The Dragon hit the edge of the pile of rocks, but Alice had crawled back in and among them. The creature’s huge head pushed in after her, between a pair of boulders. Alice could see it lose its bearings in the sudden gloom, enormous snout sweeping back and forth. When she moved, it swung towards her, drawn by the sound of her shoes on stone. The great mouth opened, letting loose a hot wind that smelled of dead, rotting things. Alice could see past its teeth into the bottomless recesses of its throat.

God in heaven, she thought. I wouldn’t even be a morsel.

‘Isaac,’ she shouted hoarsely. ‘NOW!’

At the same time, she yanked the Swarm thread into herself, wrapping it around her essence over and over until her body started to change. There was a weird, fragmented moment of dissolution, flesh flowing and melting in a way that made Alice want to vomit. She tasted bile at the back of half a hundred tiny throats, as the swarmers spilled forth in a wave. They – she – dashed off, up through the rocks, leaving only a pair of shoes to mark where she’d been standing.

The swarmers couldn’t climb stone as well as they could trees, but the slopes weren’t as steep, and they were excellent jumpers. Alice’s consciousness expanded as she raced through the pile of rocks, dodging the icy bonds that held them in place, racing away from the Dragon and up towards the hillock. The swarmers leaped from boulder to boulder and stormed through the crevices, working their way through passages too small for any human. Below, the Dragon swung its head back and forth, hunting for some sign of the prey that had suddenly vanished.

As soon as she’d shouted, if everything had gone according to plan, Isaac would have released his grip on the iceling. They’d spent the better part of an hour directing the little stream into carefully iced-over channels, growing discs and pads of ice between the boulders, feeling the whole structure twist and complain at every shift. Now he threw that process into reverse, drawing the cold away, melting the ice much faster than the chilly air could. The hill of boulders, padded with planes of slippery, half-melted ice, began to move.

Alice nearly didn’t make it out before the avalanche began. Her leading swarmers had reached the firmer ground of the hilltop, beside the tree and the trickling spring, but the rest of her felt the rocks begin to slide underfoot. She jumped, leaping from rock to rock even as they began to move, and the last couple of swarmers hurled themselves blindly into space as they lost their footing, trusting to their rubbery physique to keep them relatively intact.