When they crossed the southern threshold of the council nave, the world tilted beneath their feet.
It wasn’t an earthquake or a sudden load-bearing collapse of the timber foundation. The floor itself remained utterly rigid, paved with broad planks of stone-hard cedar that were dovetailed together with linked joints. Yet as they took their fifth stride into Entry hall 588, the relationship between down and out began to fracture.
The floor sloped downward at an alarming angle of forty-two degrees, plunging into a deep, shadowy ravine like the ramp of a royal shipyard. Under normal conditions of gravity, a man walking upon such an incline would right away lose his balance, his boots sliding out from under him as he tumbled into the dark. Yet when Qiao Ming took a step forward, his balance point did not pull him down the slope.
Instead, an invisible, titanic crushing weight was pulling him laterally toward the western wall. A huge stone-hard world-tree trunk seventy paces thick that rose vertically like a mountain cliff of dark, furrowed bark.
Qiao Ming stopped right away. His bare feet reacted with gut water-mapping genius. His toes splayed wide, gripping the ribbed grain of the cedar planks, his ankles rolling outward to compensate for the sideways shear.
