The hall leading from the channel gate to the third entry hall rose at a steady slope of one arm-length every twenty paces, carved through dense grey hard speckled rock that had never felt the direct warmth of a sun.
Qiao Ming walked without slipping, his bare, hardened soles finding the transverse drainage grooves that ancient stonemasons had chiseled into the floor. In his arms, the girl felt almost weightless, though her sodden silk robes dripped a steady trail of salt water and diluted blood against his knees. Her breath came in short, stuttering gasps that hitched against his collarbone, each breath out carrying the faint, sweetish odor of bile, ocean sulfur, and deep body tiredness.
Beneath the steady tread of his feet, the hard speckled rock stone floor told its own history. This was the Ascent of the Quiet Tide, built during the middle hundreds of years of the First Epoch when the great engineers of the sunken flotilla still possessed machines of bronze and steam. The walls on either hand bore the upright scoring of clockwork bore-bits, thirty arm-lengths tall, polished smooth by hundreds of thousands of tidal surges until the stone looked like greasy river-jade. At every tenth pace, a shallow niche held a carved bowl of lead-glass containing a fist-sized lump of stone-hard eerie-glowing lichen. It glowed with a faint, ghostly green soft glow that lit up the mist swirling around his ankles.
