…Gide—Gide—on…
No answer.
I took a few cautious steps forward.
The great hall branched at the far end into multiple corridors like a trident of potential bad decisions.
Each hallway stretched in a flickering, candle-lit gloom, lined with doors. Some were shut, some slightly ajar, each one carved differently. One had a wolf’s head motif, another a pattern of intertwined thorn branches, a third inlaid with something that looked disturbingly like bone.
“Of course you don’t label anything,” I said under my breath. “Why make kidnappings convenient?”
I tried to listen.
For breathing. For chains clinking. For Gideon’s particular brand of swearing. Anything.
Magic pressed from all sides, thick and layered. The house hummed with it, and the priestess’s signature was woven through older, stranger strands. It made it hard to pick out any one strand.
I picked the central hall first.
Partly because it was in front of me, partly because the door to the left had a faint, oozing darkness seeping from underneath it that made my skin crawl, and the one on the right smelled like dried herbs and something suspiciously alchemical, and I did not have the bandwidth for exploding bottles.
The central corridor was narrower than the hall, but still wider than any normal house. The walls here were paneled insome dark wood, polished to a shine that reflected the candle flames in long, distorted streaks. The ceiling arched overhead, painted in murals that looked like scenes from some kind of ancient ceremony with robed figures, circles, stars, wolves, and an endless interplay of light and shadow.
The floor runner under my boots was thick and soft, woven in a pattern that shifted if I looked at it too long. At one glance, it was geometric knots; at another, it was vines; at another, twisting snakes.
“Gideon?” I called again, letting my voice carry down the hall.
This time, something answered.
Not words.
A faint sound, like metal scraping stone, distant but real.
My heart thudded.
I followed it.
The corridor branched, then branched again.
Door after door.
A library filled with shelves of neatly labeled jars—powders, roots, things that looked like dried organs—stared back at me when I cracked one door. Another opened onto a room lined with mirrors, all of them draped in black cloth except for one in the center that showed nothing but a swirling gray fog when I glanced at it.
“Absolutely not,” I told that one, closing the door again.
The scraping sound came again, softer now, as if the house were swallowing it.
“Gideon!” I tried once more, louder.
…deon…
The house threw my voice back at me with a mocking echo.
The hall stretched on.
I kept walking.
Left turn, right turn, another hall that looped back in on itself. I tried to keep track, mentally mapping my steps, but the geometry refused to behave. I was nearly certain I’d passed the same portrait twice, even though logically that shouldn’t have been possible unless my grandmother had commissioned a duplicate of an ancestor solely to mess with people.
