“What?” She heard him. She’s just confused.
“In this vehimal. Perhaps in that very seat. I have been here, I feel it. And that language – I don’t remember ever having heard it, and yet.” He bares his teeth suddenly, and thrusts his fingers into his hair. “Familiarity, but no, no… context! No meaning! Something about this journey is wrong. Something is wrong and I don’t remember what.”
Schaffa has been damaged for as long as Nassun has known him, but this is the first time he has seemed damaged to her. He’s speaking faster, words tumbling over one another. There is an oddness to the way his eyes dart around the vehimal interior that makes Nassun suspect he’s seeing things that aren’t there.
Trying to conceal her anxiety, she reaches out and pats the shell-chair beside her. “These are soft enough to sleep in, Schaffa.”
It’s too obvious a suggestion, but he turns to gaze at her, and for a moment the haunted tension of his expression softens. “Always so concerned for me, my little one.” But it stops the restlessness as she’d hoped, and he comes over to sit.
Just as he does – Nassun starts – the woman’s voice speaks again. It’s asking a question. Schaffa frowns and then translates, slowly, “She – I think this is the vehimal’s voice. It speaks to us now, specifically. Not just an announcement.”
Nassun shifts, suddenly less comfortable inside the thing. “It talks. It’s alive?”
“I’m not certain the distinction between living creature and lifeless object matters to the people who built this place. Yet —” He hesitates, then raises his voice to haltingly speak strange words to the air. The voice answers again, repeating something Nassun heard before. She’s not sure where some of the words begin or end, but the syllables are the same. “It says that we are approaching the… transition point. And it asks if we would like to… experience?” He shakes his head, irritable. “To see something. Finding the words in our own tongue is more difficult than understanding what’s being said.”
Nassun twitches with nerves. She draws her feet up into her chair, irrationally afraid of hurting the creature-thing’s insides. She isn’t sure what she means to ask. “Will it hurt, to see?” Hurt the vehimal, she means, but she cannot help also thinking, Hurt us.
The voice speaks again before Schaffa has time to translate Nassun’s question. “No,” it says.
Nassun jumps in pure shock, her orogeny twitching in a way that would have earned her a shout from Essun. “Did you say no?” she blurts, looking around at the vehimal’s walls. Maybe it was a coincidence.
“Biomagestric storage surpluses permit —” The voice slips back into the old language, but Nassun is certain she did not imagine hearing those oddly pronounced words of Sanze-mat. “— processing,” it concludes. Its voice is soothing, but it seems to come from the very walls, and it troubles Nassun that she has nothing to look at, no face to orient on while she’s listening to it. How is it even speaking with no mouth, no throat? She imagines the cilia on the outside of the vehicle somehow rubbing together like insects’ legs, and her skin crawls.
It continues, “Translation —” Something. “— linguistic drift.” That sounded like Sanze-mat, but she doesn’t know what it means. It continues for a few more words, incomprehensible again.
Nassun looks at Schaffa, who’s also frowning in alarm. “How do I answer what it was asking before?” she whispers. “How do I tell it that I want to see whatever it’s talking about?”
In answer, though Nassun had not meant to ask this question directly of the vehimal, the featureless wall in front of them suddenly darkens into round black spots, as if the surface has suddenly sprouted ugly mold. These spread and merge rapidly until half of the wall is nothing but blackness. As if they’re looking through a window into the bowels of the city, but outside the vehimal there’s nothing to see but black.
Then light appears on the bottom edge of this window – which really is a window, she realizes; the entire front end of the vehimal has somehow become transparent. The light, in rectangular panels like the ones that lined the stairway from the surface, brightens and marches forward into the darkness ahead, and by its illumination Nassun is able to see walls arching around them. Another tunnel, this one only large enough for the vehimal, and curving through dark rocky walls that are surprisingly rough-hewn given the obelisk-builders’ penchant for seamless smoothness. The vehimal is moving steadily along this tunnel, though not quickly. Propelled by its cilia? By some other means Nassun cannot fathom? She finds herself simultaneously fascinated and a little bored, if that is possible. It seems impossible that something which goes so slow can get them to the other side of the world in six hours. If all of those hours will be like this, riding a smooth white track through a rocky black tunnel, with nothing to occupy them except Schaffa’s restlessness and a disembodied voice, it will feel much longer.
And then the curve of the tunnel straightens out, and up ahead Nassun sees the hole for the first time.
The hole isn’t large. There’s something about it that is immediately, viscerally impressive nevertheless. It sits at the center of a vaulted cavern, surrounded by more panel lights, which have been set into the ground. As the vehimal approaches, these turn from white to bright red in a way that Nassun decides is another signal of warning. Down the hole is a yawning blackness. Instinctively she sesses, trying to grasp its dimensions – but she cannot. The circumference of the hole, yes; it’s only about twenty feet across. Perfectly circular. The depth, though… she frowns, uncurls from her chair, concentrates. The sapphire tickles at her mind, inviting use of its power, but she resists this; there are too many things in this place that respond to the silver, to magic, in ways she doesn’t understand. And anyway, she’s an orogene. Sessing the depth of a hole should be easy… but this hole stretches deep, deep, beyond her range.
And the vehimal’s track runs right up to the hole, and over its edge.
Which is as it should be, should it not? The goal is to reach Corepoint. Still, Nassun cannot help a surge of alarm that is powerful enough to edge along panic. “Schaffa!” He immediately reaches for her hand. She grips it tightly with no fear of hurting him. His strength, which has only ever been used to protect her, never in threat, is desperately needed reassurance right now.
“I have done this before,” he says, but he sounds uncertain. “I have survived it.”
But you don’t remember how, she thinks, feeling a kind of terror that she doesn’t know the word for.
(That word is premonition.)
Then the edge is there, and the vehimal tips forward. Nassun gasps and clutches at the armrests of her chair – but bizarrely, there is no vertigo. The vehimal does not speed up; its movement pauses for a moment, in fact, and Nassun catches a fleeting glimpse of a few of the thing’s cilia blurring at the edges of the view, as they somehow adjust the trajectory of the vehimal from forward to down. Something else has adjusted with this change, so that Nassun and Schaffa do not fall forward out of their seats; Nassun finds that her back and butt are just as firmly tucked into the chair now as before, even though this is impossible.
And meanwhile, a faint hum within the vehimal, which until now has been too low to be much more than subliminal, abruptly begins to grow louder. Unseen mechanisms reverberate faster in an unmistakable cycling-up pattern. As the vehimal completes its tilt, the view fills with darkness again, but this time Nassun knows it is the yawning black of the pit. There’s nothing ahead anymore. Only down.
“Launch,” says the voice within the vehimal.
Nassun gasps and clutches Schaffa’s hand harder as she is pressed back into her seat then by motion. It isn’t as much momentum as she should be feeling, however, because her every sense tells her that they have just shot forward at a tremendous rate, going much, much faster than even a running horse.
Into the dark.
At first the darkness is absolute, though broken periodically by a ring of light that blurs past as they hurtle through the tunnel. Their speed continues to increase; presently these rings pass so quickly that they are just flashes. It takes three before Nassun is able to discern what she’s seeing and sessing, and then only once she watches a ring as they pass it: windows. There are windows set into the walls of the tunnel, illuminated by the light. There’s living space down here, at least for the first few miles. Then the rings stop, and the tunnel is nothing but dark for a while.