Gerhardt took a breath, and it was plain he had turned these words over in his own head many nights running.
"The ones who walked out say it started deep, young master. Not a fresh vein. One of the old worked-out stretches, far down, ground we cut through and left behind years ago." His hand rose to the red ring on the map without touching it. "There was nothing there worth digging. There should have been nothing there at all."
"And before that?" Trafalgar asked. "The days ahead of it. Anything out of the ordinary."
"Now that you press me on it." Gerhardt's brow drew down. "There were tremors. Small ones, in a mountain that does not tremble. Sounds from below, deep enough that the men blamed the water. And a crew went down a week before it broke and never came back up. We wrote them off as a cave-in. We had no reason to think otherwise at the time." He paused. "I have had reason to think otherwise since."
"One breed of monster, or several?"
