The outer flood-channel had groaned three times during the sixth hour of the low watch, each shaking shuddering through twenty feet of dense, salt-soaked granite before dying out against the dark rock keel of the lower galleries.
Qiao Ming stood where the floor snapped off into the drainage water chute, his soles bare against the ribbed pale limestone flags. The stone was slick with green sea-glass speck scum and the cold, stone sweat of the foundations. But his toes curled naturally over the lip, splayed and hardened from years of holding fast to drowned stepped stone bases. Beneath his arches, the shaking was not the gentle pulse of the natural tide, nor the slow settling of the forty thousand cut stone blocks that formed the southern seawall. It was sharper, violent and clashing, carrying the metal ring of burst iron leagues away in the outer ceiling.
He wore his knee-length coat of boiled oilskin, stiffened by amber linseed oil and years of dried salt water, patched at the left shoulder with tough, grey-grained sharkskin. The copper buckles of his greased bridle-leather harness were green with green rust, clicking faintly as he shifted his stance. From the cross-strap hung his slate ledger, his animal fat cup, and the coiled horsehair line whose eight-sided lead line-weight rested against his hip.
