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wooden flooring stretched out in front of her. She sat back on her haunches, overwhelmed. The legs of chairs and tables soared higher than the tallest tree. The people in the hall were colossal, their voices like thunder, their movements huge as an arm swept the air far above her head or a massive leg went surging by, the booted foot as huge as a moving hill, shaking the boards.
    She realized that she couldn’t see red at all. The flames of the torches that lined the walls had a fierce, hard white heart, sheathed in a flare of luminous violet. The shapes that filled the world in front of her eyes were in shades of blue and gray and dull yellows and greens.
    And the smells! A thousand different scents assaulted her nose. Wood. Brick. Plaster. Stone. Cooked meat. Bones. Sweat. Blood. Rotting fruit and vegetables. A horrible, pervasive stench of something worse than dead. And a powerful stink that threatened terrible danger, a stink Tania instinctively knew to be that of dogs.
    She stared nervously around the Hall. Yes! It was dogs! Fortunately, there were none close by, but she could see them roaming on the far side of the dizzying stretch of floor: great black dogs with lean flanks bunched with muscle, short-haired with blunt muzzles and small evil eyes. Some of them sprawled at ease beneath the long benches, waiting for scraps to be thrown from the tables. Others roamed the floor, snuffling through the filth, fighting over discarded food or gnawing bones.
    â€œMorrigan hounds!” Eden hissed. “Be vigilant, Tania. I know of these beasts. They are fearsome creatures.”
    â€œWill they be able to smell us?”
    â€œThe glamour should mask our scent,” Eden said. “But I know why these half-demon hounds are here. They were bred with but a single purpose: to scent out black amber. The Sorcerer King means to use them to hunt down the mine of Tasha Dhul.”
    Tania knew about Tasha Dhul; it was the hidden black amber mine, the only source of that precious mineral in the whole of Faerie. Black amber was the only protection against Isenmort—against metal—and it was the Sorcerer King’s intention to equip an army with black amber jewels and send them into the Mortal World to conquer and destroy.
    â€œCome,” Eden said. “We must keep to cover or we will be seen and crushed underfoot.”
    â€œI’m right behind you,” Tania said.
    Eden scuttled off, keeping tight to the wall until they came under a table. There they paused, hidden in shadowy shelter. Gradually, Tania found herself growing accustomed to her surroundings. The noise and the smells and the sheer size of everything was no less alarming, but as she peered out from under the table, she began to be able to make sense of it all. And the things she saw were worse than her darkest nightmares.
    The glorious Faerie tapestries had been torn from the walls, and ugly emblems had been daubed on the white plaster: swaths of red and crude representations of coiled or striking serpents. A smell of blood hung in the air like a foul gas. The Gray Knights of Lyonesse sat at tables laden with food and drink; debris from the meal was scattered on the floor—bones and hunks of gnawed meat, spatters of food lying in the accumulated filth, trodden underfoot, snatched up by the roving dogs—all foul and stinking.
    Tania’s stomach twisted in disgust when she saw the food that filled the tables. Impaled on a wooden spike on one long platter of roast meat was the head of a unicorn. She pictured the delicate little unicorn that she had met in Cordelia’s menagerie. The beautiful violet eyes were dead now, the soft pale blue mane clogged and tangled with blood. And there were other things on the tables—the butchered remains of more of Cordelia’s animals.
    But worse was to come. On the far wall, brieflyrevealed when the crowds shifted, Tania saw rows of Faerie folk chained in bonds of Isenmort. Their moans were