It was a nest, a crawling nest of Man. Here they had grown filthy fungal-looking excrescences in profusion, and then they had bred and festered until the entire hideous hole of a place was overrun with a scurrying tide of four-limbed, flabby-skinned Man-creatures.

Words burrowed into his mind, all-unsought: hovels, huts, houses, a village.

“So many.” The voice was strange to him. It was not from any of the Men he traveled with. He realized they were looking at him with those arrangements of articles on their faces that were expressions. Expressions were used to show the attitudes of Man toward the things their eyes rested on, he discovered. The “expressions” of his jailers and tormentors—which he would rather have remained a mystery—were uniformly hostile.

He realized the voice had been his.

One of them looked less fierce than the others. “It’s just a village,” the small male Man said. “You should try a city.”

The meaning of the word “city” followed unbidden a moment later, and the concept horrified Nth beyond any bounds, simply because of what it said about just how many of these Men there must be.

The female Man who commanded the agonizing light, and seemed to be like a Mother to this little brood of them, broke in. “Lief, go on ahead and find something to disguise… that as best you can.”

That, Nth realized, was he himself. He was beginning to think more clearly now, and to disentangle something of the net of dealings within the world of Men, and between that world and its newest and most unwilling immigrant. That they had made him into this form, and were now sufficiently chagrined over it that they wished to hide him introduced him to another new word. Hypocrite.

But Lief, the smallest male, was already nodding and heading off, while the rest settled down off the track, within sight of the village.

He had been trying to think of his captors as just “Man,” the homogenous mass he had perceived in the forest, but part of his transformation was a forcible induction to humanity, with all that entailed. They were individuals, each with different things to fear and loathe about them.

The one who had just gone was Lief, and he seemed least offensive. There was a furtive nature to him that was at least comprehensible to Nth, who had crept through his share of shadows in his time. The others were even less pleasant than he.