The mountain quit listening after a while, and Trafalgar went on down into the part of it no map had bothered to name.
The tunnel shed its manners as it dropped. Near the mouth it had at least resembled something men had cut; down here the walls bent at angles no crew would have left, the floor spilled into long slides, and the crystal thinned from fat threads to a cold dusting until the light failed and threw him back on the grey his own eyes made of the dark. He read the ground as he walked, the way a place that punishes bad reading had taught him, and it told a story he liked even less than the one above.
The first of it was the smell, old rot gone flat and dry and sweet, the reek of a thing long finished dying. He found the source a dozen strides on. Carcasses, and not the grey shards the ice-born left, but livestock: goats, by what the frost had spared, hauled down and staked along a widening in the tunnel, bones gnawed bare, tethers knotted to iron pegs driven into the stone.
