Still on the pinnacle—so close to his goal yet now so far away—Sphinx could only watch in dismay as the top of the pinnacle was blown apart by Jack’s fire and dropped away into the flooding city-maze.

‘No!’ he cried. ‘Noooo!’

He immediately slid back down the pinnacle to rejoin Cardinal Mendoza at its base.

The decapitation of the great spire made the sniper harassing Ezekiel look up, a move that got him killed.

Ezekiel and his monks immediately whipped up their own assault rifles and shot the sniper dead.

Ezekiel already knew what the next option was. ‘Monks, to the tunnel entrance under Malkuth! Go, go, go!’

Rastor saw the spectacular fall of the gold-and-silver pinnacle from the floor of the maze and he smiled broadly.

‘Oh, Captain West, that could only have been you!’ he exclaimed with delight, looking over at the destroyer and its smoking forward cannon. ‘Only you are bold enough to do such a thing!’

A second later, he saw Jack—tiny at this distance, but unmistakable in his fireman’s helmet—emerge from the big gun’s firing cabin.

Rastor said, ‘What a gamble you have taken. But do you even realise what you have done? Do you know what the dark side of the maze entails? I can only thank you for it.’

To his troops, he called, ‘Men! To Malkuth! Now! Before it floods! Move!’

As he looked down at the flooding city-maze—with an oil rig suspended on one side of it, hanging from some kind of cable, and the enormous down-turned carrier lying on the other side—and the now pinnacle-less castle in its middle, Jack realised that this race had entered a new, more desperate phase.

He saw Rastor and his troops fire zip-lines across their side of the city-maze and whiz down them on flying foxes, zeroing in on the base of the castle.

He saw Sphinx and Mendoza atop the decapitated castle: they disappeared into it, hurrying back down.

He saw Ezekiel and his monks on Jack’s side of the city-maze, hurrying across the last few bridges.

They were all converging on the castle, heading for its base.

Gazing out at the castle and the unique pattern of window-balconies on it, Jack now analysed the finer details.

He again saw the pattern of the window-balconies clearly: saw how each one represented a node of the Tree of Life.

He recalled the dying monk he’d encountered in the Endless Tunnel repeating the phrase: ‘If we can’t get to Keter, Malkuth will lead us to the other realm. If we can’t get to Keter, Malkuth will lead us to the other realm.’

It hadn’t been some old holy mantra.

It had been his orders.

If the monks’ plan to get to Keter failed, they were to move on to the second option, Malkuth.