The fall into the Vertical Deep gap was not a descent into cold oblivion.
For the first thousand arm-lengths, the darkness was total, roaring with the ear-splitting wind of their end-post plunge. The leftovers of the Grand Round hall—thousands of tons of shattered hard speckled rock cut stone, the broken bronze sounding-bells. The huge granite stone props—fell around them in a dropping star-pattern of dark giant pillars, tumbling through the upright shaft like meteors through the void.
Qiao Ming held Yan Zhiqiu locked against his chest with his uninjured left arm, his bare, calloused feet tucked beneath him, his broad shoulders shielding her body from the rushing gale.
His right arm hung limp at his side, the torn shoulder numb from the cold air, but his hand still gripped the whalebone handle of the green rust bone-awl. Strapped between their bodies, the Broken Slate pressed flat against their ribs. Its intaglio carvings glowed with a soft, steady amber warmth that seemed to create a protective envelope of high-pressure air around their faces.
Then, at three thousand arm-lengths of depth, the character of the fall began to change.
The freezing, needle-sharp draft from the upper rifts began to slacken, resisted by a huge, rising column of warm, dense air that climbed from the fathomless belly of the shaft like the breath out of a sleeping titan.
