Working all night and well into the next day, as swiftly and silently as they could, they moved rocks and dug through the dirt until they had made an opening just big enough for the tery to slip through.
Dalt nodded to Rab as he prepared to follow Jon. Rab was to wait by the entrance and use his Talent to summon help if necessary.
He squeezed through the opening –
And entered the anteroom to Hell.
Dalt had been expecting the worst, but nothing hinted at in his transcript of the Shaper history had prepared him for the sights that greeted him.
The forgotten corridor stretched before them with a gentle curve to the left. The left wall was composed of a thick transparent substance that jutted out into the Hole at a forty-five degree angle. A mixture of dried blood, excrement, and dirt, smeared its far surface, traces left by generations of Hole inhabitants trying to claw their way out.
But there was no way out. The rock of the floor, sides, and ceiling of the Hole had been treated by the Teratol clique to make it impervious to any digging or tunneling. The only access to the outside world was through the vertical shafts leading to the ventilation grates, and these were lined with the same impenetrable glassy substance that now separated Dalt and Jon from the Hole.
The porous rock that lined the inner surface of the Hole had been treated in another way: It glowed. The light arose from all sides, totally eliminating shadow, creating an endless twilight that added to the surreal, nightmarish quality of the hellish panorama before them.
For food, the Teratols had developed a rapidly growing fungus that hung from the ceiling of the Hole in stalagtitic abundance. For water there were a number of underground springs that fed into a large pool at the center of the cavern. The temperature was a damp, cool, subterranean constant. For those who required shelter, a hidey-hole could be dug into the porous rock that had not been treated against it. No wood, no fire, no tools of any sort.
None of the Teratol mistakes would ever escape, none would ever starve, none would ever die of thirst, none would ever freeze.
And none would ever know a moment's peace.
The Hole had no social order. The strongest, the fiercest, the ones that hunted best in packs — these ruled the Hole. The weak, the timid, the sick, the lame became either food or slaves. The sense of entrapment and foul living conditions, compounded by generations of inbreeding, had reduced the inhabitants to a horde of savage, imbecilic monstrosities.
"This is the darkest side of the human soul, Jon," Dalt said. "Anything that's good and decent within us has been banished from here."
With Jon gliding behind him, Dalt walked along the corridor, queasily watching as scenes of nightmarish barbarism that were a part of day-to-day existence in the Hole played out before him.
A creature with an amorphous body, six tentacles, and a humanoid head shuffled along, picking up morsels of fungus and stuffing them into its mouth. Without warning, a reptilian creature with horny plates projecting from its back — and again, the humanoid head, always a humanoid head — launched itself from a burrow about a meter off the floor and landed on the tentacled creature's back. With sharp fangs it tore into the
flesh of its victim's neck until blood spouted over both of them. The victim rolled onto its side, however, and managed to wrap one of its longer tentacles around the attacker's throat.
Dalt could not bear to wait and see whether the first's blood supply could outlast the other's oxygen. He left the combatants writhing on the other side of the window and pressed on, trying not to watch the endless variety of depraved forms that skulked, leaped, crawled, shuttled, scuttled, and ran through the small area of the Hole that was visible to them. Yet he was unable to turn away.
"There's a door somewhere along here," he told Jon. "The Teratols made one entry from the corridor into the Hole. I just hope we can open it when we find it."
The tery said nothing and Dalt glanced at his companion, wondering if he could hold his own in there. Jon would have two advantages — his intelligence and his hunting club. Dalt had wanted to give him a blaster, but the tery had been too frightened of its power. He seemed more comfortable with the weapon that had protected him and helped feed him for most of his life. So a club it was.
I wouldn't go in there with two blasters, Dalt thought, glancing into the Hole again.
He estimated from the difference in light levels between the cavern and the corridor that the dwellers on the other side of the window probably didn't know the corridor existed. The light from the phosphorescent stone would reflect off the filth smeared on the window, making it look like an unusually smooth section of the wall. The Shapers had probably wanted it that way so they could watch without being seen.
Jon stopped abruptly and pointed to something on the window.
"What is that?"
Dalt saw a round, dark splotch, about the length of a man's arm in diameter, edging its way down the Hole side of the window. He tried to get a peek at what it looked like on the reverse but it must have been flat and disk-shaped. He could make out no protrusions from the other side.
A movement to the right caught his eye. Down a narrow path came five dark shapes, low to the ground, scuttling. The disk must have had an eye on the other side, too; must have seen the approaching shapes, for it reversed direction.
Then the shapes were close enough for Dalt to make out details: They had normal human heads and torsos, but all resemblance to humanity as Dalt knew it ended there. Each had dark skin and eight legs — four to a side — which were articulated spider-style. But it was the naked hunger-fury in their blank, idiotic faces as they swarmed up to the window and attacked the disk that made Dalt leap backwards and slam against the far wall of the corridor.
An instinctual response. Intellectually he knew he was safe. Emotionally…that was another matter.
Then came a further horror. After the spider gang had peeled the disk from the wall and was carrying it away to wherever it was they lived, Dalt saw its other side. He could make out only a few details, but even in the dim light a fleeting glance showed beyond a doubt the features of a human face.
Jon's eyes snapped to him. He had seen it, too.
"This is how they must live? Why was this done to them? Why must this be?"
Dalt arched himself away from the wall and approached the tery. He had developed a genuine affection for this innocent in beast form. Jon could not comprehend the corruption of spirit that could occur when one human found he had absolute control over the existence of another. Neither could Dalt, but he knew more of human history than the tery.
He put his hand on the tery's shoulder as they resumed their trek.
"Jon, my friend, none of this must be. This is a hideous fabrication, a product of the worst in us. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Nothing that can happen to us by chance is anywhere near as awful as what we somehow manage to do to each other by design."
" ‘We?’ " Jon said. "Who is ‘we?’ I would never do this."
"I was speaking of all humanity in general — and like it or not, that includes you, my friend."
"But I am not a ‘we' for this," Jon rumbled in his deep voice. "I would like to be a ‘we’ with you and Rab and Komak and Adriel, but no…I am not a ‘we’ in this. Never."
The note of finality in Jon's tone made Dalt decide not to pursue the matter any further. They walked on in silence.
The door was unmistakable when they came upon it. The windowed wall of the corridor had been one long, uninterrupted, seamless transparency. After following the curving passage along an arc of approximately forty degrees, they saw the window terminate at what appeared to be a huge steel column, perhaps three meters across, reaching from floor to ceiling. The window continued its course on the far side of the column.