This hardened killer was calling for his fucking mother.

‘Momma, please . . . ahhhh!’

With shocking suddenness, a metallic gold claw reached out from the darkness of the Squire’s tunnel and yanked him violently back into the darkness.

A crunching sound followed and a moment later, the Squire’s severed head came rolling out of the tunnel and dropped into the abyss.

Lily gulped.

From the other side of the shaft, ninety feet away, Jack also stared in shock at the scene. He’d seen the whole thing.

And then both he and Lily heard a voice from the other tunnel.

A voice shouting, ‘Move it! Get out of my way!’

A voice that they both knew.

The voice of Dion DeSaxe.

In the nanoseconds of time in which the mind operates, as Jack saw Lily standing there, alone, on the other side of the shaft beside the tunnel with all the chaos emerging from it, he realised what had happened here.

This test really was all about knowledge.

A day ago, Sphinx had entered the Labyrinth, followed by Ezekiel and his Omega monks: both of those groups had studied the lore of the Supreme Labyrinth, so they knew about things like the Emperor’s Route, the Trees of Life and Death, and Ningizzida.

Dion had arrived at the Labyrinth some time after them. Jack recalled the radio intercept he’d heard from Sphinx to Dion, calling Dion to the Labyrinth and ordering him to bring some Squires of the Golden Eight with him.

So Dion had obeyed and done just that.

But he didn’t have the requisite knowledge.

The spoiled son of royalty, ever confident in the belief that he would rule simply by virtue of his lineage and his wealth, he had not paid enough attention to his history lessons. He didn’t know about Ningizzida.

And so he’d taken the wrong tunnel.

He must have ventured down it for a time—many hours at least—until he’d come to a dead end.

Then he’d turned back, and walked for the same number of hours the other way . . .

. . . only to discover that the stone statues flanking the entrance to his tunnel had come alive and—given the gold claw that had reached out and grabbed the blinded Squire—maybe something else had, too.

On her ledge, Lily was arriving at the exact same conclusion, when suddenly a second Squire stumbled out of the adjoining tunnel mouth.

Like the first Squire, his armour and skin were gruesomely melted. But this man’s helmet was missing.

Lily could see that his hair had been burnt off and his facial skin was melted through to the bone. He gripped a length of climbing rope in one hand and looked fearfully in every direction.

He was in a total panic, searching for an escape.

He squinted hard.