The archway of Entry hall 034 opened onto an expanse of stone-hard devastation.
Here, sixty paces wide and nearly a hundred paces long, lay the Calcified Anemone Threshold. The chamber was a low-ceilinged transitional basin where the waters of the lower tides were forced through a natural constriction before draining into the western water gates. The constant ebb and flow had scoured away the original paving stones. It replaced them with a vast, uneven reef of living and hardened marine organisms that coated the floor from wall to wall.
The air here was foul, heavy with the sharp, acidic stench of decaying salt water-sponges, rotting kelp. The bitter, chemical musk of packed cnidarian venom.
Qiao Ming skidded to a halt at the edge of the limestone ledge.
The sight before him demanded total stillness.
Stretching from his toes to the distant archway of Entry hall 037 was a field of razor-sharp obstacles. Dense banks of black and violet mussels—each shell grown to the length of a man’s hand and ridged with edges as sharp as freshly knapped flint—clustered across every ridge and boulder. A misstep that landed a bare foot upon a cluster of these shells would shear through flesh and tendon down to the metatarsal bones.
More lethal still were the hardened anemones.
Rooted in the crevices between the mussel beds were thousands of stone-hard flower-chalices, each one to three feet across. Their outer stalks had absorbed white lime-chalk from the ancient water, hardening into jagged, ash-grey tubes of living limestone that rose like jagged stumps from the floor.
Within the hollow cups of these limestone tubes stayed the living polyps.
Because the receding backwash of the earlier tide had left the basin drained, the anemones were hungry. Their crowns had swelled into fleshy, semi-clear wheels of pale pink and milky white tentacles, each tentacle glistening with droplets of thick, thick, sticky slime.
Qiao Ming knew that slime.
It was a neurotoxic salt water secreted by thousands of tiny nematocysts. A single touch against bare skin would inject a paralyzing peptide that attacked the central nervous system within twenty breaths. That turned voluntary muscle into rigid, painful stone while leaving the mind fully conscious as the incoming tide drowned the lungs.
Far behind him, echoing through the fluted hard speckled rock halls of Entry hall 032, the infrasound whistle had begun to die away.
The air-powered air was spent. In its place came a new sound: a deep, throaty rumble that shook the foundations like a hundred loaded iron wagons crossing a wooden bridge. The Median Surge had breached the lower drain pits. The water was already thundering up the drainage channels.
He had less than seven minutes before the torrent washed this entire floor three arm-lengths deep.
Qiao Ming drew a long, slow breath through his nostrils. His slate-grey eyes narrowed, scanning the jagged maze of the reef.
He didn’t look for a clear path. There was no clear path. He looked for the high stone ribs—the ancient, hardened limestone ledges that had been scoured clean of polyps by the scouring action of the daily gravel backwash. They formed a broken, tortuous zigzag across the basin, raised barely three inches above the poisonous tentacles.
He reached down to his right hip and freed the eight-pound lead line-weight from its rawhide tether.
He didn’t unfurl the sounding line. He held the lead weight directly in his right hand, gripping the upper brass eyelet between his thumb and curled forefinger. The heavy, eight-sided lead bob was his balance staff, his sounding probe, and his only defense.
He stepped off the ledge onto the first limestone ridge.
His bare left foot landed with feather-light care on a narrow crest of grey pale limestone no wider than three fingers. His splayed, horn-calloused toes gripped the rock with gut certainty, feeling the texture of the stone through the thin film of damp salt.
His right hand swung the lead line-weight forward, tapping the next foothold two paces ahead.
Clink.
The lead struck solid stone. The ridge was sound, free of loose shingle.
He leaped.
He moved not with wild haste, but with the fluid, calculated grace of a coastal heron navigating a wave-lashed reef. Every movement was balanced, his balance point shifting smoothly from hip to hip. When his right foot touched stone, his left foot was already rising. When his left heel landed, his right arm was swinging the lead bob to counteract the turning force of his body.
Beneath his knees, the field of pale tentacles quivered.
Disturbed by the shifted weight of his passing and the shakes of his footsteps, the anemones flared. Hundreds of milky-white polyps uncoiled from their limestone chalices, reaching upward toward his ankles like ghostly, grasping fingers. Droplets of clear, glistening venom dripped from their tips, sizzling faintly as they touched the acidic mud between the stones.
Qiao Ming did not look down at the tentacles. To look at the hazard was to invite pause, and pause meant death. His eyes remained locked on the stone ridges three paces ahead, reading the cleavage planes and the dry stone patches.
Halfway across the basin, disaster tested his footing.
He landed on what appeared to be a solid shelf of hardened banded limestone. But beneath the thin crust of stone lay a pocket of rotting sponge.
The stone broke with a muffled crunch.
His right heel sank two inches into the fissure. The jagged edge of a violet mussel shell grazed his lateral ankle, slicing a paper-thin line through the skin that instantly welled with a dark bead of blood. The sudden loss of purchase threw his upper body forward, his balance pitching toward a massive anemone chalice where a cluster of pink polyps waited with flared tentacles.
In that split second, Qiao Ming’s long years of training saved his life.
He didn’t thrash or fight the fall. Instead of jerking backward, he hurled the eight-pound lead weight in his right hand wildly toward the opposite flank.
The heavy lead acted as an instant balance weight. The outward-pulling driving force arrested his forward tumble, turning his torso around his locked hip. His left foot snapped forward, finding purchase on a narrow nub of dark rock six inches clear of the anemone’s lip.
He caught his balance on the single point of his left ball-foot, frozen like a bronze statue in mid-air.
Below his right shin, barely half an inch away, the pale tentacles lashed against the empty air, their stinging threads striking the stiff, oil-soaked hemp of his trouser cuff. The linseed-cured cloth resisted the venom. The nematocysts discharged harmlessly against the slick, water-resistant fibers, leaving only a streak of grey, frothy slime.
Qiao Ming exhaled. His heart was steady, beating with the calm rhythm of the tide.
He wrenched his right foot from the fractured crevice, ignoring the stinging scrape on his ankle, and brought the lead weight back to center.
He withdrew the Brass star-compass with his left hand, holding it level for two heartbeats to verify his exit heading through the drifting mist.
The slate gave him the vector: North-by-Northwest, fourteen degrees. Six minutes remained before the surge crest.
He pocketed the brass dial, gripped the lead weight with renewed focus, and resumed his crossing.
The last forty paces were a blur of stone, lead, and foam. He bounded from ridge to ridge, his bare feet touching only the cold, unbending limestone, vaulting over clusters of gaping mussel shells and leaping past towering anemone chalices that stood as high as his waist.
Behind him, an ear-splitting crash shook the chamber.
The first wave of the Median Surge had shattered the bronze gates of Entry hall 034. A roaring wall of white, frothing salt water, four feet high and churning with crushed gravel, burst through the archway, swallowing the hardened reef in a boiling fury of foam and shattered shells.
Qiao Ming did not look back.
With a final, desperate surge of his thighs, he launched himself across the final deep gap of open water, his toes catching the edge of the raised stone temple steps of Entry hall 037. He scrambled onto the smooth, dry flat stone slabs, rolling onto his shoulder and coming to his feet against the base of a fluted pilaster.
Behind him, the foamy torrent slammed against the face of the stone temple steps with a dull, bone-shaking boom that sent a shower of cold spray thirty arm-lengths into the air.
The water churned furiously across the reef, submerging the mussel beds and the poisonous polyps beneath five feet of rushing, dark ocean. But here, upon the high terrace of the Middle Tier, the stone was dry, solid, and safe.
Qiao Ming leaned his back against the cool marble pilaster.
He wiped the salt spray from his eyes and looked down at his right ankle. The shallow cut from the mussel shell was stinging with the salt, but the blood had already begun to clot in the cold air. The venom had not touched his flesh.
He set the lead line-weight upon the flat stone slab beside his heel. The heavy metal settled with a clean, dull clink that sounded sweet in the vast, echoing hall.
Ahead lay the grand row of stone pillars of Entry hall 038 and the Entry hall of the Broken Gavel. There, seated upon his cut stone throne, was the Iron High judge, and Qiao Ming had a ledger of water-pressure seals to inspect before the high tide completed its turn.