There were moments in the deep when speech became an unnecessary friction upon the stone.
The fifth night watch had arrived, and the water in the lower channels had fallen to its deepest ebb. That left the vast maze of the House suspended in a total, velvet silence that mortal ears in the outside world could never understand.
In the cities of the upper sky, silence did not exist. Even in the dead of winter, the air was crowded with the distant hum of floating void-ships, the crackle of protective sect arrays, the barking of watch-dogs. The restless murmurs of millions of mortal people sleeping in crowded wooden apartments. There was always a shaking in the ear—a constant, exhausting reminder of collective anxiety.
Here, forty deep-water lengths beneath the surface of the Dead Gulf, the silence possessed a physical mass.
It wasn’t an emptiness. It was the massive presence of millions of tons of ancient stone and cold salt water holding their breath together. The dark rock vaults absorbed every sharp sound, returning only the deep, rhythmic sixty-cycle hum of the planet’s own spinning core. A sound felt through the soles of the feet rather than heard through the ear canal.
