Importantly, Jack noted, as the maze rotated, this end section with the hill of stairs did not.

‘Finally, solid ground,’ he whispered.

Then suddenly he saw three figures race out of the final trenches of the maze and onto the open space in front of the pyramidal step-hill, and begin bounding up the stairs.

‘It’s Rastor!’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘Damn it, he’s through the maze.’

Jack swore.

His team, up on the right-hand wall, still had a solid hundred metres of maze to go. And they needed to get onto the flat ground.

‘We gotta pick up the pace,’ he urged.

He looked out across the maze and saw Sphinx and Mendoza making their way along the opposite wall, level with him and his team.

‘Lily, which way will the maze rotate next?’

‘To the right,’ Lily called from behind him. ‘Clockwise.’

‘That’s better for us and worse for Sphinx,’ Jack yelled. ‘His wall will go upside down, so he’ll have to take cover in a blockhouse, while ours will become the floor—we can stay in this trench and keep pressing onward. We’ll be in front of him and right behind Rastor!’

They took off, racing as fast as they could through their wall-trench. They were twenty metres short of the next blockhouse when the giant maze groaned loudly, the precursor to a rotation.

‘Move, everybody! Move, move!’ Jack yelled.

They leapt headlong down a vertical trench of their wall-maze just as the maze began its colossal rotation—but then a huge gushing wave of sloshing water that none of them saw coming poured out of the flat section of the maze, leaping over the rim of the trenches as if searching for someone to drown, and it came smashing down in between them all, the force of the water sending Jack tumbling forward down one trench, toward the exit, while Zoe, Lily and Alby were hurled back down another, away from the exit.

Jack rolled to a stop and looked up.

He had been swept all the way down the last trench of the rotating maze and suddenly he was out of the infernal thing and standing at the base of the pyramidal hill of stairs rising up to the exit.

But he was alone again, out in front of his team.

He glimpsed Rastor reaching the summit of the hill and racing away through the archway there.

I can’t let Rastor reach the second throne first, Jack thought. He’ll destroy it.

He spun to check on the others, calling out, ‘Zoe, you guys all right?’

‘We’re all okay! But we’re gonna need a minute or two to get through these last few twists and turns,’ Zoe shouted back.

‘Rastor’s getting away. I gotta go after him.’

‘Go! We’ll catch up!’

Jack took a deep breath.

Then, gasping and panting once again, he charged up the steep hill of stairs, determinedly chasing after the mad general.