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The light filtering in from the entrance quickly faded, giving way to pressing shadows. He stubbed his toe on something and stumbled, almost falling. His helmet clanged against the wall.

"Follow me," said the demon, pushing past him. "Watch my feet and step exactly where I tread. Don’t put a toe out of line. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he said. Where her bare feet touched the stone, they left prints which glowed orange-red for a while before fading, so he could see where to walk. "How far must we go before we find her?"

"You can’t express it in terms of distance. Come along."

He was so intent on watching her feet that he never realised just when his surroundings began to change. The first he noticed was that her footprints seemed to be glowing less brightly, and fading quicker. Then he realised that it wasn’t the footprints which were fading faster, but the fact that the darkness around them was decreasing. A reddish light was seeping into the tunnel.

A few steps further, and she led him round a bend held out a hand to bar his way, so suddenly that he almost bumped into her.

"Look."

He bit back a gasp. At their feet the ground fell away in a near vertical slope of red, glowing rock to a distant plain, in which red and orange glowing rivers flowed between black humps of stone. On both sides, the wall of glowing rock spread out, into the far distance, until they faded into darkness. And on the far side of the plain, so far away that he could barely see it, there was another diffuse glow of red.

They were standing on the lip of a gigantic crater, so huge that he could not imagine its size.

"Is she down there?" he asked, his mouth dry.

"Yes, indeed. If you want, we can go back. I won’t think any less of you if you do."

He swallowed, painfully, and deliberately brought to mind his dream and the shattered hut."We’ll go on."

"Fine. Follow me, and step where I do."

He followed her. The slope was so steep that it felt as though he were stepping down a vertical wall. But he had no time to think about that; his eyes were fixed on her feet, which always somehow seemed to find the dark cool spaces between the glowing rocks.

"Hold on to my tail," she called over her shoulder, when the way had got so steep that he could no longer balance on his legs properly. "Be careful not to fall."

With the desperation of a drowning man clutching at a piece of driftwood, he clutched the barbed tip. It hummed in his gauntlets, buzzing as though filled with energy that was barely held back, so that he almost let go again. But she grunted impatiently, so he held on tight to it. After that it wasn’t quite so difficult to climb down, except for the strain in his back, calves and thighs.

"We can’t stop for a break," she said, though he hadn’t suggested anything of the sort. "This place would fry you to a crisp."

Trying to keep his trembling legs from collapsing under him, he followed her down to the plain.

From close up, the river was like a snake made of molten rock. It hissed and spat and bubbled, and the heat and light were so intense that he squeezed his eyes almost shut and flinched.

"How do we get across that?" he asked.

"We’ll have to look for a bridge across. The flow tunnels under the rock here and there. We’ll find a way."

"You could get across if you wanted, couldn’t you?"

The demon glanced at him. "If it were up to what I wanted, Man," she said drily, "I’d never have come down here at all."

"And she’s down here?" he asked incredulously, gesturing around. "She’s down here inthis?"

"That, I can assure you." The demon paused a moment. "Of course, you may find her a little...changed." Without another word, she turned and began striding along the flow of liquid rock, and he had to hurry behind in order to put his feet down where hers had rested a moment before.

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