The dark rock road had narrowed to a ribbon two arm-lengths wide, running like a tightrope between two howling gulfs of ice-cold ruin.
In Entry hall 836, the bedrock of the World-Ship had met an ancient transverse fault in the bottom spine-beam. To span the fracture, the original masons had not laid broad pavers. They had set a single course of long, narrow dark rock stringers, two arm-lengths across and twenty paces long, keyed into each other with linked bronze cramps.
Beneath the narrow dark rock ribbon, the starlight ice was no longer a smooth, solid sheet. It was shattered into a chaotic wilderness of jagged seracs, bottomless crevasses, and leaning towers of blue crystal that groaned under the shifting earth-shaking loads of the hull. A thick, freezing fog of turned straight into ash cold air drifted through the chasms on either side, through which the faint, glowing souls of underwater giant statues flickered like drowning lanterns.
To step off the dark rock ribbon by three inches was to plunge into a micro-fractured deep pit where the heat stood at eighty-four below zero. A fall that would turn into glass a mortal body before it struck the bottom of the fissure.
