They stood on a wide, flat stone, looking out over a landscape like a giant’s toy box. Enormous, craggy boulders were everywhere, piled up in heaps. Bushes and even a few small trees sprouted from between bare stones. Roots grew out over the edges, groping blindly in search of somewhere to burrow, like worms. A mountain loomed in the distance.

Isaac shifted to a language Alice didn’t understand, though she thought he was swearing. She straightened her dress and dusted herself off.

‘This wouldn’t have happened if you had just given me the book, like I asked,’ she said. ‘Or better yet, not stolen it in the first place. Now we’re here, and we’ll have to deal with it.’

‘“We”?’ Isaac shouted. ‘I think I have had about enough of working with you!’

He raised his hands, and Alice caught the scent of snow again. Little swirls of white whipped out from Isaac like ocean foam. He extended his arms, palms out, and a blast of wind hit Alice in the face, freezing cold, as though she’d opened a door into a blizzard. Tiny hailstones bounced off her with painful, stinging impacts, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut.

Blindly, she reached out and pulled a dozen swarmers into being all around her. Borrowing their vision, she saw Isaac in the centre of his self-created gale, and sent the little creatures running at him. The first to arrive pecked at his legs, not deep, but enough to cut his trousers and draw blood. Swearing again, Isaac lowered his hands, directing the blast of freezing wind towards his feet. The swarmers scrabbled for purchase, finding claw-holds on the bare rock or else rolling over the side to carom off the rocks below.

Alice pulled harder on the thread, and more swarmers materialized. She opened her eyes to find Isaac staring back at her, his lip set in a snarl.

‘Don’t you think—’ Alice began.

She was interrupted by a tremendous roar.

Alice had heard a lion roar once, in a circus, and at age ten it had made her squeal and clap her hands over her ears. This was another class of sound entirely, as if it had issued from some vast mechanism, like the engines of a steamship groaning into life. It rattled her skull from the inside, and the rocks themselves shook and shifted alarmingly. Alice lost her grip on the thread, and the little swarmers vanished. Isaac was on his knees, hands pressed to his head.

The sound died away slowly, amid rumbling echoes. Alice’s ears still rang with the force of it. She looked around wildly, but there was no obvious source for the tremendous noise.

‘We’re dead,’ Isaac mumbled. ‘Oh God. We’re dead, we’re dead, we’re dead . . .’ He lapsed into the other language again.