~4.20~

John was not himself a master of echolocation, of course, but he still had a clearer picture of his surroundings than most of the people inhabiting the tunnel did.

Two miles in towards the city center, the habitations were in spread-out clusters. Each dwelling also had its own solution to the most basic problem of sanitation, and he could smell those. There was running water for cleaning and bathing in some parts of the tunnel, but those areas were more densely populated than the outskirts through which he passed. He could smell the underground dwellers not as an indistinct impersonal miasma of unwashed humanity, but as a series of individual olfactory presences, as unique and distinct as a personal seal or signature.

Some of the dwellings had dim battery powered lights or flickering candles which showed through cracks and seams… very faint light, very hard to miss in the darkness. He could hear low murmurs of conversation muffled by thin walls.

Some surface street dwellers — even many members of tribe — often regarded the kingdom’s dwellers as something like ghosts. Nobody spoke louder than they needed to, in the kingdom of the blind. Silence was a survival skill for those moving through the darkness beyond their domain, and it was cultivated and practiced within it. Speaking no more audibly than was necessary to be heard was also a way of preventing confusion when one could not know where another person was facing when they spoke.

If you wanted to converse with somebody in the darkness, you drew near to them first.

Conspire, thought John. Literally, it meant to breathe together, to come together and share the same air. Conspiracies were whispers in the darkness. By their very nature, these strange, silent people were conspirators in everything they did.

Had they come together to breathe against tribe?

It was certainly possible, but John could neither smell nor hear nor see any sign that the kingdom was on high alert, nor expecting reprisals of any sort.