We were in the corner of a huge, empty room, so vast that the light from the dog’s lantern didn’t touch the far walls. I could see motes of something drifting in the air, dust or tiny spores from something.

At our feet the dog plonked onto her side, kicked up a leg, and began licking herself. The knight let out a slow breath, almost a sigh, though he didn’t seem to relax at all.

“Stay here,” he said, voice so low that it barely carried to me. He didn’t need to tell me twice.

He stepped out into the room, treading carefully, probing at the floor in front of him with the tip of his sword. The dog lay in front of me, watching him nonchalantly. All I could see of the room was more rusted iron identical to the corridors we had just fled down, featureless and red. I thought I could feel the weight of it hanging over us.

The knight reached the edge of the lantern light and stopped. He turned back to me and the dog, gestured us over with a flick of his fingers. I was shaking so much that I didn’t think my legs would support me, felt like I was frozen in place, but though my brain didn’t want me to go anywhere my body took over out of some kind of weird instinct and I found myself walking across the iron with the dog by my side.

As we approached the knight the light spread out over more of the room. In the centre of this vast space the iron panels of the floor were missing, revealing bare earth that reminded me of the peat cloughs I knew so well. From this patch of damp ground rose a thick, twisted tree trunk, its bark grey and ashen, knotted and scarred. Ten feet above the floor it had been ravaged by something, torn and scraped and hacked at so that the pale white flesh of the heartwood was visible. It reminded me of the base of the door frames in my house, the wood scratched and ripped in long straight lines where our cats sharpened their claws on it.

“What did that?” I asked, my voice so low that I barely heard myself.

The knight shook his head - I don’t know - and stepped up to the tree, planting his feet carefully. He raised a hand to the bark, his gauntlets glinting in the light.

Slowly he traced the tip of his finger down one of the long gouges in the wood. As he pulled his hand away I saw a thread of liquid stretched between his finger and the wood, a viscous amber substance that glowed in the dim light.

He pulled his hand further from the tree and the strand of liquid broke with a wet plop. There was a rush of air, and the next thing I knew a thick cloud of spores was gusting out of the cracks in the tree and filling the air around the knight’s head.

“Down!” he said, pushing me to the ground as the end of his word disappeared into a choking, hacking cough. He dropped to his knees beside me, eyes streaming with water and cheeks blown out into fat circles as he tried to hold back the sound of the coughing that racked his body. While one hand covered his mouth the other dived into a pouch on his belt, pulled out the square of leather he’d used to grip the door. He stuffed it into my hands, gestured at me to hold it out while he popped the seal from a waterskin and soaked the thing. Then, as the thick cloud of spores settled over him and he retched into the palm of his gauntlet, he raised my hands and pressed the wet leather over my mouth and nose.

I realised I’d been holding my breath, and now I allowed myself to inhale through leather. The flow felt restricted, the air wet and cool and uncomfortable, but I didn’t choke. No spores could get through.

Still hacking away, his chest heaving and his face turning red, the knight lay down on the ground and started to roll on his side away from the tree. When he left the damp soil and rolled up onto the floor his armour scraped on the iron plates with a sharp, piercing shriek that filled the room. I saw spores settling on his body, but the cloud was thickest where he had been standing and he had soon got himself out of the worst of it.

Carefully, clutching the wet leather to my face and keeping my head to the floor, I crawled over to him. He was still heaving his chest, his breathing heavy and laboured, but the coughing was slowly subsiding. He rose up onto a single knee, his head darting back and forth as he looked around the room.

“We need to leave,” he said, and his voice was rough and strained. “Touch nothing.”

I nodded, biting my tongue. He’d already told me that once, and I’d heeded him. I wasn’t the one who had touched the tree.

We moved toward an archway in the wall, far across the room from the door we’d entered through. We gave the tree and its clouds of spores a wide berth, and I found myself breathing as little as possible just in case the spores had drifted. As we approached I spotted another archway in the same wall, closer to where we had come in, and I tugged on his hand.

He stopped, and I felt like I could hear his brain turning. There was no way for us to know which way we should go. I still don’t know how he made the decision, and I still don’t know what would have happened if he’d chosen differently, but after a few seconds he shook his head and pulled me in the direction of his original choice. He was stumbling, dragging his feet, his breathing heavy and laboured. He dragged me along beside him in fitful starts and stops. His hand gripped my upper arm tightly, and every time he moved it felt like he was falling forward rather than stepping.

We moved across the room, and from some indistinguishable place in the darkness behind us I heard a great, grinding shriek of metal as something huge and heavy scraped across the floor. It lasted barely a second, echoing through the corridors, chased by the deafening thunderclap of tonnes of iron slamming into something hard and unmoving. I felt the pressure in the air change, the walls and floor vibrating in sympathy. Bile rose in my throat.

We ran, or at least stumbled faster. Through the archway and into a sprawling maze of passages. The knight led us blindly, twisting and turning on sheer instinct, the light from the dog’s lantern flashing over identical iron panels, thick white moss sprouting from the joins. Our feet echoed loudly, the knight’s armour scraped and sparked against the walls. My breath was high in my throat, pinned in place by the thudding of my heart. I imagined I could hear heavy steps behind us, something with too many legs pursuing us through the corridors, and I stumble-stepped after the knight as fast as I could.

We continued on up corridors, the knight muttering “left, left, keep left”. Every now and then a massive vault door loomed up out of the darkness, a high circle set in the wall just like the one we had come through earlier. Always in the side wall, never at a dead end, and each time the knight dragged me past them. Who knew what could lie on the other side? Open passages loomed to the right and we darted past the entrance to those, too.

I don’t know how long we ran, frantic and scared, always on the edge of collapse. I knew that our pace was dropping, that whatever pursued us would soon be on us. I found myself leading the knight instead of being dragged along. His breaths came sharper, now. He was losing the strength to support himself, spending more time limping along with his shoulder pressed heavy against the wall.

A clarity came over me as we passed another vault door. The fog of panic was fading and a grim realisation was taking hold of me. I saw a corner in the corridor up ahead, the path kicking to the left. ““Left, right, passage,” I said softly to myself, picturing the way I knew the path was going to go. As we moved down the corridor I listened, and realised that the sounds of pursuit had stopped.

The knight stumbled against the wall, the edges of his razors shrieking against the iron, and half a second later I heard it echoing up the passage behind us.

“We’ve been running from ourselves,” I said. I don’t think the knight heard me.

Round the corner. Left. Another corner. Right, and then the path splitting. A passage to the right, a corner to the left. On the wall to the left I saw the scrape of metal, the iron freshly wounded at the same height as the knight’s shoulder.

His fingers were still gripping my upper arm but they pried loose easily. I dropped his hand, stepped away as he slumped back against the iron. He let out a long breath that I’m sure was meant to be word, but I have no idea what he was trying to say.

“Wait here,” I said.

I moved up the passage, tracing the wounded iron with the tips of my fingers until I reached the edge of the lantern light. The dog stayed with the knight, and no amount of clicking my tongue or waggling my fingers or saying here, girl, come here would move her. Absolutely no part of me wanted to go off alone into the darkness of the maze.

With shaking hands I unhitched the lantern from her collar. She whined softly and I ruffled her head, whispered stay here for a minute. Then, lantern in hand, I moved past the corner and into the adjoining passage, sure of what I was going to find but hoping against hope that I was wrong. After a short run it kicked back on itself, opened into a large archway, spilled out into the vast chamber with the tree that had poisoned the knight.

Back to the junction, a quick check to be sure that the dog was still guarding her master and the knight was still breathing. Then up the passage and around the corner, following the scrapes in the iron, every step increasing my conviction that I was right.

I came to a junction, held up the lantern to see the passage dead-ending ahead of me. Turned left, saw more scrapes in the walls. Another corner, a U-turn, more scrapes, then out into a long passage. A few steps, vault door to my right, drops of blood on the floor, the passage kicking back to the left. A shape on the ground, heavy and jagged, the light spilling over it to reveal the knight and his dog exactly where I had left them.

We’d been running in circles the entire time.

6

The knight’s breathing was laboured even at rest. His pack gave up a waterskin, a husk of bread, some strips of jerkied meat wrapped in oilcloth, another pair of bruised apples, a small bag of dry biscuits that smelled like beef and black pudding. I rationed them carefully, chewing on a strip of the meat while I fed the dog a handful of the biscuits, pouring drops of water into the knight’s mouth and watching carefully to see that he swallowed it rather than inhaled it.

At some point I’d stopped shaking. My heart had settled, and now I was filled with a grim determination. Twice we had fled noises in a blind panic. Twice it had got us nowhere. I’d trusted that the knight knew what he was doing, but he’d gone and touched that tree that even I, a child, could tell shouldn’t be touched, and now he was deteriorating fast.

If we wanted to get out of here alive we needed to be smart. We needed to be calm. We needed to think, and move with purpose, and not take silly risks. We hadn’t come far, and I knew how to get back to the tree room. That meant that we could find our way out.

But maybe going back was one of those silly risks we shouldn’t take. This time we had fled from our own echoing footsteps, but the first time we’d been fleeing something very real. There was no way to know whether those scuttling metal things were still lurking behind the door, waiting to pounce the second it opened. Which left two options, as far as I could see it. Back into the tree room and through the other archway I’d seen, or else through the door in this looping corridor that we’d stumbled past so many times.

I packed up the food, took the lantern from the dog again.

“Wait here,” I said.

There could be anything behind that door. I didn’t even know if I could open it. But I could go and scout the archway, see what lay beyond it. Then maybe we - I - could make a decision.

The dog and the knight faded into the shadows and the passages opened up ahead of me. Back into the room with the tree, hugging the wall, sliding along the weirdly warm iron until I reached the archway. I kept the shutters of the lantern narrow, only letting the tiniest sliver of light spill out so I could see ahead of me, not wanting to make myself a beacon in the darkness. I sensed rather than saw the grey, ashy bulk of the tree somewhere out in the gloom.

Somewhere off in the distance, across the emptiness of that vast chamber, I heard the scrape of stone on iron and heavy, bestial breathing. I froze, shuttered the lantern fully, clamped down on my breath. Somewhere something big was snuffling and scraping. The noise made me think of days spent truffle hunting with dad and Cowell and the dogs, that rooting rustling noise of an animal scrabbling in dirt. But bigger. Deeper. Weightier.

The noise drifted, moved away, the sound fading as the heavy iron surrounding us soaked it up, and I allowed myself to exhale. I could still hear that heavy scraping noise, and my brain conjured up a vision of a huge milk-white dragon dragging itself through the corridors. Somewhere at the base of my skull I felt panic rising again, felt my feet gluing themselves to the floor, and I stamped it down mercilessly.

“Dragons aren’t real,” I whispered. I’d heard something, sure. Something big. Something alive. But it was moving away, I couldn’t hear its breath any more, and that was good. Panic would only bring noise, and noise would bring it down on me.

I slipped along the wall, turned into the archway, and stopped dead still. Nothing moved in the darkness. From somewhere ahead of me I heard the plink of water dripping, but that was all. I opened up the lantern.

I’d entered one side of a small room, and opposite me another archway gave way to another identical iron passage beyond it. The floor between the arches was marked with a wide strip of rust, like a red carpet stretched across the middle of the room. I crouched down, reached out a finger to run it gently along the surface.

It was perfectly smooth, not at all like any rust I’d ever seen in my life. It felt like it had been buffed and polished repeatedly, retaining the colour of the corrosion but none of the texture. Down here there was a smell, too, a rank animal scent that made the hairs on my back and arms leap to attention.

I let the light play over the rest of the chamber. The walls and ceiling were a mass of scratches, scrapes, and deep gouges in the iron. Sharp shards of it were curling away, their edges gleaming silver in the light.

“No rust,” I whispered. “Fresh.” I knew it was a bad idea to make any noise here, the sound of my own voice grounded me, helped convince me that this wasn’t a dream, that I was in control of my own fate.

I looked again at the buffed floor. There was a connection between that and the wounded walls, I was sure.

Very, very carefully I stretched out a foot and placed the tiniest bit of weight on the red ground. I felt the difference immediately, felt a softness to the floor here that wasn’t present anywhere else. It creaked gently under the very slight weight of my boot and I knew, instinctively, that it would collapse underneath me if I applied even a little more pressure.

I thought again of that huge animal I had heard earlier. Did it come through here? Again my mind conjured the image of a dragon, though this one wasn’t like the dragons of the stories. I saw a wide, flat lizard, something like a fat adder with legs, its belly dragging on the ground. I pictured it sliding through this room over years and years, its scales polishing the ground to a low sheen, its weight slowly working the iron panels of the floor loose.

Was it smart, then? Did it know that the floor could no longer take its weight? Was that why it now used the walls and the ceiling, sinking its wicked claws into the iron to drag itself around a pitfall of its own making?

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