Before she could decide, something else moved in the darkness. Ashes, a blur of grey fur on the pounce, hit the thing and bowled it over, trapping it between his paws before it could get back to its feet. Ignoring its scrabbling claws, he sank his teeth into the little creature and gave it the quick shake cats give mice to break their necks. This failed to produce the desired effect, but the squirming thing was quite helpless, and Ashes turned to face Alice triumphantly.

‘I’ve got it!’ His voice was not, she noted, impeded in any way by having a mouthful of squirming bird-thing. ‘Pfeh! It tastes like coal.’ He shook it again, and the thing gave a high-pitched quirk. ‘Have you got something heavy we could drop on it, perhaps?’

A few moments earlier, Alice wouldn’t have entertained the idea; now, cheek and shoulder burning, she would have gladly bashed the little terror with a poker.

‘Maybe I can get one of these bricks loose,’ she muttered. ‘Or else—’

She paused. Ashes, intent on his prey, was batting it playfully with his paws without releasing his stranglehold. Underneath the frantic quirks, though, she could hear something else, almost like the sounds of rain on a tin roof.

Tik. Tik. Tik-tik. Tik-tik-tik.

Tiktiktiktiktiktiktik—

‘Ashes, let it go,’ Alice breathed.

‘But—’

‘Run!’

She took to her heels. Ashes, relinquishing his prize, followed. A few moments later, small creatures filled the passage, the staccato tiks of their claws on the brickwork merging into a rising crescendo.

Chapter Nine: Trapped!

CHAPTER NINE

TRAPPED!

Alice pounded down the tunnel as fast as she had ever run in her life. She skidded back into the room with four doors, and looked frantically from one to the other, uncertain. The tik-tik-tik echoed off the bricks and seemed to come from every direction at once.

Deciding that one door was as good as another, she took off straight ahead, into another corridor. More halls branched off from it at random intervals, with no sign of anything solid she could put between herself and the approaching swarm.

Rounding a corner into a four-way intersection, she turned left and drew up short at the sound of quirking. A pair of the little creatures sidled out to block the path, so Alice backed up and ran down the opposite corridor. It split into a T-junction a dozen yards on, and from one of the arms she heard the scrape of claws on stone. She took the other way, heart slamming against her ribs and breath rattling in her chest.

‘They’re herding us,’ said Ashes, who apparently had no trouble running and speaking at the same time.

‘Herding?’ Alice gasped.

‘Pushing us towards something,’ Ashes said. ‘Probably a dead end.’