It just looked like a featureless piece of rock but, with a shrug, Liska put her front paws against it and pushed. Lug came to join in and with all of them straining, the wall gave a sudden jolt and began to grind inwards.

‘Slimy segments! There is a passage!’ said Lug as the sliding doorway revealed a small room with some steep steps leading upwards at the far end.

‘Of course,’ said Elowen with a frown. ‘Do you think I’m making things up? Don’t you trust my memory?’ When neither Lug nor Liska answered, she huffed and stepped inside the doorway. ‘Come on, then. We’d better shut this behind us. Make it harder for the hunter person to follow.’

One by one they squeezed inside, pushing the door shut behind them. A metal rod stood in a corner of the chamber and Elowen used it to bar the way behind them, ‘just in case’. Then she held up her lamp again until it shone on the steep, stone steps, spiralling up inside the mountain.

‘Where does this stairway go exactly?’ Lug asked, peering up into the darkness.

‘Why, to the top of the Shield Mountains of course,’ said Elowen. ‘It comes out by the Stormfort, but not close enough for them to spot us.’

‘And then where do we go? We’ll be stuck up there. We’re supposed to be leaving the city!’

‘We will,’ said Elowen, smiling. ‘There’s a path down the mountain on the other side once we get through the Kittimew Kingdom.’

‘The what?’ asked Lug, looking more worried than ever. But Elowen had already stepped past him and was heading up the steep stairway.

‘Up we go,’ said Liska, giving Lug a firm nudge and wishing – for the hundredth time that night – that she could just spread her wings and fly, preferably leaving the moaning worm mage behind her.

*

Round and round, up and endlessly up.

Liska followed the glow of Elowen’s lamp, trudging step after step. Her eyes watched the dancing patterns of light on the featureless rocky walls, letting them hypnotise her as she forced her tired paws to take one more step, then another, then another . . .

It started to seem like all she had ever known was the plodding walk up this rocky staircase, as if all her past life had just been a dream and she would trudge on and on forever, never reaching the top.

From somewhere behind she could hear Lug’s whimpering. It had a rhythm of its own: a squeak every time he moved a foot upwards and a pained groan as he heaved his weight after it. Mixed with the scuffing and shuffling of her own paws and the whispering of Elowen’s long layers of dresses against the stone, it made a kind of music: squeak, shuffle, groan, shuffle, swish, shuffle, squeak. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat.