Chapter 12: The Balrog, or: What the Deep Places Actually Contain

The drums did not stop.

This was the first thing I catalogued in the dark beyond the Chamber of Mazarbul: that the drums had not ceased when we began to move, as I had, without examining the assumption, expected they would. I had constructed a model in which the drums were responsive — a communication system, a warning, a language directed at us. But they continued at the same unvaried cadence regardless of our position, our speed, our direction. They were not tracking us. They had been proceeding at this frequency before we arrived and would continue at this frequency after whatever happened had happened. This was a more disturbing model than the alternative, and I noted it in the interior ledger and descended.

Greyvast had said, in the Chamber: Follow me, and do not look back. He had not said: there will be fire. He had said nothing about fire. I understood, later, that this was not omission but accuracy — that fire was not the operative category, that to name what followed as fire was to classify it within a taxonomy it had preceded by too many orders of magnitude to make the classification meaningful. A man born blind might classify the sun as warm. He would not be wrong. He would have missed the primary datum.