It took us hours to reach the place, as I’d said it would. We set off when the sun was still burning the dew off the ground, and by the time we reached the spot our shadows were small black circles directly beneath us. I kept having to resist the urge to look back at him, to stare at his razor-studded armour and his scars and the long, heavy sword strapped to his hip.

“Thank you,” he said when we stopped, placing his hand on the iron slab with something like reverence. He plucked an apple from his pack, slightly bruised but still good, and handed it to me. “You can go now, if you like. I don’t know how long I’ll be. Your da’ will want you home before dark, I’m sure. And before another burn starts.” He paused, staring at me for a second. “I’m grateful,” he said. “You’ve done me a huge service.”

I took a bite from the apple, letting the tart juice wet my tongue, looking from him to the slab. With a hand over my eyes I looked up at the bright mass of clouds, trying to judge what I knew of the weather. It wasn’t hot enough for another burn, or clear enough, and dark was still hours away. I knew I should get home, but…

“You’re going to open it,” I said. He nodded. “Can I stay and watch?”

I’d been coming here for years, my secret place where I’d never seen another living soul. I’d run my fingers over the word carved into the rust, tracing the shape of the letters with my hand and my voice, always wondering what secrets it held. I wanted, more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life to that point, to see it opened. I needed it.

And somehow, with five words and a look, I communicated that to him. He nodded, pointed to a spot a few feet away from the slab.

“Over there,” he said. “Where it’s safer.”

I went without question, practically skipping over. I took another bite of the apple, sat quietly, watched him. A fly buzzed at the juice running down my hand and wrist, settled onto my skin, but I didn’t dare flap it away. I felt like I’d cast some sort of spell over the knight to bend him to my will and that any sudden move might break it.

From his pack he pulled a pair of short, thick bolt cutters, their blades gleaming bright and sharp in the midday sun. He settled their jaws around the old ring that I knew so well, the metal shrieking as the blades scraped across it. He placed a foot on the slab, settled his shoulders, and bore down on the handles.

It seemed like nothing was happening. From where I was standing he looked motionless, frozen in place like some weird statue. The dog had folded her legs up beneath her and sat on the ground staring at him, tongue lolling out as she panted softly. I could hear the bolt cutters groaning under the pressure, see a thick vein growing angry in his temple as he grew more and more tense.

When the hoop finally gave out the sharp snap it made was so loud that I let out an involuntary squeak. The sound rolled out across the empty landscape like high pitched thunder. Off in the distance I saw skylarks burst up from their nests among the scrubby brush, their panicked shapes silhouettes against the bright grey sky.

Then everything was still again.

While I’d watched the birds the knight had been busy. When I looked back he was returning a chunk of lard to his pack, and the old rusted deadbolt across the slab was coated in a thick white layer of it. With a grunt the knight reached down, took hold of the bolt, and pulled it free. Then he reached down, jammed his fingers beneath the lower edge of the slab, and dropped his hips.

“Last chance to leave before I do this,” he said, looking over to me from where he stood.

I nodded. “I know.”

He turned back to his work. I saw him roll his shoulders back, take a big breath, and then he stood up and the slab tilted up under his hands and the thing was open, for the first time in who knows how long.

“That felt…”

“Anticlimactic?” the knight asked, as he tipped the slab backwards over its bottom edge and dumped it unceremoniously into the soil. I nodded.

“It always is,” he said. He was smiling, jagged black teeth all crooked and weird in his mouth. Something in his eyes looked almost feral, and the hairs on my neck stood up.

“Always.” I chewed over the word, over what it must mean. “Is this what you do? This is your job?” I thought about my dad, mending roofs. About Cowell, spending his days shoeing horses. About all the men I knew who made work seem so mundane and boring, a chore you perform to scrape together enough coin to maybe get a hot meal and a bath at the end of the day. And I thought about this man in front of me, covered in scars and burns, his dog just as damaged as him, but bearing pouches bursting with silver. This man who, just by arriving from elsewhere, by not being one of us, had already seen more of the world than I could conceive of.

“Some say it’s folly,” he said. “Not a job at all. That these sorts of places are best left undisturbed.”

I looked at the dark hole that he’d revealed in the ground, at the man who had walked through fire to climb down into it. Part of me - the part of me that spoke in my dad’s voice - thought that maybe those people who said this was folly were right. But the rest of me remembered all those afternoons with my ear pinned to the stone slab, trying to hear whatever might be below it, desperate to know what secrets it held.

I swallowed heavily, my mouth dry all of a sudden. I felt like I was standing at a crossroads, and that one path had a heavy gate across it that might slam shut in an instant if I said the wrong thing. And I hated that, because I didn’t know what the right thing to say was.

The knight stepped over to me and knelt down to my level, his armour creaking and jangling. The ground was soft and wet under his knee and I heard the squelch of mud as his weight settled on it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I know what you’re feeling.” He glanced back to the hole in the ground and I saw the bump in his throat bounce up and then down, heard the gulp of spit in his mouth. “I was your age too. I know what it’s like to want to know everything.”

“I-”

He shook his head, smiling sadly. “If you don’t come back tonight your dad will send people out to find you,” he said. “To find me. And if they find that I took you down there, they’ll string me up and cut out my guts for the crows.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. Of course he was right. So I nodded, and he stood. He pressed another apple into my hand, and then he reached into his pack again and brought out a small stack of silver coins.

“I paid your da’ so he’d let you guide me,” he said, “but I never paid you for the deed itself. Now. Go home, please.”

I nodded, and slowly I turned away. I heard him clanking back in the direction of the hole, heard the dog get up from her spot on the ground. I pictured him climbing down into that hole, walking through an archway gilt with riches I could barely imagine. He and his dog strode through corridors older than anything I had ever known, filled with treasures placed here by people long dead that would make him rich beyond imagining. My heart ached with the longing of seeing it.

I stopped, and I turned back. “What if I pay you?” I asked.

He straightened up from where he had been leaning over his pack, a length of thick rope dangling in his hand. “What?”

“I’ll pay you,” I repeated, holding up the coins he had just given me. He laughed, shaking his head, and I took a step forward.

“What do you think is down there?” I asked.

He looked down into the dark for a second, and I felt like I could hear him thinking. “I don’t know,” he said, at length. “I’m told it’s a maze of some kind. That dragons are buried here. Inside it.”

He looked at me and again I felt him calculating. “It’s dangerous. Too dangerous for a child.”

“If there’s dragons down there they’re dead,” I said. “Or else why would they stay there.”

He tilted his head to one side. The dog yapped at him and he shushed her, almost lazily. “I can’t,” he said.

I threw one of the coins to him the way I’d seen Cowell toss a coin after losing a bet, flicking it with my thumb and watching it spin end over end as it arched through the air. Out of instinct, it seemed, he reached out a hand and caught it.

“No,” he said, after a pause.

I took a step forward. “Just to the bottom,” I said, gesturing to the hole. “Let me climb down with you. Let me see. And then I’ll go.”

He shook his head. “You know I can’t.”

Another step, close enough now that I could have reached out and taken the coin back from his still outstretched hand if I’d wanted to.

“Please.”

The dog rolled onto her side at my feet, then onto her back, three legs stretched up toward me and tongue hanging out. I reached down and scruffled her stomach and she made a happy little yip.

“It’ll be safe,” I said. “I’ll be with you.”

I think I knew he’d broken before he did. I could see it in his eyes, like a wall coming down. He sighed, pushed the coin back into my hand and whistled to the dog, who jumped up from her back.

“I go first,” he said, and I nodded. “You touch nothing. You do exactly as I say.” I nodded again. The same arrangement we’d had to get here, when I led him across the treacherous land that I knew and he didn’t. Except I’d trusted him to know all this stuff without needing to be told, and that sentiment wasn’t being returned. That stung, a little, but I knew that if I said anything now I’d seem petulant. Childish. Like someone who couldn’t be trusted to climb down into a dark, ancient hole where dragons might be sleeping.

“Nobody is to know about this,” he said, and again I nodded.

“Say it.”

“I won’t tell anybody,” I said. And then, “thank you.”

He grunted, and he turned away from me, and he threw one end of the rope down into the hole, and that was how it began.

5

The descent is the bit I remember least, and so I won’t try to recount it. I was too high on my victory, too flooded with adrenaline to take it in. One second we were up on the moors that I knew so well and the next second we were inside them. My hands were aching and raw, burned slightly from the rope, and a cool sweat had coated my entire body, but I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life.

Something in the knight had changed. It was like when a cat suddenly spots something across the room, how they go from soft ball of fur to coiled spring in a heartbeat. I couldn’t see him but I could feel it, feel the tension rolling off him in waves.

I heard a scrape of metal on stone, saw sparks, and then light bloomed from a tiny lantern held in his hand. He reached down to the dog and fastened it to a metal hoop on the throat of her collar, then opened the shutters on it to let light spill out into the room.

We were standing on a thick bed of moss, spongy and soft beneath our feet but with something firm beneath it. I opened my mouth to speak, to ask how there could be moss when there hadn’t been any light down here for thousands of years, but the knight’s raised hand silenced me. I pushed the thought aside and took in the rest of the room, trying to cram it all into my eyes and my memory before he ordered me back up the rope.

The room was a cube of iron, the walls and ceiling made of huge square panels of it, all of them red with rust that clogged the joins between them. The ceiling was maybe twenty feet above us, and the hole we’d climbed down through was practically invisible in the dim light. I thought I could make out a tiny patch of sky above us, but I wasn’t sure. If the rope hadn’t been dangling beside me I don’t think I ever would have found that shaft again.

Directly ahead of us the wall opened in a vast archway onto what looked like a corridor. The light from the dog’s lantern barely penetrated it, but I could see more iron panels and more rust. Two more arches stood in the wall to our left, opening onto more iron.

The knight turned to me, opened his mouth to speak. I knew what he was going to say, of course. He was going to say you’ve seen enough, time to go. And I wouldn’t argue. I’d climb, and leave him here, and spend the rest of my life wishing I’d seen what the rest of this place had to offer.

But he didn’t say that. His eyes widened as they locked on to something behind me. I heard a quick, sharp scuttling, like the ticking of a thousand clocks fallen out of time with one another. The dog barked once, a hard sound that filled the space and echoed around us. The knight grabbed me, yanked me into motion with a force that felt like it would tear my arm loose, and we ran through the first archway.

We sped past a corridor, ducked around a corner, stumbled out into a room thick with moss. The air was damp, filled with the smell of almond and something wet and earthy. I caught a glimpse of white on the floor, didn’t have time to see what it was as the knight dragged me across. A huge door loomed up ahead of us, a vast round thing set into the wall like a plug, a massive circle of iron bolted to the front of it. Another archway opened beside it and the knight darted into the passage beyond as that clicking, clattering, rattling sound filled the air behind us.

“Quickly,” he said, as though I needed the encouragement.

The corridor kicked to the right and we flew around the corner into another one of those doors, this time with nowhere else to go but backwards. The knight snarled, cast a glance behind him in the direction of the ticking scuttling mass of whatever it was. The dog had turned back, put herself between us and whatever was chasing us, hackles raised and teeth bared as a low rumbling growl rose up from her throat.

The knight threw an arm across me, jammed me back into the wall, and I cried out in pain as the razors studded into his armour cut into my skin. I felt heat well up and I knew I was bleeding.

“Quiet,” he said.

His hand plunged into his pack and came out holding a square of supple leather. He wrapped his hand in it, grabbed hold of the circle of iron bolted to the door, and dragged it down. It turned easily and I heard him grunt in surprise as the thing spun and the huge metal plug in the wall hinged back into the space beyond.

“Go,” he said, pushing me. The door was set in the middle of the wall, the bottom of it almost level with my chest, the world’s biggest step up to pass through. So I dived, leaping at it, my hips crashing into the thick iron of the wall and my shoulders dropping down on the other side. I landed heavily on my neck, tumbled into a wall, ended up face down on the ground with the wind knocked out of me.

Somewhere above and behind me I heard a solid thud of metal on metal, the knight’s plated boots clanking down near my head, then the scuttle of claws as the dog followed. A grunt of exertion, the sense of movement above me, a rush of displaced air, and the huge door slammed home with a deep boom that shook the walls and floor and echoed through the corridors of whatever this place was. I thought I could hear noise from behind it, the distant clang of many metal things making violent contact with it, sharp edges scrabbling against the iron, but the thing was so thick, deadened so much sound, that maybe I invented that.

A hand beneath my armpit, the ground falling away from me, and I was on my feet again. The knight knelt, eye to eye with me, and raised a finger to his lips. Shut up. I nodded. His eyes were wide, panicked, and I felt fear rising inside me.

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