The object had not arrived gently. It had entered the hall through the high-volume floodway of Siphon Four, carried on the crest of the thirty-eight-cycle surge. Then it struck the lower terrace of Entry hall 154 with enough moving fury to shear off two fancy pale limestone balusters.
Qiao Ming stood on the third landing of the terrace, his horn lantern raised high to cut through the swirling river of cold limestone mist.
Wedged between the fourth and fifth columns of the eastern row of stone pillars was the crumpled prow of a sky void-cutter.
It was twenty paces long, built of cold-hammered star-iron that had rusted to the rainbow-bright, oil-sheen purple of a dead raven’s wing. The titanic deep-water pressure of the outside deep-sea had crushed the ship’s pressure-hull like a dried seed pod. Its ribbed frames were buckled inward upon one another. Its bronze rivets had snapped cleanly from their plates, leaving rows of empty, whistling holes through which the retreating tide drained with a hollow, bubbling hiss.
Across the prow, half-wiped out by salt-scouring and jagged tears in the metal plate, ran the silver inlay of an ancient guild-sigil: three linked star compass vanes surrounded by an eclipse ring.
