“Did you see any more of Geran’s men?” she whispered to Miruva, who shook her head.
Together they crept through the huts and back on to the wide path leading back to the Hall of Arrivals. As they went, Miruva seemed to lose her earlier confidence.
“What if the Banshees discover us?” Miruva asked, sounding much more timid than she had done back on Khost.
“What harm can they do us?” said Teyla. “They have already done their worst by bringing us here.”
“As far as you know,” said Miruva. “Have you forgotten the terror?”
“We will have to take the risk, Miruva,” she said.
Together they walked across the rolling plains and back towards the giant cliff-face. No one followed them out. For the time being at least, they were on their own.
Soon they were at the foot of the spiral staircase. The dark steps were lined by the soft silver starlight. Above them, the rock glistened. All was silent.
After a few steps, Miruva stopped. “I can’t go on.”
Teyla looked at her carefully. Her face was ashen and her hands trembled.
“Miruva, I am surprised at you,” Teyla said. “When we spoke in the settlement, you seemed so full of strength. And now, at the first sign of — ”
Teyla stopped herself. She felt the same thing. Even now, the anxiety began to return. It wasn’t Miruva’s fault.
Teyla took the young woman’s shoulder. “Listen to me,” she said. “There is some force at work here which affects your mind. I feel it too. You must try and resist it. You are braver than this — I know it. If you give in to the feeling now, you will never escape the Underworld.”
Miruva looked back. The fields and crops stretched away under the benign starlight. “I know,” she mumbled. “But…”
“No more hesitation,” snapped Teyla, losing patience. “Trust me. We passed through it before. We can pass through it again.”
Miruva looked briefly as if she would relent and turn back the way they had come, but under Teyla’s gaze a glow of resolve lit in her eyes. She took a deep breath and looked up at the forbidding cliff face. “I can do it,” she said. “I must do it.”
“We will do it,” said Teyla, taking her by the hand.
“Is it broken?” asked Helmar, still prudently respectful of the device but keen to see what was going on.
Sheppard frowned and adjusted the settings. “Damn thing’s telling me we’ve hit the bulls-eye.”
“And, er, that isn’t good?”
“Nope,” he said. “According to this work of genius, we should be standing in the middle of several hundred people.” He looked around at the empty icescape. “You see any?”
There was absolutely nothing — let alone people — for miles on end. Sheppard studied the display, trying to make sense of the readings. They were very odd-looking. Whereas a human would normally register on the scanner as a green blob of fairly consistent intensity, these readings flitted in and out of existence. Even when they were present, they were hazy and indeterminate.
Against his normal inclination, Sheppard found himself wishing McKay was there. At least the man would have a theory as to what was causing the anomaly. Was it instrumentation failure? Or was he picking something else up?
He tightened the search parameters, narrowing the set of phenomena picked up by the machine. The results remained stubbornly inconclusive.
“Rodney told me he’d fixed this,” he said, frustration rising. If his only means of detecting human life-signs was defective, then the whole rescue-mission was near-impossible. There weren’t a whole lot of alternative strategies available.
Unwilling to concede defeat, Helmar kept going. “What range does the box have? Perhaps we can try and get closer?”
“Don’t you get it, kid?” Sheppard snapped. “This box of junk is telling me we’re right in the middle of a crowd of people! Unless they’re invisible, or up in the air, or under the…”
As the words left his mouth, realization crashed in like a landslide. He looked at his feet. The snow and ice were as unmarked as ever, just another part of the featureless wastes.
“Gotcha.”
Teyla looked over at her companion with satisfaction. Once the two of them had reached the wide rock shelf, Miruva had returned almost to normal. At the higher levels of the stairway the air was clearer, and even Teyla felt her spirits restored. Whatever phenomenon had clouded their judgment, it seemed to be at its strongest in the fields below.
“Do you have any idea what we’re looking for?” said Miruva, peering through the entrance to the dark Hall of Arrivals.
“No,” said Teyla. “But I am sure that there is something hidden in those shadows. We will just have to look carefully.”
They walked into the gloomy chamber. At first it seemed entirely black. Gradually the dim red outline of the columns re-established themselves. If anything, the place looked even more grim and forbidding than the last time they’d been there.
“We know what lies straight ahead,” said Teyla. “If there is anything to find, it will be in the shadows along either side. Now we have a choice. What do you think, Miruva? Left or right?”
Miruva, her face in shadow, peered into the gloom. “They’re equally unattractive,” she said. “But let’s go left. For some reason, that feels correct.”
Once they had moved away from the starlit outline of the entrance gate, the darkness grew ever more complete. They went slowly, placing their feet with care. Even though the floor was perfectly smooth, the shadow was so all-encompassing that it felt as if they might stride into a bottomless pit at any moment. Though the meager red glow allowed them to negotiate a path through the mighty columns in the dark, it was quickly swallowed by the endless shadows between them.
Several minutes passed. They were like a tiny, mobile island in an immense sea of shadow. Even after their eyes had adjusted, everything was obscured. Miruva fell silent, perhaps troubled by her doubts. Even Teyla felt her limbs stiffen. The effect of the dark was disorienting and she began to feel an odd sense of dislocation.
“This place goes on forever,” whispered Miruva, her voice muffled and indistinct.
“It must end soon,” said Teyla.
As she spoke, she saw a faint glint ahead. The reflection was weak, and only by moving her head back and forth could she be sure there was something really there. They came to a standstill. Ahead of them was a blank wall, as dark as every other surface in the hall.
Teyla ran her fingers carefully across its smooth cold surface. “We can go no further,” she said. “That is something, at least.”
Miruva stood alongside her, and pressed her face close up against the flawless stone. “I can’t see a thing,” she said. “This is just a blank wall.”
Teyla turned to her left and began to walk beside the sheer face, keeping her fingers lightly grazing the surface. “This wall continues for some distance,” she said. “I think this may be what we are looking for. Let us follow it for a while.”
The silence became ever more oppressive, the darkness ever more threatening. To their left, the dimly-lit columns passed in gloomy files, like an army of frozen giants.
Teyla began to lose heart. The hall was gigantic. If they tried to map out the entire area in the dark it would take them days. For all she knew, they had already passed several exits. It was almost impossible to make anything out.
She began to become despondent. “I think…” A sudden impact on her forehead sent her reeling backwards. She staggered.
“Are you alright?” cried Miruva, groping forward to find her in the dark.
“I am fine,” said Teyla. Her forehead smarted, but it was nothing serious. She had walked into a wall, jutting out at right angles from the one she had been following. Easy enough to do in the circumstance, but still embarrassing.
Teyla peered at the obstacle. It was a buttress of some kind, set hard against the wall to her right. It was about five feet across and, for all she could tell, stretched up as far as the hidden ceiling far above them. She ran her fingers over it, testing for any indentation or marking. It was as smooth and featureless as everywhere else.