“Tenns.”

“What are you looking at?”

It was humour; it might even be joy.

“I -”

“Give me that; come on,” she quickly inserted the four round stones - for what purpose? - in the sack she had for that and tied it over her shoulder; rising at the same time, taking the reins of Setty; his mare. “You understand you've come at the worst possible moment in the history of Cyclops civilisation - don't -”

“- Why I'm here,” she led his horse into the entrance of the three-domed entrance atrium - connected - that would take him below.

“I have to find out why, that is, they're killing -”

- “The children can't see.”

- He thought maybe something else, “They can't, but – you've always been more than -”

“For a moment I was happy to see you - but they can't see. The children can't see. They're blind.”

She brought his horse along the wee path toward the Door of Flat Eyes, which was the door that brought them all inside. In the phrase they sometimes used to indicate that. A quotation. Not just the Door of Flat Eyes, but the door that brought them all inside; in that poem, of course; that psalm of the great Old Dark Religion.

Maybe that was why - but he always felt panic over that threshold.

The eyes on the door weren't flat at all, they were carved out the great black bloody door, varnished in the sanguine of 500,000 years. The blood of each of them was in that door, each of them who'd ever lived - 500,000 years . - They'd all been pricked and theirs had been added to all the rest; and as soon as that, they were joined, they were part too of that history that was in numbers the same thing, no difference, no human/Cyclops difference at this point. No difference.

She did that thing that allowed them to enter and the door parted its hinges in the manner that it did, as if on its own will.

Pry shivered, he thought his horse did too, but likely he was imposing that on her by means of the talent the other side of which he saw reality.

It was empty. No hubbub. No stalls selling the wares of the Cyclops women that they manufactured down there in the dark; the traditional healing herbs and the balms, soaps and unguents they manufactured for tending wounds; other stuff like that, you know. Talismans. All that had been cleared away, and the space was just vast and empty and desolate and sad. Straw sprinkled around on the floor here and there. Stone walls.

The Ascensor in the middle would take them down.