Maul was a hundred meters up the lift shaft, groping his way upward through unrelenting blackness, when the Hive started changing shape around him.
Another reconfiguration? Now?
He’d never been this deep inside the prison when the process had occurred. From here everything seemed to be happening faster, on a cataclysmic scale. It was like being trapped inside the works of the galaxy’s biggest and most deadly clock. Gaps opened in the walls, and the walls themselves broke apart and began to rotate and realign. Steel scaffolding swung and clanged on its hinges. Within seconds the entire infrastructure was buckling and oscillating in a thousand independently governed directions, flinging whole levels of itself at him, articulated vent shafts and automated platforms pivoting and swinging around him with mechanical abandon—as if this entire world, no longer content with simple reconfiguration, was determined to tear itself apart. From the left, a thick bundle of electrical conduits erupted out of a newly formed gap in the opposite walls. Maul ducked as the pipeline sailed by his scalp, slamming into the wall that had just risen off to his left. Another panel swung open to his right and extruded a meshwork of strut channels that swiveled through a shaft on the opposite side.
He held on tight to the rungs he’d been climbing. The shaft wall that he’d been scaling just moments before jolted stammeringly into motion, clanking and scraping, rising at an angle and then turning on itself, twisting until it was perpendicular to its original orientation, and he was hanging from the rungs, his body dangling straight down above an open abyss whose depths he couldn’t gauge.
It seemed that Warden Sadiki had lost patience and decided to conduct the next bout without him.
Maul stared straight down. An updraft of air rose from the void. Far below, hundreds of meters down, a series of levels dilated open like the valves and chambers of some colossal mechanical heart at the bottom of the shaft, and for an instant, he thought he glimpsed it—the throbbing turbines at the very center of the prison, the great gnashing driveshaft upon which all the clockwork turned.
At last, with a final clattering slam, the prison fell still again.
Maul hung there, waiting.
The silence came next.
It was suddenly very cold in the updraft, and he was aware that his shoulders were aching, that he couldn’t hang on here forever. But he no longer had the slightest sense of direction—only that Cog Hive Seven’s artificially generated gravitational field was already sucking him irrevocably down toward the void, where the gears at the heart of this place would no doubt grind him to a paste.
He reached out with his feelings, trying to get a sense of where he needed to go, the nearest exit, even the nearest wall.
Something brushed against the back of his neck, soft and sticky.
Looking up, he saw that the open spaces around him were webbed with a filmy, gossamer substance, dangling in threads. At one point the strands might have been nests, but when the prison had reconfigured itself, they’d been torn apart, and now they rippled in the currents of air rising from below.
Maul narrowed his eyes. The webworks twitched and seethed, bundles of tiny living things, their white bodies squirming in the silken strands. They looked like—
All at once, the rungs in his hands began to vibrate.
Maul gripped them tighter, feeling the entire surface shaking over his head. Unlike the mechanized uproar that he’d just experienced, this was a singular, living presence, slithering its way through the steel panel that had once been a wall, the one from which he was currently dangling. Its weight caused the support armature itself to sag and buckle below it.
The Syrox. The Wolf Worm of Cog Hive Seven.
The clamor must have roused it, brought it here, where it would have to be reckoned with.
It was already very close. Maul realized that the Hive’s most recent reconfiguration had probably thrust him directly into its nesting grounds, where it spawned its sucklings, such as they were. Had the Warden done this on purpose? Was this to be his next fight after all?
Accidental or on purpose, it hardly mattered. He could feel the thing itself passing through the tunnel directly above him in an oozing, peristaltic wave.
Maul squinted straight ahead into the darkness, focusing until he could make out the vague shape of what he hoped was another wall, fifteen meters in front of him. Clutching the rungs overhead, he began to work his way hand over hand to the far wall. He had no sense of what he’d find there exactly, only that he couldn’t linger directly underneath the weight of this thing above him, which felt like it might tear through the passageway overhead and come spilling down on top of him at any second.
Above him, the repulsive weight of the worm slithered along at the exact same pace, as if it sensed his proximity. Maul knew where it was because of the way the groaning steel protested louder than ever, bolts and rivets popping free now, whole panels bulging and snapping out of place.
What do you want?
The thing paused again, searching.
Stretching out with his feelings, Maul heard a tangle of voices exploding in his mind, hundreds of them stitched together in an irrational patchwork of agony and confusion.
Inmates.
All the ones that the worm had devoured since its arrival here. Shrieks. Mad, inarticulate laughter. Oaths of vengeance never to be exacted. Pleas for mercy never to be granted. It was as if the door to an asylum had been flung open inside his skull, allowing a wave of incoherent screams, individual cries, and desperate fragmented phrases into his mind.
—swear I will—
—kill you and rip your karking face off it—
—hurts me it’s eating my—
—skin when it burns you can’t—
—save me this place is like—
—blackness, it’s a pit, I can’t—
—run anymore there’s no end to this pain when it’s—
—bleeding me dry I can’t feel my hands and I’m—
—blind my eyes are rotting in my—
—skull what’s that thing in my—
—brains we shall eat—
—WE SHALL EAT—
Maul reached the far wall and swung himself forward. In the darkness, his feet found a narrow toehold at the edge of a scaffolding perhaps three centimeters wide, but sufficient to steady his weight.
Pressing his back to the wall, arms outstretched for balance, he stood there for a long ten-count as the worm above him slithered slowly out of range, hauling its albino bulk along behind him with the unhurried determination of a thing that knew its ultimate role here, and saw no need to rush.
He let out a breath and took a closer look at where he was standing. The scaffolding where he stood wrapped itself around an oblong recessed platform that had recently been formed by three intersecting walls, each one on hinges. He pressed his weight tentatively against them. None of them looked particularly solid.
Enough of this.
Kicking the panel in the middle, he watched as it swung open to reveal a low, arched doorway through which a faint orangish yellow glow emanated, hazy in the cold metallic dust.
He swung himself inside it and hit the floor running.