of the palace grounds and rushed towards the back entry, via Silk Corner.
Melilot being rich, he could afford locks on his doors; he had given her a heavy
bronze key which she had concealed in her writing case. She fumbled it into the
lock, but before she could turn it the door swung wide and she stepped forward
as though impelled by another person’s will.
This was the street – or rather alley. This was the door with its overhanging
porch. Outside everything was right.
But inside everything was absolutely, utterly, unqualifiedly wrong.
4
Jarveena wanted to cry out, but found herself unable to draw enough breath. A
vast sluggishness took possession other muscles, as though she were descending
into glue. Taking one more step, she knew, would tire her to the point of
exhaustion; accordingly she concentrated merely on looking about her, and within
seconds was wishing that she hadn’t.
A wan, greyish light suffused the place. It showed her high stone walls on
either side, a stone-flagged floor underfoot, but nothing above except drifting
mist that sometimes took on an eerie pale colour: pinkish, bluish, or the sickly
phosphorescent shade of dying fish. Before her was nothing but a long table,
immensely and ridiculously long, such that one might seat a full company of
soldiers at it.
A shiver tried to crawl down her spine, but failed thanks to the weird paralysis
that gripped her. For what she was seeing matched in every respect the
descriptions, uttered in a whisper, which she had heard of the home of Enas