Nothing in the royal texts of the Yan-Luo Dynasty had prepared Yan Zhiqiu for the massive scale of the Sunken Rows of pillars.
She had read the grand stone-built treatises of the First Epoch. She had studied the exaggerated descriptions written by ancient poets who spoke of halls that could house an entire mountain range. She had assumed that such texts were the hyperbole of courtiers seeking royal favor.
Then she stepped through the massive archway of Entry hall 351.
She stopped dead in her tracks, her bare feet frozen upon the damp pale limestone floor, her breath escaping in a reflex, stunned gasp that echoed into the vast gloom like a dropped pebble in an endless canyon.
Before her opened a pillared hall cross-hall four hundred and twenty paces wide.
On either hand, marching into the unending dusk in four huge ranks, rose one hundred and twenty fluted giant pillars of grey-veined Pentelic marble. Each column was five paces in width at the base, carved from a single block of stone, rising sixty arm-lengths toward a vaulted coffered ceiling that vanished into drifting ribbons of purple and silver ceiling-mist.
The floor between the columns was not flat. It was stepped in massive terraces of polished banded limestone, dropping by three-arm-length grades toward a central navigation canal sixty paces wide. The canal was currently at low slack, its black water reflecting the huge stonework like a black glass mirror, unruffled by any breeze, fully motionless in the lightless calm of…
