Tunnels 01, Tunnels

green of the city as he held the two machetes in readiness at his sides.
    Then Imago pushed them on again, and Tam was forever lost from view. But burned onto their retinas was that final scene, that final picture of Tam standing proud and defiant in the face of the approaching tide. A single figure before a bristling field of drawn scythes.
    Even as they fled they could hear his urgent, shouted curses and the clash of blades, which grew fainter with every twist and turn of the tunnel.

     

36

    They ran, and Will held his arm tightly to his side, his shoulder throbbing painfully with each stride. He had no idea how many miles they'd traveled when, at the end of a long gallery, Imago finally slowed the pace to allow them to catch their breath. The width of the tunnels meant they could have walked side by side, but instead they chose to remain in single file -- it gave them some solitude, some privacy. Even though they hadn't exchanged a single word since they'd left Tam behind in the EternalCity, each knew only too well what the others were thinking in the wretched silence that hung like a pall over them. As they plodded mechanically along in their mournful little column, Will thought how much like a funeral procession it felt.
    He just couldn't believe that Tam was really dead -- the one person in the Colony who was so much larger than life, who had accepted him back into the family without a moment's hesitation. Will tried to get his thoughts into some sort of order and deal with the sense of loss and the hollowness that overwhelmed him, but he wasn't helped by Cal's frequent bouts of muffled weeping.
    They took innumerable turns down lefts and rights, every new stretch of tunnel as identical and unremarkable as the last. Imago didn't once refer to a map but seemed to know precisely where they were going, muttering to himself under his mask every so often, as if endlessly reciting a poem, or even a prayer. Several times Will noticed that he would shake a dull metal sphere the size of an orange as they turned yet another corner, but he had no idea why Imago was doing this.
    It came as some surprise when Imago drew them to a halt by what appeared to be a small fissure in the ground and looked warily up and down the tunnel on either side of them. Then he started to agitate the metal sphere with vigor around the mouth of the fissure.
    "What's that for?" Will asked him.
    "It masks our scent," Imago answered brusquely and, tucking the sphere away, he unslung Will's backpack and dropped it into the gap. Then he lowered himself to his knees and squeezed headfirst into the opening. It was a tight fit, to say the least.
    For about twenty feet the fissure descended almost vertically, then it began to level off, narrowing even further into a tight crawl space. Progress was slow as Will and Cal followed behind, the sounds of Imago's grunting and wriggling reaching them from up ahead as he desperately struggled through, pushing Will's backpack before him. Will was just wondering what they would do if Imago got stuck when they reached the end and were able to stand again.
    At first, Will couldn't make out much through his ruined mask, with one of its eyepieces shattered and the other fogged with condensation. It was only when Imago pulled off his mask and told the boys to remove theirs that Will saw where they were.
    It was a chamber, little more than thirty feet across and almost perfectly bell-shaped, with rough walls the texture of Carborundum. A number of small grayish stalactites hung down in the middle of the chamber, directly over a circle of dusty metal, which was set into the center of the floor. As they shuffled around the edges of the chamber, their boots scattered clusters of smooth spheres, which were dirty yellow in color and varied from the size of peas to large marbles.
    "Cave pearls," Will muttered, recalling the pictures he'd seen of them in one of his father's textbooks. Despite the way he felt, he immediately cast his eye around for any sign of running water, which would have been necessary for their formation. But the floor and walls appeared to be as dry and arid as the rest of the Labyrinth. And the only way in or out that Will could see was the crawl space they'd just come through.
    Imago had been watching him, and answered his unuttered question.
    "Don't worry... we'll be safe here, Will, for a while," he said, his broad face smiling, reassuringly. "We call this place the Cauldron."
    As Cal stumbled