The retreat of the forty-hour salt water left a line of black scum across the pilasters, five arm-lengths above the floor.
Qiao Ming stood upon the threshold of Entry hall 251, his bare soles planted against the cold, unbending lip of the doorway. Behind him lay the familiar pale limestone avenues of the middle galleries. There, the water had tasted of chalk, kelp-rot, and the sweet mutton fat he used to dress the joints of the weeping sages. Here, the floor shifted suddenly. The white stone ended in a clean, saw-cut rebate three inches deep, giving way to an expanse of pitch-black dark rock that drank the yellow beam of his oil lamp without giving back a single spark of mica.
The air across the threshold smelled different. It didn’t carry the clean Atlantic iodine of the upper terraces, nor the soft lime dust of the dry entry halls. It smelled of cold ozone, stale lightning, and the metal tang of iron that had spent ten thousand years sunk in heavy salt water.
He lifted his foot and set it down upon the black stone.
The chill struck instantly through the hardened horn of his heel, running up the tendons of his calf into the bone. It wasn’t the biting frost of ice, but the dense, heavy cold of deep-sea bedrock that had never known the warmth of a sun. His toes curled, testing the friction. The dark rock was not polished like the ritual floors of the inner porticoes…
