The wind of the deep gap did not howl like the gale of an open sea. It groaned through the upright flutes of the shattered deep pit with the sustained, hollow timbre of a drowned pipe organ.
They had been falling for what Qiao Ming’s internal water-mapping pulse measured as forty-six slow heartbeats. Above them, the ruined keystone of the Grand Round hall was already nothing more than an irregular patch of dull cinder-grey, its outline swallowed by the huge upward rush of humid, high-pressure air. White dark rock fragments, snapped away. Just then, the great central arch gave way under Zhu Heling’s acid charges, tumbled through the darkness beside them in silent, lazy trajectories, their sharp-angled edges dulled by distance and shadow.
Qiao Ming kept his body oriented feet-downward into the dark, his broad, calloused soles spread wide against the rushing slipstream. The skin of his bare feet, hardened by fifteen years of gripping slime-slick marble roof ledges and barnacle beds in the upper rows of stone pillars, read the heat shifts in the rising column of air. The air was not cold. That was the first strange flaw his senses cataloged. In the upper entry halls, every drop in fathom brought an increase in ice-slow bitterness, the salt water growing heavier, blacker, and more hostile to mortal warmth. Here, thousands of feet beneath the foundations of the Fifth Hundred halls, the rising draft carried a dense, humid warmth that tasted of fermented tannin, damp peat, and the sweet…
