The walls spoke from every side at once.
Mara was standing in the middle of the lowest chamber, a few steps from the railed pit at its center, when it began. There was no speaker in the chamber that she had seen. The voices came out of the rock itself, out of the nine conduits’ cages and the walls between them and the darkness above, as if the whole chamber were a throat.
The chorus.
But not as she had heard it in Hearth’s shrine. There, it had spoken together, a half-beat apart, one voice beginning and another carrying and a third finishing, so smoothly that it sounded like one mind with many mouths. Here it failed.
“We—” the voices said.
Together. All of them. The word started as one.
And then broke.
“—have reviewed—” said some.
