So it was with these and another half-dozen temerarious adolescents that Jacent sneaked into the lower corridors and through the narrow crack that was the best Kermac had been able to achieve with the stout and obdurate door. Anyone less lithe than the youngsters could not have wriggled through that narrow slot at all.
They emerged into a variable dimness that was, so Jacent soon decided, rather worse than darkness, for in darkness he would not constantly think he saw things that, on second glance, did not seem to be there. The place also provoked a breathlessness that reminded him unpleasantly of his nighttime terrors. He thought apprehensively of the noxious gases said to gather in ancient vaults. The others, however, were having no trouble breathing, as their chatter indicated. He took himself firmly in hand, assuring himself the seeming lack of air was all imagination.
The place was a labyrinth. Corridors connected and divided. Rooms had multiple doors, which often opened at unexpected places; stairs plunged up and down with little regard for system or direction. It was impossible to get any sense of where one was in relation to where one had been shortly before. Had it not been for the hansl, the trip recorder Kermac had borrowed (unauthorizedly) from Supplies, they would have been hopelessly and helplessly lost within moments.
With the lifeline of the hansl to depend upon, however, they progressed ever more deeply into the tangle, finding nothing interesting but continually hoping to do so. Walls and floors had been uniformly gray to begin with and were now uniformly laden with velvet dust. All the surfaces were featureless. Glow beads along the floors let them move about without stumbling. Here and there work lights came on at their approach, letting them actually see where they were, though there was nothing to see. No interesting sights, no sound at all, not even the subliminal hum and hiss of moving air. When the work lights came on, they created a gray and swampy glow, bordered by shadow. When the lights turned off behind them, they left a darkness deeper than before.
At the bottom of an uncertain number of stair flights they found a short corridor debouching into echoing space, into what might once have been an assembly hall. Their chatter had long since been stilled by the dusty silence. Now, in this huge space, the quiet weighed upon them so heavily that their spirits demanded interruption of it.
“We’re hunters,” Metty shouted suddenly. “Haii, we’re hunters!” She waved her net-gun, as though to some invisible watcher.
Her voice went out into a silence so utter that each of them stopped, poised to flee, hearing the shocking sound escape into nothing, awaiting the echoes that had to come back from the hard-surfaced labyrinth. Their ears pricked in anticipation of the sound they knew was coming, and their minds supplied the expected reverberation: “… ters … ters … ters.”
The reply, when it arrived at last, was a mere insinuation, a flabby softness on the ears, as though the velvety dust were capable of devouring the bones of sound and leaving only its fat and skin.
“We’re … hungers….” The words, though soft, came clearly, then the repetition, falling away into silence once more. “… gers … gers … gers,” the sound gulped hungrily.
The young people looked at one another uncomfortably, each wondering if the other had heard what he or she had heard.
“Hungers?” whispered Jacent. “Is that what you yelled? I thought you said hunters?”
Metty shook her head at him, suddenly haunted by the vision of some soft and repulsive creature crouched just out of sight around the nearest corner, cunningly capturing words and twisting them as it sent them back, making the explorers doubt not the echo but the original utterance.
“Hunters is what I said,” she whispered from a dry throat.
Her brother Jum, white-faced but restive, raised his voice, challenging the darkness.
And again the echoes came, meeping and maundering, twisting the words into different, quite dreadful meanings.
Jacent, feeling the hairs on his neck stand up, knew it could not be an accidental effect. It had to be deliberate. Such intelligible warpings would not happen by chance! He started to say so, then caught himself. He shouldn’t say so, not here. His ears had heard vile obscenities Jum’s tongue had never uttered, but it would be wiser, far, far wiser to pretend not to have noticed. He glanced at Metty, to see her flush and look away. Well, then. So she had heard the same.
The two of them were standing beside a huge pillar at the center of the hall, the ceiling invisible above them, the walls showing only as a distant limit to the darkness. Unlike other walls they had passed, these were covered with murals: Frickians in arms, Frickians involved in great battles, the landscapes of military engagement. Jacent took Metty’s hand and drew her to the pillar, as though to refuge, like some small forest creature to a tree, putting the bulk of it between them and the sounds.
Leaning against it Jacent could hear the footsteps of the others, amplified through the great support post into the sound of an ominous army marching, around, around. What if he cried out “Beware!” or “Danger”? He imagined himself shouting out the words, imagined them coming back like an avalanche, sending his friends fleeing wildly. He knew what would happen then. They would become separated. They would be lost. All of them. That would be something real, an actual happening, something Council Supervisory could not merely wave away, something they’d have to deal with! Search parties would have to come from the Great Rotunda! The Inner Circle would have to do something!
He swallowed the hysterical impulse to scream such a warning and breathed deeply, as he did on waking from his nighttime terrors. Kermac had the hansl, and Kermac was across the vast room, near the opening of a corridor. If Kermac was startled, he would flee down that corridor, leaving Jacent and
