An involuntary shudder rippled up my spine and I shook my head, slapped myself on the cheek. The sharp sound echoed up the passage ahead of me and out of instinct I clamped the lantern shutters shut.

“Stop it,” I said. “Stop freaking yourself out.”

Clearly we couldn’t go this way. Maybe I was capable of jumping over that rusted patch, avoiding the fragile part of the floor, but the knight would never get around it. And what if the dragon - my brain kept calling it that and I decided not to fight it, because the more I fought it the more I’d be actively thinking about that huge thing in the darkness - what if the dragon decided to slither this way while we were trying to cross that room? What if there was something else worse on the other side, and we’d left ourselves with nowhere to run to?

Time to make good decisions.

The knight and the dog were where I’d left them. He was sitting up against the wall, half an apple clutched in his ungloved hand, the juices of it running down his chin. He looked terrible, but somehow better than when I’d left him. His breathing was still slow and laboured but the haze that had settled over his eyes was gone. When the light of the lantern struck him his free hand darted to the sword lying on the floor by his side, and that gave me a glimmer of hope.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said as I clipped the lantern back on the collar of his dog.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been scouting.”

He smiled, briefly, the expression quickly turning to a grimace as deep, bottom-of-the-lungs coughs racked him.

“Scouting,” he said, his tone at once mocking but also affectionate. “And what did you find?”

I shook my head, gestured to the passage around us. “More of this.” I pointed down the passage. “There’s a door this way. I think it’s our best bet, unless we go back the way we came.”

“Help me up,” he said. I grabbed hold of his outstretched hand and pulled. His armour scraped and shrieked against the iron and his heavy grunt echoed down the passage. As he rose to his feet he stumbled forward and for a second his weight was on me entirely, his bulk pinning me to the iron, edges of his razors digging into my flesh. As he pushed himself away I got a blast of his hot breath across my face. It smelled like damp earth and rotting wood, and I recoiled slightly.

“Sorry,” he said, gasping for breath. “Let’s go slow.”

I led him to the vault door. He gestured to the passage beyond it, to where it kicked around to the right. “Did you check that way?”

I nodded, swallowing heavily. Did he really not remember our mad flight down this passage, how we’d circled round here over and over again?

“It loops around,” I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering. “We’ve been that way.”

I couldn’t read the look he gave me. His face was blank, emotionless. Like there was nothing behind the mask of his eyes. As I looked at him looking at me, waiting for him to say or do something, a thin strand of snot descended from his nostril and settled on his top lip. It was milky white, and somewhere beneath the viscous surface I thought I could see a tinge of red. The knight didn’t notice.

“Right,” he said, at long last. He turned to the vault door, set his hands on the huge ring set in its face, and twisted. It swung open silently, monstrously thick and heavy, and we were forced to jump back against the opposite wall as it swung out and slammed into the iron beside it with a reverberating clang.

The knight made a cradle with his hands for me to step into, boosted me up over the high lip of the door, head swivelling back and forth, scanning the passage as I dropped down into this new room. He lifted the dog in then stepped over the lip as casual as a farmer stepping over a stile.

“We leave that open,” he said, gesturing at the door. “Just in case.” I nodded.

“Give Porridge the lantern again,” he said, and this time I shook my head.

“I like carrying it,” I said. I paused. “Porridge?”

He nodded, and the dog gave a small yip in response to her name. I laughed. “Good name.”

A violent spasm of coughing came over him without warning. He dropped to his knees, hand over his mouth, doubling over as he heaved and retched and choked. Porridge was whining, sniffing around him, making tight worried circles on her three legs. I stood frozen in place, no idea what to do, staring in horror as this man choked in front of me.

I had that weird sensation again of feeling like I was splitting in two, much like I’d felt back in the pub before this all started. One part of me was standing in this room watching the knight cough and splutter on the ground, frozen in terrified indecision. Another part of me was cold and calm but simultaneously on high alert, ears tuned to every little noise in the room and beyond, ready to bolt the second I heard that cacophonous iron scrabbling or the heavy animal huffing coming in our direction.

The coughing subsided and the knight rocked back on his heels. His gauntlets were flecked with blood and mucus, his eyes puffy and red, tears mingling with more creamy white liquid flowing out of his nose. That fog had come over his face again, and he mumbled nonsense words in a thick, wet voice.

I knelt down, let the lantern light his face properly. His pupils were fully dilated, didn’t react at all to the bright light.

“Bed,” he mumbled, gesturing behind me. The word left his mouth in a cloud of fine white spores and I threw myself backwards, the lantern bouncing off to my side. I scrabbled backwards, pulling myself across the warm iron until my back struck the wall. Only then did I allow myself to exhale and pull in a slow, shuddering breath.

“Bed,” I heard him say, from the darkness. I could hear shuffling and scraping, like he was trying to drag himself across the floor. Porridge was sniffing around the fallen lantern, trying to grab the handle in her teeth. The shutters were pointed down at the floor, making a small circle of light beyond which nothing was visible.

I whistled, low and sharp. “Here, girl,” I said. “C’mere Porridge.”

She finally got a grip of the lantern and came trotting over to me, her three feet scraping across the floor with an ungainly grace. Very delicately she placed the lantern on the floor next to me, then turned to go to her knight.

“Wait,” I said, placing a hand on her collar. “Sit?”

She sat, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Stay,” I said, and she lay down with her chin on her front leg.

I opened up the shutter on the lantern as wide as it would go, flooding the room with light. The knight lay outstretched on the floor a few feet away from the door we had climbed through, slowly crawling across the ground as he gulped in thick, shaking breaths. Another door hung in the wall I was leaning against, just a few feet to my left, and another in the corner of the room to my right. More decisions to be made. But they would have to wait.

“Bed,” the knight said again, and now I knew why.

A huge frame of wrought iron stood in the middle of the room, a vast four-poster bed hung with tattered curtains of black silk drawn tight to hide whatever might be beyond them. The knight was pulling himself across the floor toward it.

I knew I should stand, go to the knight, somehow divert his attention or drag him away, but I couldn’t. Something about that bed froze me in place. I can’t explain what, can’t fully express why a simple iron bed with black curtains could exude such powerful malignancy, but it did. Hatred rolled off it in waves, an almost tangible force of wrong that made my stomach churn. I felt like it was crawling over my skin, seeping into my pores, tainting everything it touched. I didn’t want to breathe in case it got inside me.

I sat, frozen, and watched the knight pull his way across the floor. Distantly, somewhere far off in the maze, I heard that shriek-slam again, felt it vibrate through the iron, but I was only dimly aware. I felt foggy, my brain full of warm water lulling me into dreams. But the dreams were sharp and roiling and smelled like sulphur, and the bed was at the heart of them.

The knight had reached the bed. He pulled himself to his knees, his whole body shaking, and pulled back the curtain.

There was no mattress, and no ropes to hold one. Instead the frame was a tangled latticework of bones, femurs and hands clutching each other, bonded together with thick nails and lengths of rusted chain. Some of them pointed up, clawing talons reaching above the surface to wrap bony fingers around the thing that sat atop them.

It looked like a man, bald and naked and sitting proud like a king. Its flesh was yellow-white, bulbous and soft, writhing like someone had stuffed a pale sausage with maggots. Where the hands gripped its thighs the skin had burst, spewing pus down over the grasping bones. Its eyes were stitched shut, the skin around the black threads turned the hot dark red of infection.

The knight was reaching out, his gauntlets barely inches away from touching the thing. Next to me Porridge was growling, her ears forward and her hackles raised, her body coiled and ready to release.

I felt that dreamlike fog slip off me. “Fetch,” I said, and Porridge sprang forward like a bolt from a flatbow. She crossed the space in half a breath, her jaws clamping down on the forearm of her knight. I heard a rip, a pained yelp from the dog as one of the razors in the knight’s arm tore into her cheek, but she held firm with her teeth and pulled.

I was standing beside the knight, no memory of how I got there. This close to the bed I could smell the vile rotting thing sitting atop the bones, could see now that thick black nails had been driven into its skull in a ring like a crown. Waves of dizzying, sickening energy rolled off it. I had never been so close to something so wrong in my life. Every thread of my being screamed at me that it was an abomination, that it couldn’t be real, that it needed to not exist.

Porridge was pulling at the knight’s arm, blood rolling down out of her mouth, but even in his weakened state he was too strong. I threw my arms across him, hugging him from behind, digging my feet into the ground and pulling back with strength I didn’t know I had. Hot, sharp pain flared up in my arms and chest as his blades cut into me and I cried out in pain, but he began to topple. Now that there was momentum Porridge began to pull, and slowly we dragged him across the floor away from the bed.

I reached down without thought, hands scrabbling at his belt as his legs kicked next to me, dragged his huge sword free. I had to use both hands to hoist it, couldn’t even contemplate trying to draw the blade from the scabbard. Instead I raised it like a club over my head, brought it down onto the nail-studded head of that thing on the bed, wincing back as the skull imploded under the force of my blow.

A huge, furious roar filled the room, the sound bludgeoning its way through the thick walls from somewhere beyond the door near where I had been sitting. I knew immediately that this was the beast I had heard, the great heavy fat lizard that had been sniffing down the corridors. The dragon.

Porridge barked, the knight spluttered something unintelligible through a mouth filled with blood and bile and spores. I dropped the sword, hooked my hand beneath his arm pit, and with strength born of sheer panic I dragged him to his feet and pulled him past the bed in the direction of the door I had seen before all of this went wrong.

The iron ring turned easily and I shoved the knight over the lip into the room beyond before I clambered over, Porridge scrabbling up the low wall at my side. Behind us I heard huge impacts, something massive beating on the walls, then the slam of a vault door being thrown open with abominable force.

Again I grabbed the knight under his arm and again I pulled, dragging him along with me with one hand while the other held the blazing lantern high in front of us. Dimly I was aware that we had entered the tree room again, coming in through a door we’d missed last time. All these hours spent in the maze and we’d made no progress at all.

Another roar from behind us, a blast of hot dank rot-smelling air, the sound of claws and massive bulk forcing itself through a doorway slightly too small for it. I was gripped with panic, with the desperate need to run run run get away go faster faster faster run, but some part of me was lucid enough to realise that whatever was chasing us dragon it’s a dragon oh my god they’re real it’s a dragon was hindered by its own size. If we kept moving, if we didn’t get lost or hit a dead end or take a wrong turning that brought us back to this gods-forsaken room with the tree, maybe we could put some distance between it and us.

Past the tree, the dark bulk looming to our left. An opening in the wall next to us, another exit missed last time, relief flooding my body at the thought that maybe we could escape.

I dragged the knight out of the room into a passage running parallel with the long edge of the tree room. I kept us moving in the same direction, not daring to turn back in case the dragon knew of another exit that we’d missed. My greatest desire in the world in that moment was to never see the face of the thing chasing us.

The knight was babbling nonsense words, something about moss and rust and his mother. My palms were slick and sweaty and bloody and my grip under his arm kept failing. Every time I stopped for a second to hoist him back up I heard the crashing cacophony of the dragon behind us. My inner thighs were warm and wet where I’d pissed myself.

I dragged him down the twisting passage, following the featureless iron path as it doubled back on itself again and again. The dragon was thundering behind us, but the sound had changed as we got out of the open space of the tree room and into this narrower space. I could hear it scraping and squeezing, its flesh pressed tight against the walls and the roof, having to force itself into a space slightly too small for it in order to continue the chase. Every time we came to a tight corner, a kickback where the passage doubled back on itself, I felt like we were putting even more distance between us and it.

But still it roared and raged. I imagined I could feel pressure building behind us, like the beast was compressing the air in the passages with every step it advanced on us. It might be slowed but it wasn’t slow. We had to keep moving.

“Mother,” the knight said, his voice suddenly clear. I exhaled sharply, blowing in the direction of his face to disperse the cloud of spores carried on his words. One of his eyes was clouding over, like milk spilled on water.

“Mother!” he shouted, and a roar rattled up the corridor behind us.

I pulled at him but he planted his feet and I stumbled, all my momentum suddenly relieved of his weight. Bright, blinding pain flashed in my fingers as my hand yanked away from its spot beneath his arm. I was acutely aware of my thundering heart, of how each beat was repeated half a second later in my hand. My fingers felt hot, and for a second my vision turned grey. I clung to consciousness desperately, throwing my hand against the wall to steady myself.

My vision cleared and I found myself staring at my hand on the wall as it smeared blood across the iron. My middle and ring fingers were gone, shorn clean off, the blades on the knight’s armour slicing through the bone like it was nothing. A hot, heavy sob forced its way out of my mouth.

The knight was turning away, walking slowly back down the passage in exactly the wrong direction. From somewhere ahead, somewhere far too close, I heard the heavy scraping shuffle of the dragon. It was less frantic now, like it knew that its prey had stopped running. I could hear, too, that bestial snuffling sniffing sound from earlier.

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