Entry hall 218 was an intentional stone-built cul-de-sac known in the master blueprints as the Blind Cross-hall.
Built during the Third Cycle, the hall was eighty paces long and thirty arm-lengths wide, lined with twin rows of massive stone pillars carved from dark red coarse grey rock. At the western terminus of the cross-hall, where a casual traveler might expect an archway opening into the next side, there was only a huge giant stone inner wall of solid granite, forty feet high and twelve feet thick, without a seam, latch, or keyhole.
The chamber had never been built for transit. It was an overflow pool designed to receive excess high-pressure head whenever the deep-sea tides threatened to breach the lower water gate-gates.
Into this blind hall the leftovers of the outer sect’s middle calm distance had pulled back.
They numbered fourteen men—archers, shield-bearers, and junior spirit-cannoneers who had fled the sound terror of the bronze chambers. Exhausted, freezing, and scared of the unseen guardian who seemed to control the very stones of the hall, their sub-officer, an old mercenary named Master Jiao, had ordered his men to barricade the eastern entrance with overturned supply carts and iron mantlets.
They believed they had found a defensible stronghold where they could hold out until Zhu Heling’s main fleet breached the upper hull.
