This story originally appeared as "Worms Of The Earth" in the limited edition hardback of The Moss Mother's Maze. This is a slightly edited version of that story, with a new title. The story is free to read online, or you can grab the epub for £2.

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1

“No matter what happens,” my father used to tell me, “no matter where you end up, always remember this. You were shaped by this land, where the last of the dragons was buried. That’s where your heart comes from. You’ve magic in your veins.”

A nice story, I always thought. A way for a hard old man to tell his daughter he loved her without actually having to say it. What I didn’t know then, but would soon learn, was that it was true.

This land does have dragons buried in it.

2

It’s not hard to believe there are dragons buried here. The moors roll on for miles, broken and scarred, barren and empty. The ground is soft, boggy, split open by great steep cloughs of peaty black earth, like some monstrous beast raked its claws across the land.

In winter the mists rise like exhaled breath. The earth blends into the clouds like someone dreamed it. In summer, with no shade for miles in any direction, the sun is merciless. The ground smokes. Our world burns. Great walls of flame tear across the scrub, inhaling everything in their path. But in the cool dark valleys of the peat cloughs the earth still weeps water, still turns to mud that steals boots and drowns the unwary. And when the flames meet the wet, exposed flesh of the moors that water turns to steam that mixes with the smoke, making the air heavy and hot and thick.

Have you ever smelled peat smoke? Have you ever woken to your house filled with it, to the distant crackle of flames as the earth burns around you? Have you ever lived somewhere where the only things that grow are mosses, and mushrooms, and hard berries so rank and poisonous that at night owls drop out of the sky dead because the mouse they just caught ate one earlier in the day?

Easy to believe there’s dragons in the ground here, rotting beneath the earth, leaking their vile toxins into the soil.

The knight arrived on a burning day. We heard his dog before we saw either of them, its barks flat and distant through the smoke and haze. I remember the sky was clear of clouds, the sun a hateful white eye staring through the shroud of smoke.

When the sun is up and the wind is down the smoke twists the light. Everything is thrown into stark relief, a world of sharp, blinding contrast for a few feet before it disappears into the orange haze. The only good thing about a still day when the burn is up is that there’s no wind to drag the flames across the village.

So this was how we first met him, the sound of his dog breaking through the distant crackle of fire. Then a silver-black shape came looming out of the smoke, a silhouette that occasionally flashed with brilliant, dazzling white as the smoke shifted and the sun caught his metal plates.

He came to us in armour, dull and smoke-blackened and glowing with heat. His face was blistered and red, the skin peeling away in great wet strips. He strode proud out of the fires of our poisoned land, eyes grim and full of purpose, hands clutching his razor-studded helmet and the saddlebags from a horse we later learned he’d left dead and burning somewhere on the moor. As far as I know, nobody ever found its bones.

That night I sat on a stool by the bar with Dad and we listened. This was a rare treat for me. My father preferred to stay away from the drink, said he couldn’t be trusted with it, and so we rarely visited the pub. But a strange man in armour covered head to toe in razorblades had just walked out of the fire with a three-legged dog by his side, and a few hours later the heavens opened and dumped a rain so torrential onto us that the fires vanished almost as fast as they came, and he said that seemed as good a reason as any to indulge for a single night.

The knight picked a table off in the corner of the pub, not wanting to be the centre of attention, but what he personally wanted in that particular moment didn’t matter to anybody but him. The pub was packed, everyone in the village squeezed in and hoping to hear whatever story he had to tell - because of course he had a story, how could he not? I remember feeling sticky and closed in, the air hot and filled with the smell of a hundred people damp from rain and growing sweaty from the heat of each other.

Out of his armour, dressed in clothes still wrinkled from his saddlebags and only approaching clean, he was almost a more intimidating sight than when he’d arrived. He was built like a brick wall that sprouted legs and begun to walk. His skin was red raw, blistered and oozing from where he’d nearly been roasted alive inside his plates. All along one side of his head his hair was missing, his scalp a mass of years-old knotted scar tissue as white as bone against his cooked skin. Three of the fingers on his left hand were gone, replaced with long tapering spikes that looked like they’d been screwed directly into the stumps of what remained. When he opened his mouth, rows of dark black stone looked out in place of his teeth.

“What is he?” I remember asking my Dad. He just shrugged, muttered the word “foreign”, as though that meant anything.

We were here for his story, but this was a man who looked like he had a thousand of them. And we didn’t know which one to ask for first.

3

“You’re a long way from anywhere out here,” he said. Old Cowell had gone and sat with the knight, dragging over a stool and pushing a fresh pint across the table. The knight didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to look at Cowell, but he didn’t shoo the man away, either. So Cowell sat, quietly tamped his pipe, waited. The rest of us chatted quietly to ourselves, instantly forgotten small talk meant to disguise the fact that all our attention was on the stranger. We all waited for him to do or say something, and it was torture.

When he finally spoke his voice was low and smooth, and the chatter in the pub fell quiet in a second. He was talking to Cowell but it was obvious he knew he was really speaking to everyone. I think that was what he wanted.

“A long, long way,” he said. “Almost missed you in all the smoke.”

“Aye,” Cowell said. “Easily missed.”

“That’s no bad thing.”

“T’ain’t. Things stay quiet, f’t most part.” Cowell puffed on his pipe, fingers slapping on the end, purple smoke rising up through his moustache. “As we like it.”

A pause, the two of them locking eyes for a second.

“Not many visitors,” Cowell said.

“I won’t be intruding long. Tonight, maybe tomorrow. Then I’ll be off.” The knight stopped, looked again at Cowell, his face full of expectation. The way he spoke was strange to me. Not the words, or the accent, but something about the way he waited for his turn to speak, waited for Cowell to pick up the thread he’d left hanging. It was like he’d never really had a conversation, like he’d been taught the theory of turn-taking but never experienced the reality of actual speech, of people cutting in and talking over.

I expected Cowell would ask after the knight's business. Why are you here? What are you looking for? Why are you leaving so soon? But he didn’t. All he did was grunt and suck on his pipe some more, send another puff of smoke up into the rafters.

The knight cleared his throat, glanced around the quiet room. He seemed unsure of himself, and it didn’t look natural on him.

“I’ve a map,” he said, finally. His eyes lit up with something like excitement and he jerked a little, like he’d gone to lean forward in his seat but stopped himself.

“Aye?” Cowell said.

The knight reached down under the table, mutilated hand patting the head of the dog curled up by his shins before rooting around in his saddlebags. When it emerged into view again it was clutching a long, slender tube. It looked like it was made from bone, hollowed out and capped with thick black wax that had melted and run down the sides in curling strands. He frowned when he saw that, tipped the open end over his palm to catch whatever was inside.

With a soft trickling hiss a small shower of ash spilled out of the bone, cascading over his hand and through the gaps in his fingers and onto the table beneath. He sighed, his breath coming out in a gust that pushed the ash across the wood in the direction of Cowell.

“I had a map,” he corrected himself, his voice flat.

Cowell tutted gently, thcing his tongue against the back of his teeth.

“A damn shame,” he said. “Fine things, maps. You never know where they’ll lead you.” He paused to take a deep, slurping sip from his pint. “Where was yours to lead?” he asked, and you could feel everyone’s attention focus in on the pair like the point of a dagger.

The knight glanced around again, eyes lingering on everyone in his audience. I’ve never known what he thought of us, then. I never thought to ask.

He swallowed slowly, wet his lips with a dark tongue then wet his tongue with a long drag from his so-far-untouched pint. I heard his fingers slide on the outside of the glass where it was slick with condensation.

“Well,” he said, at last. “I was told it would lead me to a dragon.” He looked up, met Cowell’s eye, and for the first time he smiled. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen one around?”

They chatted for a while and slowly people relaxed. None of us had seen a dragon, of course. We all knew the old story about dragons buried beneath the moors, but that was all they were - stories. And once they realised that the knight was just a foolhardy treasure hunter on a misguided mission to the arse-end of nowhere, people soon went back to their own business. But something about him held my attention, and so while my dad sipped a fresh pint of shandy I kept listening.

If I hadn’t, I never would have got involved. Never would have ended up deep beneath the earth, choking to death on spores, losing two of my fingers gripping the knight’s razor armour as I tried to drag him back to safety.

But I did.

“You don’t remember anything of the map?” Cowell was saying. The knight was deep into his drink now, growing a little maudlin as the reality that his journey had come to an end settled into him.

“Very little,” he said. “This place was named on it. But named something else. Something older.”

He muttered to himself, started trying to sound out a word, like it was on the tip of his tongue and he couldn’t reach it.

“Hy- Hym. No. Del? Mosdel?”

An image sprang to my mind then. Ancient iron, a thick slab of rusting metal out on the moors, older than I could possibly know. And a word carved into it, almost worn smooth with rain and time.

“Hytelmos,” Cowell said with a smile, a smile that faded when he realised he’d heard a small voice say it at the same time as him.

Both of the men were looking at me. My dad’s hand gripped my shoulder, squeezing tight enough to make me wince. Cowell narrowed his eyes, scowled through the gloom of smoke that filled the pub.

“That you, Sen?” he said, and my dad grunted. “You and your gal, is it?” He beckoned us over. “Not seen you in a minute. Come and meet my new friend.”

Before I knew it I was sliding into a seat between Cowell and the knight and my dad was sitting down opposite me. The corner smelled like beer and sweat and cooked pork. Under the table something moved and I felt the cold nose of the dog snuffling at my ankle.

“What was that word you just said?” Cowell asked, turning to me.

I looked at my dad, unsure, and he must have seen something like fear in my eyes because he said, “It’s okay. You’ve done nowt wrong.”

I looked up at Cowell, then at the knight, who was staring at me with something like hunger. I quickly put my eyes back on the nice old man who’d known me my whole life.

“Hytelmos,” I said.

“That’s the one,” Cowell said. “Do you know what it means?” I shook my head, and I felt the knight shift back away from me. I sensed something like disappointment rolling off him. Cowell was smiling gently, the old leather skin around his eyes crinkling into dark valleys that made me think of the peat cloughs out on the moors.

“I’m not surprised,” Cowell said. “That’s an old word. An old name.”

“I’ve never heard it,” Dad said.

“No reason you would’ve. It’s what this place was called before the east folk came and drove everyone who was here away into the forests. Before they brought this tongue we’re speaking now. Probably it’s written down somewhere in some record, some great sheaf of parchment in one of the cities, but who here’s ever seen them?”

“That was what, a thousand years ago?” My dad laughed. “No way you could know that, you old fraud. You’re spinning us a tale, hoping this idiot” - he gestured at the knight, who narrowed his eyes - “will stand you another drink.”

“Oh, whisht,” Cowell said. “You know I’d never.”

“What does it mean?” the knight asked.

“Could mean a few things,” Cowell said. “Mews is moss, I think. And we’ve plenty of that up here. Hytel? That’s a little harder. Could be hydale, or hysael. Something like dust, or something like a container. A box. Some sort of hidden place.”

“A grave?” the knight asked.

I had a weird feeling, then. Went all cold and distant. It felt like I was pulling back out of my skin, retreating up through the back of my skull. All my skin came over with goosepimples. I felt at once like the smallest thing in the world, a tiny speck high above everything watching from a far, but also like a giant peering through a window into a nest of ants. I felt outside time, like I knew exactly what was about to happen next, like I’d already lived it.

My vision filled with the iron slab, the word carved into it, the heavy iron hoop that emerged from the ground and disappeared into the iron, a thick heavy ring pinning the thing to the ground. That huge bolt holding the door - because I knew, somehow, that it was a door - shut from the outside.

“Not a grave,” I said, and I felt them all look at me. “A jail.”

I told them about the iron slab, and the deadbolt. About how I’d found it years ago and never thought anything of it. Just one of those weird things out on the moors, a place nobody else seemed to know about, somewhere I could go when I wanted to be alone.

I told them about the way the air changed there, how it’s always a little warmer, the sun a little harsher, the shadows a little deeper.

I tried to tell the knight how to get there, but with so few landmarks it’s all but impossible to describe. I tried to draw a map for him, but that was even harder.

Eventually the knight looked at my dad. “You’ll let her guide me,” he said. We all heard the way he tried to make it a question rather than a demand and failed. My dad, to his credit, started to object, but then the knight’s purse hit the table with a heavy thud. A few coins spilled out of it - thick, untarnished silver. The pouch bulged with the promise of more.

“All of it,” he said. “Yours. If she’ll guide me.”

More money than any of us would see in a lifetime. Of course Dad said yes.

4

The morning was hot and wet, the ground thick with the rain of the night before and the air pregnant with rain still to come. All I had on was my thin dress and my boots and even then I felt like I was always on the verge of overheating. I don’t know how he went on in his armour.

We barely talked, but it was in a comfortable way rather than an awkward one. He seemed the type who preferred to be left to his thoughts, who only spoke when he felt he had something worth saying, and I was fine with that.

He followed me without question or complaint. I’d led people across the moors before and always it was an ordeal. Strangers can’t read the land the way we can, can’t see that if you step here you’ll go up to your hip in mud but if you step here, then here, then there, then back to here, then leap just so that you’ll be fine. He copied every step I took from the moment we left the village, never needing prompting or correcting, clanking along behind me like some sort of tin shadow. Even his dog followed perfectly, sometimes stopping to bark at butterflies but never running after them.

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.

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?

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.

I slumped to the ground holding my wounded hand, squeezing tight to try and stem the flow of blood, finally giving in to the despair lurking in the back of my mind this whole time, finally allowing the tears to fall. I was going to die here.

Porridge was next to me, sniffing my hand, trying to lick at the wounds, and for a second I took some small comfort in it. Then the knight whistled, her ears pricked up, and she abandoned me to return to her master.

I felt the pressure shift, and something huge emerged around the corner. A long snout, white as stone, scales shifting and rippling like a rockfall. A shaggy coat of deep green moss sprouted from the gaps between the scales. It was like the moor itself had come alive.

The head forced itself around the angle of the corner, a milky white eye as big as my head with a sheep-like figure eight pupil that blinked at me, layers of nictitating membrane gliding across the surface with a series of sharp wet slaps.

“Mother,” the knight said, raising his arms. Moss sprouted from the gaps in his armour, blooming with unnatural speed. Porridge barked, started to back away, but the knight whistled again and she fell to heel.

The living earthslip shifted, the stone scales where its lips should be pulling back to reveal jagged shards of smoky grey quartz. A forked tongue flicked over them, and then it opened its maw and exhaled.

Instinct saved me. Once again I had fallen into that dreamlike state of observation, that feeling that everything was happening in slow motion, that I had seen it all before and knew everything in an instant before it occurred. As the beast the knight called Mother drew in its breath I did the same, sucking in air to the deepest parts of my lungs and clamping it down.

She exhaled, and the corridor filled with a thick cloud of shifting spores that roiled and churned in the lantern light. The knight opened his arms wide as though welcoming them, striding forward into the cloud and disappearing into the haze with Porridge at his side.

As the cloud of spores cascaded down the corridor I lost sight of the dragon, and it was like a spell was broken. I found my feet, and I ran.

7

This is the part of the tale that people always find the most unsatisfying.

“Where did you run?” they ask. “What did you see in the maze? What did it feel like when you finally found your way out?”

All I can do is shrug.

The memory of that final flight is fragmented, shattered into mirror shards that shift and fall at random. Some days I remember things that I later forget, or else that later memories directly contradict.

I think that we were down in that maze for only an hour or two. I was found on the moor, collapsed in a peat clough, the stumps of my missing fingers packed with moss I had torn from the ground beside me. When I didn’t return from escorting the knight by mid afternoon my dad gathered our neighbours and they set out across the moor to look for us. Night hadn’t even fallen when I was discovered.

I don’t remember my escape. I don’t remember packing my wounds. I don’t remember being found. I don’t remember the days immediately after being rescued. Sometimes I dream of it, but dreams can’t be trusted.

Eventually I was lucid enough to direct people to the maze’s entrance. I begged them not to go looking for the knight, tore my throat raw screaming that nobody should go down there, that they should seal that shaft up for good. Pour hot lead into it, make it so that nobody can ever go back in there.

They chose, instead, to seal it with a thick grate and good locks. And I was thankful for that, if I’m to be honest with you. Despite the horrors I had experienced my urge to explore never waned. I welcome the dreams when they come, relish the chance to walk beneath the earth and learn what secrets it held.

One day, when I’m older, when I’ve walked under different suns and delved into different cracks in the earth, when I’ve learned some of the things the knight never had the chance to teach me, I’ll come back, pry up that grate, and throw down a new rope.

The stumps of my fingers still ache from time to time. Sometimes, late in the year when the days grow short and the wind carries a chill that fights with the lingering heat of the dying summer, when the air is pregnant with the promise of coming rain, my scars grow white and begin to crack open. I’ve grown to love the feeling of it, the way the tiny shoots poke through my skin, the way the moss blooms and flowers on my flesh. In those moments I feel a connection with the land that nothing else can match.

On the nights when the moss takes root in my flesh, the dreams are more vivid than ever. I remember the knight, and Porridge, and the distant clang of ancient machinery powering whatever lies at the heart of the maze. Protecting it. Guarding it.

But mainly I remember Mother. And I remember that I was shaped by this land, this desolate place of moss and lichen, poison and fire. This place where dragons are buried.