“And there are other such unfinished places in the Land?” Prim asked.

“Many. All of them as difficult to reach as this one,” said Pick.

“Otherwise Pluto would have done them up,” Lyne guessed, “so that ordinary souls would never see such strange holdovers of the Before Times.”

“Just so,” said Pick.

“Why have we then come here?” asked Mard, letting the sample case down onto the ground with a gentleness that in no way reflected his true feelings toward it.

“To be elsewhere,” said Corvus. “Look, I am a bird and I do not love having rock over my head. So I’m going to get out from under the Overstrike and do what birds do.”

“Eat worms?” Querc asked.

“Shit all over everything?” said Lyne.

“That’s the spirit! Now shut up and keep Pick from killing himself down there,” said Corvus, and after a few hops back down the way they had come, took off squawking into the sunlight.

“You’re going . . . down there?” Lyne asked Pick.

Pick unlocked the front of the sample case, which hinged down to form a table, variously burned and stained. Revealed were numerous niches and drawers, labeled in very old script such as Pestle had, according to legend, learned from the Old Gods in First Town. Prim, who knew how to read it, saw words like PRIMORDIAL ADAMANT—FROM THE LARGEST ROCK and AURIC CHAOS—PARTIALLY SENTIENT and other terms that made considerably less sense even than those.

The general plan of action was to anchor ropes up here that Pick could use to secure himself as he descended the ramplike surface of the crack face. Up here it was strewn with stuff that had fallen on it over the centuries, but once he descended to a depth “profound enough to be worth visiting,” it would be as clean and featureless as the opposite, overhanging face, and he would begin to slide.

“You can’t just stop there,” Mard objected.

“What do you mean?” Pick asked. He was uncoiling, and inspecting, a very long rope.

“‘Begin to slide.’ Then what?”

“Keep sliding?” Lyne guessed.

“At increasing velocity?” Querc offered.

“But, to where?” Mard demanded. “Where would you stop?”

“Better to ask whether,” Pick said. “Careless as he was, I see no reason to assume that Egdod bothered to supply every hole in the ground with a bottom. Tedious work, that. Not his way.”

This left the younger members of the expedition in silence as they went about their work—though the vision of Pick’s falling into a bottomless chasm did have the salutary effect of making them very keen about sound knot-work and proper anchoring of rope ends. They more and more avoided the lip of the fault.