit here hung lower. Pears, I thought first, golden and teardrop-shaped. Then I passed one at eye level and saw it clearly. A glossy little golden pear-shaped fruit, and pressed into its skin from the inside, the faint outline of a hand. Fingers spread. Palm flat. As though whatever grew in there wanted out.
I stopped. My mouth watered anyway. I hated that most of all.
"Isolde. What grows in these?"
"Appetite."
"Plain English."
"That was plain." She paused beneath a branch and gazed up at it with an expression I'd never seen on her before. Pity, perhaps. "Every soul that comes to Dymas under contract brings their hunger with them. The Prince does not waste. He plants it."
Nyx made a low sound, almost a laugh, all breath. "Ever the economist, Belphegor."
"You know him?"
"I know of him. In my day, a man who could summon a Prince of Hel counted himself either very great or very dead." Their outline flickered . "I was merely unlucky."
The orchard thinned. Beyond the last row of trees, the land dropped away, and I found myself standing at the lip of a long shallow valley.
A table ran the length of it.
One table. It started at my feet and stretched away until it dwindled to a thread against the amber haze, miles of polished dark wood, and every inch of it laden. Roast birds glazed to mirror shine. Towers of fruit. Loaves the size of cartwheels. Tureens with their lids off, and from every tureen rose steam, fresh and fragrant, as though the cooks had only this moment set them down.
Chairs lined both sides. High-backed, carved, cushioned in deep red velvet . Thousands of them.
Every one empty.
"Someone's expecting a crowd," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted.
"Someone has been expecting one for a very long time." Isolde crouched and touched the table leg nearest to her. Her fingers came away clean. "Not a speck of dust. Not a fly. The food does not spoil because it has never been permitted to."
I stepped closer. The heat coming off the dishes brushed my face. A platter of something that looked like duck sat near the edge, the skin crackled and glistening , and the smell of it went straight past my brain and grabbed hold of my gut.
I'd skipped lunch. I'd skipped breakfast, come to that. Yu-Fei had me on doubles all week and I'd been living on prawn crackers stolen from the delivery bags.
*Just a bit of skin.* The thought arrived smooth and reasonable, in my own voice. *Nobody would notice.*
My hand had lifted. I watched it hover over the platter like it belonged to someone else.
Cold. Sudden, biting cold at my hip. The Fae blade, sheathed under my jacket, had gone from chilly to glacial, sharp enough to hurt through the denim. I snatched my hand back and pressed it against the hilt. The cold ran up my arm and cleared my head like a slap.
"Good," Isolde murmured. "The moonsilver remembers what you forget."
"You could've warned me."
"I did. Twice. You were listening to the pears."
Nyx had drifted further along the table. They'd stopped beside a goblet, tall and fluted, filled to the brim with something dark and gold. Their violet eyes fixed on it. They hadn't moved in a while.
"Nyx."
No answer.
"Aldric."
That got them. Their head snapped round, and for an instant their face resolved into something almost solid, almost human, a narrow jaw and a tired mouth I'd never seen before. Then it smeared back into shadow.
"Three hundred and eighty-one years," they whispered. "I have not tasted wine in three hundred and eighty-one years. Did you know I cannot recall what it was like? I remember that I enjoyed it. I remember the tavern. I do not remember the taste."
"Step away from it."
"I know."
They didn't move.
I went and stood between them and the goblet. Up close their form shivered like heat haze. I'd never touched Nyx without them choosing to go solid first. I put my hand where their chest should be anyway, and felt a faint cool resistance, like pressing into deep water.
"We came for the portal records," I said. "Not a pub crawl. You can drink yourself stupid in Silas' bar when we're home, and I'll even let you put it on my tab."
A pause. Then the ghost of a laugh. "You do not have a tab. Silas stopped extending you credit in March."
"Then you'd best help me find something worth selling."
They drew back from the goblet. Slowly. It took effort; I watched it cost them.
The Heartstone pulsed against my chest.
Not the steady warmth it had given off since we arrived. A hard, single throb , like a knock on a door. Then another. I pulled it out from under my collar. The crimson stone blazed, its inner glow swelling until it lit my fingers red from the inside.
"Rory," Isolde said, very quietly. "Put it away."
"I didn't do anything, it's just..."
Down the length of the table, one of the tureens clinked.
A lid, settling. That was all. Then another, further along. Then a sound like a long exhale rolled down the valley, and every chair on both sides of that endless table slid back from the wood at once. Thousands of velvet seats scraping over stone in a single, rippling wave.
Nobody sat in them. Nobody stood behind them.
Isolde had gone white to the lips. "The riddle has no answer I can give you now. Only a warning. Do not tell them your name."
"Tell who?"
A door opened in the valley wall beside us. I hadn't seen a door there. It was simply there now, round-topped and ancient, and a man stood in it wearing a chef's white coat stained to the elbows. His face was grey and hollow-cheeked. Iron shackles circled both wrists, the chains trailing back into the dark behind him. He held a silver cloche in both hands, and his eyes went straight to the pendant blazing in my fist.
He dropped to one knee. The chains clanked.
"Lady Malphora." His voice cracked with relief, the way a drowning man's would. "You've come back. At last, you've come back."
Behind him, deep in the dark of the doorway, a great bell began to toll.
"His Highness," the chef whispered, "will want to know you're home."