The teleportation array deposited them at the mouth of the mine in a dissolving cascade of silver light, and then there was nothing but silence.
It was the particular silence of underground spaces, not the absence of sound so much as the presence of a different kind of it. The soft, irregular flutter of will-o'-the-wisps. The faint creak of settled stone. Light that came from the grooves in the cave walls in thin, intermittent lines, supplementing the ghost-fire in a way that illuminated without quite explaining anything.
Don stood at the front of the group and looked at the cave hall stretching ahead of them.
The walls told their story plainly. Dark, mottled gouges ran in long horizontal channels where tools had bitten into stone over and over again across years or decades, the resource stripped out and the scarring left behind. Human hunger rendered in rock. The floor was clear, no bones, no fragments, nothing moving.
