The road brought them at last to the great boundary of the Ninth Season—the massive portal of Entry hall 575.
Here. There, the upright deep gap ended and the solid floor of the sunken continent began, the ancient foresters had carved a gateway of titanic proportions. It wasn’t built of assembled blocks or mortared stone. The entire portal was hewn from a single, giant world-tree root that arched out of the bedrock, rose ninety paces into the air, and plunged back into the earth fifty yards to the west.
The archway was carved with three nested bands of deep, relief sculpture depicting the history of the First Drowning. On the outer band, sky waters were shown pouring from the stars, represented by stylized spirals of carved salt water. On the middle band, giant foresters with branch-fingers and root-beards stood in linked circles, holding up a vast wooden canopy to shelter sleeping cities beneath their limbs. On the innermost band—closest to the traveler’s passage—were engraved the three hundred ancient water-mapping trigrams that governed the flow of deep-water gates.
The threshold beneath the arch was a massive top door beam of stone-hard hardwood, polished by the passage of millions of ancient feet until it shone like black jade.
