The walls of the maze were made of rough hewn yellow stone. The floors and ceilings, too. Occasional gleams of quartz threw Ros’s clear yellow light back at him, like the eyes of spiders at night, as he faced another difficult choice.

The tunnel he had been following terminated at a crossroads. There were no scratch marks on any of the walls, indicating that he hadn’t come this way before. Of the three paths ahead of him, two of them likely went nowhere, since there was only ever one way into the centre of a maze. Possibly all three were dead ends.

Ros played with the scant wisps of hair on his chin and thought hard.

He wasn’t afraid of mazes per se. He had escaped from several over the years, all of them set by his teacher, Master Pukje, as tests of his ability to navigate, to reason, or to run. This maze, however, contained no swirling, tantalising lights to distract him, no puzzles to solve - apart from the maze itself - and no sharp-toothed creatures snapping at his backside to make him hurry. This maze was something entirely different.

He considered his options. The air from each of the tunnels smelt and felt the same. Each path seemed equally curved as far as his eye could see. None of them gave any sign that it would lead to the centre of the maze.

Giving up on reason, Ros tried chance instead. He gritted his teeth, gripped his chin-hairs tightly, and pulled.

Two came loose. By a code he had determined earlier, that meant he should take the second en trance on his left. Straight ahead, in other words.

It had better be the right one, he told himself, or he would soon run out of bum-fluff

That was the least of his worries.

He scored a notch in the yellow wall and set off down the new tunnel. It wound left, then right, then left again. No junctions, no tempting passageways to either side. Was he imagining it, or did the air smell fresher? He put on speed, beginning to hope that this time he had found the one, that he was at last about to reach the centre ...

Ros ran around the third bend and skidded to a halt.

Ahead of him was nothing but yellow stone and gleaming quartz.

Another dead end.

He took a deep breath, telling himself that he wasn’t scared - not of a maze, no matter how strange it might seem. No matter how deadly.

The floor vibrated underfoot. Dust rained from the ceiling above. The candle burning in his palm began to dance as though in a fitful breeze.

Instinctively, Ros crouched down as the maze contracted around him, growing fractionally smaller in less time than it took to turn in a circle, twice.

When he stood up again, the tips of his dusty hair brushed the ceiling of the maze.

He dusted himself down, resolved not to think of how many more dead ends he could afford, and turned back the way he had come.

It had started innocently enough, with quite under standable curiosity.

‘What happened to your last apprentice, Master

Pukje?’

‘You don’t need to know.’

He had been twelve years old the first time he had asked and, unsatisfied with his teacher’s dismissive answer, he had repeated the question at every opportunity. Now he was fourteen and in all the time between, Master Pukje had never once mentioned another student. Not specifically, although Ros knew he wasn’t the first. It was only natural that he wanted to know more about the ones who had come before him.

‘I don’t understand why you won’t tell me about them. Did they grow up to be famous Change workers, or did something horrible happen to them?’

‘I told you. You don’t need to know. Something horrible will happen to you if you keep asking.’

Ros wouldn’t take no for an answer. If he asked once, he asked a thousand times - in hope of a reward when he did well, and when he did badly because he knew he couldn’t get in any more trouble.

And then, just a week ago, while setting camp in the hollow of a stony outcrop, his back carefully turned while his teacher changed from dragon to imp form, ‘Please, Master Pukje. Won’t you tell me what happened to your last apprentice?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

The slight difference in wording caught Ros’s ear immediately.

‘I do want to know, Master Pukje. Why would I ask you so often if I didn’t?’

His teacher came around to face him. There was no mistaking the mischievousness in his tilted, glit tering eyes.

‘You only think you want to know,’ he said, ‘because you don’t know anything, really.’

‘That’s true, Master Pukje,’ said Ros, trying humility where all else had failed. ‘But if you won’t tell me, how will I ever learn?’

The imp barked a laugh.

‘All right, but I need you to fetch some things first. There are particular plants that grow in the shadows around here, deep in the cracks where the sun never shines. We’ll want water, too, and a fire.’

Ros wondered why all this was necessary just to learn a little history, but he did as he was told and, come nightfall, as the fat moon rose up in a bright starry sky, he got his answer.

‘You want to know what happened to my last apprentice?’ Master Pukje held out a stone beaker containing the potion he had made. ‘Drink this.’

Ros took the beaker and studied its contents. The potion was thick and greenish, with numerous black dots floating on its surface like pimples. As he stared, one of the dots popped, emitting a puff of mist that stank of ancient swamps and underpants.

‘What is it?’

‘You see what it is.’

‘I mean, what does it do?’

‘It does what it does.’

Ros rolled his eyes. Sometimes having a conversa tion with his teacher was like being tied up in knots.

‘I mean, what does this have to do with your last apprentice?’

‘Drink and find out.’

‘It smells like poison.’

Master Pukje squatted in front of Ros so the fire was at his back. A falling log sent out a spray of golden sparks that rose up above his head like a halo. He folded his hands and settled down, as though to watch Ros’s internal struggle play out.

‘Don’t you trust me, Ros?’

Ros didn’t know how to answer that question. He had entered his apprenticeship willingly, even though he knew next to nothing about the creature who would be teaching him. Sometimes he felt as though he were learning matters of great profundity, but other times he felt that Master Pukje was toying with him, keeping him busy so he wouldn’t learn anything important on his own. He didn’t know if this was one time or the other.

‘Should I trust you, Master Pukje?’

‘I don’t know. Can you?’

Ros agonised for a dozen breaths. If he didn’t drink the potion, he would always wonder ...

Raising the beaker, he knocked back its contents in three gulps, willing himself not to taste the potion as it slid down his throat.

‘There,’ he gagged, handing his teacher the empty beaker. ‘So what’s the big secret?’

‘Wait and see.’

Master Pukje leaned close to catch him as the fire went out and the world fled.

When Ros woke, he was in darkness, lying limp on his side with his mouth full of dust. It took four at tempts to get to his feet and two to conjure a small amount of light. Only then did he learn that he was in a vaulted hall, the ceiling of which hung far above his head, just out of reach of his tiny flame.

He didn’t know about the maze until he followed the hall to the first intersection and learned that it was just one of many such tunnels, wending and winding through unknown depths. He knew all about mazes - specifically, that they had centres. Hard experience had taught him that if he could find the centre, Master Pukje would let him out, and not before. He had no reason to believe that this maze was different to any other.

Then he took a wrong turn and met his first dead end.

With a shudder like one of his teacher’s dragon ish late-night shivers, the maze shrunk around him and suddenly, where once had been only shadow, he could see the yellow ceiling.

That was weird.

Two more dead ends and the ceiling came within reach of his questing fingers.

That was worrying, given he still had no gut feel ing on how to navigate the maze. The skills Master Pukje had taught him were no use to him in here: he had tried to get his bearings that way and failed many times. He might wander at random for days, hoping for a lucky break but never finding one.

He didn’t let that deter him. If anything, Ros’s determination grew stronger. He would find the centre somehow and make the maze his own, and show Master Pukje that he wasn’t so easily cowed.

Two more dead ends and two more grinding, unstoppable contractions crushed his certainty somewhat.

Using his bare hands, he tried digging his way out through the ceiling and nearly brought a landslide down upon him.

‘Was this what happened to your last apprentice?’ he shouted at the yellow walls. ‘Did you put him in here, too?’

There was no answer but a distant rumbling, as though of mocking laughter.

If talking to Master Pukje was like being tied up in knots, his silences were like being tied up and rolled off a cliff.

Ros walked carefully back to the crossroads and took the left path, ducking his head to avoid banging it on rocky outcrops. The risk of taking a wrong turn was undiminished, but he would rather fail by trying than by sitting in the dark, empty of hope.

Inaction was for the wise, his teacher sometimes said. And for the old, Ros always replied.

At the next dead end, he was forced to crouch back the way he had come.

This time he went straight across the intersection to the one tunnel he hadn’t followed, another curv ing, sweeping route that led to a T-junction. He went right, feeling the awkwardness of his hunched posture in the muscles of his back and thighs.

The dead end he found there reduced him to a crawl. And crawling meant no light, because both his hands were busy.

But he didn’t complain. He said nothing at all. The only thing he could do was retreat and press on, feeling for the notches he had left and hoping the maze would make sense sooner rather than later. Because at this rate, there might not be a later before long.

Another intersection and then another. His knees were bruised and raw by the time he found himself nose to stone at another dead end. He wrapped his arms around his head as the tunnel shook and shrank. He hacked and coughed in the rising dust. Afterwards, there was barely sufficient space to turn around.

Ros fought a rising panic. He wasn’t ordinarily afraid of small spaces, but this was different. This was a nightmare. Who knew how much further he had to go before reaching the centre of the maze, crawling on hands and knees until they were bloody to the bone? Who knew how many more dead ends he could endure? He didn’t dare imagine what it would be like to be trapped down here forever, lost like a rat in a snake warren with no end.

He kept fear at bay, barely, by telling himself that Master Pukje never did anything without a purpose, even if it was at first inscrutable. He wouldn’t throw away the life of his apprentice on a whim, even if Ros was just the latest of many.

But what about afailed apprentice .. . ?

Shut up, he told that treacherous part of his brain. I’ve beaten everything else he’s thrown at me, and I’ll beat this, too.

After the next dead end, he couldn’t turn. He had to back up awkwardly to the last intersection and twist until his spine almost snapped to fit into the next tunnel.

And then, when that tunnel also turned into a dead end, he found that he could no longer crawl at all. He could only creep along by flexing his toes and his fingers like some ungainly human earthworm, unable to see anything, unable to hear anything but the desperate rasping of his breath. Please, it sounded like - and the rhythm of his flexing limbs went what happened, what happened . . . ?

They couldn’t all be dead ends, could they?

He almost wept when the tunnel he had been painfully inching along concluded in, not the centre of the maze, but one more blank yellow wall.

The maze pressed close around him, gripping him as tightly as a stone coffin. And so it might as well have been.

‘Master ... why?’ he asked, unable to move even a fingertip. ‘What did I do wrong? How did I fail you?’ His voice sounded very loud to his dust-plugged ears, but no one answered.

There was nowhere else to go. He was trapped. The air was already growing stale.

Ros sagged in defeat, wishing he had never won dered about the apprentices that had come before him, boys he had never known and should have cared less than nothing about. Maybe their skeletons littered corners of the maze he hadn’t reached yet, and now his would join them. He could go no further, no matter how much he might want to. His journey was over. He would die ignorant, denied the future he had dreamed of

I’m sorry, he whispered to the girl he had prom ised himself to long ago, even though there was no possible way she could hear him.

He had reached the end.

In the lightless coffin, Ros’s eyes suddenly shot open. The darkness looked the same to him, but everything was suddenly different.

He had reached the end.

Could it be so simple? He didn’t dare hope, but hope blazed in him anyway. There was nowhere left for him to go, so couldn’t it be said that he had, in a weird way, reached the centre of the maze? It was exactly the kind of riddle his teacher might call education.

‘Master Pukje, I get it,’ he croaked. ‘I am the centre. Now let me out of here before I choke!’

Through layers of stone, like a distant earthquake, came the same mocking chuckle as before, and for a terrible moment Ros feared that he was wrong, that the end of his subterranean struggles really did mean the end for him, too.

But then the stone flexed around him, bucking and buckling his body into a series of unnatural and painful shapes. His skull was squeezed so tightly he saw tiny lights in his eyes.

Then all the lights coalesced into one, growing brighter and brighter and he was moving, surging forward as though on the back of an avalanche, tumbling, turning and falling heavily to the ground at the feet of an open-mouthed dragon. A dragon who had coughed him up like a fur-ball from depths he couldn’t fathom.

‘Welcome back,’ said Master Pukje. ‘Have a nice trip?’

Ros laughed, coughed, then laughed some more. The stars were impossibly clear. The air smelled sweeter than he had ever known it before. He was alive.

‘Did I imagine all of it?’ he managed to say. ‘I can’t really have been inside you, can I?’

‘What difference does it make? The important thing is that you learned your lesson. Tell me what that was.’

‘I am the centre of the maze,’ he repeated.

‘I think you can do better than that.’

Ros composed himself, forcing his aching limbs into a sitting position and raising a small cloud of yellow dust as he did so.

‘I am the architect of my own confusion?’

‘Could be.’

‘Being with you is making me more lost than ever?’

‘Now you’re trying too hard.’ Master Pukje grinned. ‘Maybe I just want you to think twice before accepting a potion from someone, no matter how trustworthy they might seem.’

‘So I shouldn’t trust you?’

‘I don’t care if you do or do not, Ros. Just trust yourself more.’

Ros thought all this through, wondering if he was dreaming this conversation, too. The scabs and scrapes seemed real. He was thirsty and tired and, judging by the stars, some hours had passed. The experience was real enough. The lesson, too, whatever that was supposed to be.

He felt a rising dizziness: the after-effects of the potion, he assumed.

‘You said I’d find out what happened to your last apprentice.’

‘And you did, Ros. She went into the maze, just like you.’

‘But did she pass the test?’

‘No. I ate her.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.

‘All right, then. She was smarter than you and got out within half an hour. Does that make you feel any better?’

Ros lay down on the ground and closed his eyes, which did nothing at all to quell his vertigo. Real or hallucinatory, the world was fading again.

‘I don’t think either of those stories are true,

Master Pukje.’

‘I don’t think that really matters.’

Ros’s teacher curled around him in dragon form, like a giant leathery dog, and gently covered him with one expansive wing.

‘You’re here. Let that be enough, for now.’