The party ran to close the last steps to the Tower of Tartarus, spurred on by their relief and at having resurrected Alex with the Phoenix Feather.

They finally made it to the tower. Its massive steel doors, ten times the height of a human, were already open from when the [demon general] had emerged from them.

But they hadn’t been able to see inside them until now. Then ran in through the doors, then skidded to a halt.

Horatio gasped.

The Tower had no ceiling, and so was not divided into floors—it only had a roof, far, far up above their heads, to which the black walls, hewn from the same stone of which Braxia was composed, climbed.

But this was not what had made Horatio gasp.

The floor of the Tower was no floor at all, but rather a huge pit, that spanned almost all of the base of the tower. Encircled by a descending spiral ledge that people and monster could walk down, it extended down into the bowels of the earth further than Horatio could see—except he could see that there was more orange and yellow glowing magma down below. It was also littered with Braxians in black, cowled robes, and all manner of vicious monsters moving up and down on the ledge apparently on strange errands for the Cult. The air was hot and noxious.

The black walls continued down at the edges of the pit too, so that on the inside the whole place gave the impression not so much of a Tower but of a gigantic hollow stake that had been driven into the ground by some titanic monster of Hell.

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Maybe that’s what it was, after all.

‘Do we have to go down there?’ asked Silvia.

‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘No doubt the Leader of the Cult, and the Sword, are to be found down there, in the tower’s pit-dungeon. Wouldn’t you say, Ursula, as an ex-Braxian?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ursula. ‘I never made it high up—or low down—enough in the Cult to be admitted inside the Tower. But it seems likely.’

‘Let’s go, then!’ said Horatio, mindful of how their time might be running out. ‘Come on, everyone! This is it! Our last throw of the dice!’

They found the place nearby where the spiral ledge that ran down the side of the pit began, and charged down it. It was wide enough that four of them could run abreast alongside each other, and they coordinated themselves so that they kept Alex at the centre of the group, to protect and try to avoid his being killed again. Horatio ran at the front, with Ceres on his right, Egea on her right, and Primus on his left, the original four of them who had set out on this crazy journey together all running next to each other.

As soon as a Braxian spotted them, he shouted and pointed up at them, and every Braxian and monster in the pit seemed to look up, and begin running up the ledge towards them.

‘Oh dear,’ said Primus.

‘We can’t go round them,’ said Ceres. ‘We can’t go under them. We can’t go over them.’

‘We’ll have to go through them!’ yelled Egea.

‘Raaaarrrrggh!’ yelled Horatio.

They collided with the first of many waves of monsters.

Battle 2.