“Then I suppose I should thank you.”

The dwenda grinned unexpectedly. Teeth. It wasn’t an altogether reassuring sight. “I suppose you should.”

“Thanks.”

The dwenda dropped abruptly into a crouch, faster than Ringil could react, and its hand shot out to cup the side of his face. The long fingers slid up into his hair, tangled in its strands, and tugged his head forward.

“I’m afraid in the end I’m going to want more from you than that, Ringil Eskiath.”

Its lips were cool and firm on his, the subtle pressure split his mouth before he realized he’d wanted to open it, and a slick, flickering tongue met his own. There was the sudden press at his chin of a stubble so soft it was almost like velvet pile. The trickling in his belly flared up like a bonfire. He felt himself hardening.

The dwenda drew back.

“You are not healed yet,” it murmured.

Ringil’s lips peeled off his teeth. “I’m feeling a lot better.”

But the dwenda was back to its feet again, just as rapidly, its grip on him gone, fading to a sense memory; he could still feel the tips of the fingers on his skull, the slip and press of the tongue in his mouth, like a promise of more. The slender figure turned away from him, rather hurriedly, he thought. Like wincing.

“Let me be the judge of that,” it said harshly.

Ringil raised an eyebrow at the change. “Well, it’s your place.”

“Not mine, exactly.” A glance back across one shoulder that he could not read. “But near enough. You’d do well to let me guide you here.”

“Okay.” Ringil got himself upright with rather less grace than his host had shown. He stood at the dwenda’s back, close enough to pick up scent. It wasn’t exactly new territory, he’d been here enough times before and to spare: the last-minute panic of a novice partner not sure what it was he really wanted. He’d learned at Grace-of-Heaven’s knee—so to speak, Gil—the patience and guile of when to force the issue, when to back up and wait.

He waited.

Silence. Long enough for him to notice that the dwenda gave off a faint musk whose constituent parts he could not quite—despite a tantalizing familiarity—pin down.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Under the city?”

“In a manner of speaking.” The dwenda seemed to have regained a little of its previous poise. It drifted away a couple of steps, turned to face him at what it apparently judged a safe distance. “Though it’s not a version of Trelayne you would recognize, I think. In your version, it will take millions of years for the river to lay down the sediment that goes to form this rock.”

“Then did we take the quick paths to get here? Travel through the pressured places under the earth like the Kiriath?”

“No.” A thin smile. “The Black Folk are engineers. They take the long way around to get to everything. Much like humans, in fact. In time you will come to resemble them more than you know.”

“That’s going to upset a few Majak purists I know.”

The dwenda shrugged. “They won’t live to see it. As a culture or as individuals. For that matter, nor will you, the League cities or the Empire.”

“You sound irritatingly superior when you talk like that.” Ringil offered up a smile of his own. “If you don’t mind me saying.”

“Why should I mind? The superiority is evident.”

“So it’s true, then. All the stories they tell, all that Aldrain lore they babble. You are immortal.”

Another shrug. “So far.”

Ringil laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. “Just like that barking black dog, eh? How the hell would anybody know something like that?”

The echoes flapped at the chamber roof, then chased each other away through the dark. The dwenda frowned. “Black dog?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just something I heard the other day.” Ringil stared around in the gloom, groping after memories of the evenings spent in pointless discussion at Shalak’s place. Speculation run wild amid cheese and wine and easy company. “So, this place, then. This has to be part of the Aldrain marches. The places between, where the constraints of time are not felt. The Ageless Realm.”

“It has been called that, yes. Among other things.”

“And you brought me here with, what? Sorcery?”

“If you like. It might be simpler to say I carried you. When the aspect storm, the maelstrom gate of alternatives, is summoned, it translates everything within its radius. As it wrapped around me, so it brought you as well.”

“Neat trick. You think you can teach it to me?”

“No. You would have to . . . evolve before that became possible.”

Ringil’s eyes fell on the black figure against the wall. He saw now that it was a suit of something like armor, hung a couple of feet up on the stonework in some fashion he couldn’t work out. He moved closer, scrutinizing the smooth oval curves of a helm that showed no external decoration at all, that in fact resembled nothing so much as the head of some sleek sea mammal coming up for air.

“This yours?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Ringil reached up and touched the suit at one hip. The material it was made of felt cool and smooth, more like leather than mail. He imagined it would mold to the wearer like a second skin. And the visor—he could only now make it out—was a simple sweep of glass as black as the rest of the suit, set in the helm with a precision he had only ever seen before in the finest workings of the Kiriath engineers.

He felt the dwenda draw closer behind him. He lifted one slack leg of the armor in his hand, let it swing gently back against the wall.

“You weren’t wearing this when you came for me.”

“No. There wasn’t time.” Ringil thought the voice turned ironic. “Nor much need, in the end.”

It was like a touch, soft at the nape of his neck. He turned about in the dark drip-sounding damp of the air, and found himself eye-to-eye with his companion. This time the bonfire in his belly was instant, a roaring, sheeting heat that rushed upward and licked at the underside of his ribs.

“You got lucky,” Ringil said unsteadily.

The dwenda seemed to move forward, a single seamless step. His bulk crowded at Ringil’s chest. “Did I?”

And Ringil—Ringil couldn’t do anything at all now with the slippery smile that played around his lips like smeared grease, and would not come off. He felt his breathing deepen, his pulse go dripping like hot wax along the insides of his arms and down his thighs. His prick was a hot iron bar pinned up against his stomach by the suddenly constricting cloth of his breeches. The dwenda’s arms lifted to his sides, a gossamer caress of motion that he felt with shivering intensity, for all that the thing’s hands never touched him.

“What time is it?” he asked, thickly.

The question came out of nowhere. He couldn’t fathom a reason for it at all, couldn’t understand it in any way but that it felt like the last flailing of a drowning man.

The dwenda stepped into him again, drenched his face in its shadow. The candle gleam in the eyes, oh ye gods the pressure of a huge iron-hard erection to match his own pressing against his thigh, and now the dwenda’s hands on him.

“It’s no time at all,” the voice told him in a whisper. “I am time here, I am all the time you need.”

And then the cool mouth fastened on his, levered his lips apart once again, lozenges of light and dark seemed to slide across and through him, and then the whole world went over sideways in sparks, like a tabletop candelabra swiped flat amid the laden plates of a feast abandoned in the gloom and waiting for anyone with the inclination to come and plunder.

IF THE DAMP AIR WAS CHILLY, HE DIDN’T NOTICE AS HIS CLOTHES CAME off, as the dwenda’s heated kisses bit their way down his neck and over his exposed chest, as impatient hands tugged down his breeches over boot tops, tore undergarments down to match, as the dwenda knelt and plunged the head of Ringil’s cock into his mouth.