They went in at first light.
The mouth of the corridor was wider than Jake expected — twenty feet across where it opened off the flat ground, the pale walls rising on either side until they cut off most of the sky. The stone was smooth. Not carved-smooth, worn-smooth, like water had run over it for a very long time, except there was no water and never had been. The floor was the same pale stone as the walls, flat, faintly warm under Jake's bare feet.
Behind them the settlement was already small. A native woman had watched them walk to the entrance without any expression at all — not warning them, not wishing them anything. She'd seen people walk in before.
"Left when it hums," Jake said.
"Left when it hums," Kitch said. He was watching the walls — both eyes, for once moving together, taking in the height and the smoothness and the way the corridor curved ahead until it was out of sight. "And in the meantime we follow the corridor and hope it goes somewhere."
Vauren said nothing. He walked between them, hands at his sides. He glanced at the walls the way a man glances at deep water, and kept walking.
"You're very quiet," Jake said.
"I am often quiet."
"Quieter than usual."
Vauren considered this. "There is nothing here that requires me yet. I am content to walk."
"That's very zen of you."
"I do not know that word."
They walked. The corridor curved. The light came down from the strip of sky overhead and pooled on the pale floor, and their footsteps didn't echo the way Jake expected — the sound went up and out and vanished, swallowed by the open top and the smooth walls. It was very quiet. The kind of quiet that had a texture.
Then the hum came.
Jake felt it before he understood it — a vibration low in the stone, rising through the soles of his feet, into his ankles, up the bones of his legs. Not a sound. A pressure. A frequency his body caught before his ears knew to listen for it. It lasted maybe two seconds.
"Left," Jake said, and turned left into the branching corridor without slowing.
Kitch followed. Vauren followed.
Behind them, the corridor they'd left made a sound — a deep grinding, stone against stone, felt more than heard. Jake didn't look back. He knew what it was. The wall they'd have hit if they'd gone straight had just closed.
"It works," Kitch said.
It worked for an hour.
The hum came, Jake turned left, the corridor behind them ground shut. Again. Again. He got a rhythm for it — the vibration building in his feet, the half-second of certainty, the turn. Each time, the wall closed where they'd have been. Each time, the new corridor opened somewhere ahead.
He started to enjoy it, a little. His feet were doing the work and his feet were good at this — the same feet that had found the grooves on the platform columns, the same soles that read the launch stone by feel. The hum came up through them clean and clear, and he moved on it before he'd finished thinking, and the maze let them through.
"This is easy," Jake said.
Kitch's head turned toward him. Both eyes.
"It's not easy," Kitch said. "It's easy for you."
"It's the same stone under all of us."
"Is it." Kitch stopped walking. He pressed one taloned foot flat against the floor — bare, three toes spread on the pale stone, more skin on the ground than Jake had. He stood like that for a moment.
"I feel nothing," Kitch said. "No hum. No vibration. Nothing. My feet are barer than yours and the stone is telling me exactly as much as the wall is."
Jake stopped too. "You can't feel it at all?"
"Not the last time. Not any of the times. You said 'left' and I turned because you said 'left.'" His head tilted. "I have been following you blind for an hour."
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They both looked at Vauren.
Vauren was quiet for a moment, his weight shifting, testing the floor through the soles of his boots. "I feel something," he said slowly. "When it comes. A — disturbance. The ground moves and I know that it moved." He paused. "I do not know which way. I could not tell you left. I only know that it happened."
Jake looked down at Vauren's feet. Boots. Then at Kitch's — bare, more contact with the stone than either of them. Then at his own.
The pattern didn't hold. It should have been about feet — bare feet feel the ground, that was the whole idea, that was why the seed-grinder had looked at his soles. But Kitch was barefoot and felt nothing, and Vauren was booted and felt something, and Jake felt it loudest of all. If it were the feet, Kitch would be the one calling it easy.
"Huh," Jake said.
Kitch was watching him. Not the corridor. Him. One eye had drifted off to track the walls out of habit but the other stayed on Jake.
"What," Jake said.
"Nothing." Kitch started walking again. "It's useful that you can feel it. That's all that matters right now."
But the eye stayed on Jake a moment longer than the word did, and Jake had known Kitch long enough now to know that nothing meant something I'm not going to say yet.
They found the first body an hour after that.
It was in a dead-end corridor — a branch that hadn't closed, or had closed and reopened, hard to tell. The traveler had been dead a long time. Not a skeleton, not quite; the dry air had kept more than it should, the skin gone tight and dark over the bones, the clothing faded to the color of the stone.
Jake crouched next to it. He didn't have anything to do with his hands. This was old. This person had come through a portal like he had, walked into these corridors like he had, and turned the wrong way.
"Barefoot," Kitch said.
Jake looked. The dead traveler's feet were bare — the shoes gone, rotted or removed, the bones of the toes spread on the pale floor the same way Kitch's had been.
"So it's not the feet," Jake said quietly.
"No." Kitch crouched on the other side of the body, both eyes on it now. "It was never the feet. She told you to feel the ground and she was right that you can. She was wrong about why." He looked up. "She's a native. She's felt it since she was a child. To her it's like hearing. She doesn't know that most people who walk in here are deaf, because she's never once not been able to hear it. So she hands out a rule that works perfectly for her and kills almost everyone she gives it to."
Jake looked at the dead traveler's bare feet. The rule was free. It was free at the mouth of the maze to anyone who sat down. And it was useless to nearly all of them, because the thing it required wasn't a rule you could be told — it was a sense most people didn't have, and the woman who gave it out had no idea she was the exception and not the norm.
"How many, do you think," Jake said. "In here."
"A lot." Kitch stood. "The door at the far end opens for someone, sometimes. But the corridors are full of the people it didn't open for. Most of them heard 'walk left when it hums' and then stood in a corridor and never felt a single hum, and turned the way that felt right, and the wall came."
Vauren was standing over both of them, looking down at the body. His face gave nothing. But he'd gone very still.
"Then we are fortunate," Vauren said, "that one of us can hear it."
He didn't say Jake's name. He didn't have to. All three of them were looking at the dead traveler's bare feet, and all three of them understood that the difference between that body and Jake wasn't the feet, and none of them knew what it was.
Jake stood up. His own feet were warm on the stone, and the hum was somewhere ahead of them, waiting, and he could feel the whole maze around him the way you feel a room in the dark — not seeing it, but knowing its shape pressing against your skin.
He didn't think about what that meant. He put it in the back of his head with the rest of it and kept walking.
The carvings started deeper in.
Jake almost missed them — shallow marks in the pale stone, low on the walls, worn nearly smooth. Kitch didn't miss them. He stopped dead, both eyes locking on a section of wall, and put his talon-tips against the marks.
"Here," he said. "Look."
Jake looked. Lines, angles, a repeating pattern that might have been a language or might have been a diagram. Some of it was spirals. Some of it was straight-edged, geometric, deliberate.
"Somebody wrote this," Kitch said. His voice had changed. "Somebody got this deep and had time to carve into the walls. Which means they weren't running. They were studying." His talon traced a spiral. "This is the hum. See — this mark, it repeats, and every time it repeats the pattern turns. It's not just 'left.' It's a sequence. Left, left, straight, left, back. The rule the grinder gave us is the first two moves. This is the whole song."
"So 'left' stops working."
"'Left' was always going to stop working. It's the shallow water. It gets you through the first stretch and then the pattern changes and if all you know is 'left' you turn left into a wall and die confused." He was moving along the wall now, following the carvings, both eyes tracking the marks. "This is the deep water. Somebody read the whole thing and left it for whoever came after. I just have to read it too."
Jake watched him go. Behind them Vauren kept watch on a maze that didn't attack — nothing to absorb, no one to hit, steady and there.
"Can you read it?" Jake asked.
"Not yet." Kitch's talon rested on a mark he didn't understand. "But it's a language, and languages have rules, and I have —" He stopped. His head tilted. "How long do you think we have before that door at the far end matters more than the walls?"
"Why?"
"Because I can read this. But it's going to take time. And I don't know how much time this place gives you before—"
The hum came.
Jake felt it — but wrong. Bigger than the others. It came up through his feet and kept coming, longer than two seconds, longer than any of them, the whole floor vibrating under all three of them at once.
"That's not a turn," Jake said.
"No," Kitch said. He'd flattened his talon against the floor. He couldn't feel it. He didn't need to. All around them, in every direction, the grinding started — stone on stone, deep, felt in the teeth. Not one wall closing. Many.
"The corridor's changing," Jake said. "All of it. At once."
"Then remember where the carvings are," Kitch said, and his voice was very flat, "because I'm not finished reading them."
The walls moved.