The mad monster that was Stanislav seemed to be having just as much difficulty. The loose surface slid underneath him, and his tentacles fought to hold on to the shining rock.

Pushing Mary ahead of him, he turned to Stanislav and brandished the knife.

‘You want me? You want her? You can’t have us. You can’t keep up because you’re weak. Weak, you hear me? You’re just a sheep like the others. A sheep.’

He had no idea if Stanislav had heard him or not. The wind stole his words away the moment they left his mouth. But what was important wasn’t whether Stanislav understood, rather that he could see his defiance with all hundred of his eyes.

Taunt him. Goad him. Make him angry and make him careless. Just as long as he followed them up the mountain.

It seemed to be working. He crawled and rolled up the bare rock after them, thrashing and bubbling, extruding tentacles into crevices and joints, slowly, inexorably, coming after them.

Whereas they were nimbler, but less sure-footed. Stanislav wasn’t going to get blown over the edge of the cliff; they, with their bloodied fingers and toes, their long limbs and impractical clothing, might.

They kept belly-low, but sometimes it wasn’t enough. The wind would whip in between them and their handholds, and bodily lift them into the air, driving in like a crowbar to separate them from their tenuous grip on life.

Whenever it happened, Dalip’s stomach lurched and his blood ran cold. He splayed himself out and pressed himself to the rock, and prayed for it to pass so he could keep going. It wasn’t far now. If he looked up, craning his neck at an unnatural angle to see the zenith, it glowed with pent-up energy. He could feel the buzzing on his skin, the prickle of electricity dancing in the clouds so close above his head, he could have reached up and touched them.

So close, so very close.

‘Come on,’ he bellowed to both Mary and Stanislav. ‘Come on!’

They were all but at the summit, in the very heart of the storm. Fat lances of light burned the rock, cracking it apart, sending shockwaves through the mountain and a blast of hot air against his back. Mary was just below him, and he hauled her up after him, pressing on her head to keep her low.

Stanislav was right behind, a shifting mass of pseudopods dragging itself over the last ledge to the unforgiving bleakness of the top.

The clouds roiled and seethed, and there was nowhere else to go. Dalip had brought them all up here. It only remained to see who would descend again.

The knife was hot in his hand, glowing with a blue aurora. Bringing metal up here, in the middle of an electrical storm? What was he thinking?