The darkness did not remain empty for long.
Before the cold foam of the leading surge had reached his shins, the true voice of the deep water arrived. It was the grinding, hollow shriek of millions of tons of liquid weight shearing against ancient stonework, with the dry crack of underground bedrock under water-pressure shock. The air smelled of sharp ozone and ancient settled mud, colder than mountain ice.
Qiao Ming did not wait for the water to test his footing.
With swift, practiced discipline, he turned toward the eastern wall of Entry hall 085. The row of stone pillars here opened into the wide climbing terraces of the Great Amphitheater of the Grand Moon-tide line-up, where eighty tiers of grey limestone benches rose toward the vaulted ceiling. He drove the chisel-teeth of his calc-cleats into the damp mortar seams between the rusticated wall blocks. The iron teeth bit deep, throwing off sparks of crushed quartz that flickered briefly in the dark.
Ten feet up. Twenty feet. Thirty.
He reached the first projecting top stone ledge—a two-foot shelf of hard snake-like carved with a relief of winding river reeds—and hauled his torso onto the stone. Below him, the five-foot tongue of advance water slammed through the archway, foaming over the floor where he had stood three breaths earlier. The salt water was black as squid bile, carrying an odor of cold rot and crushed stone salts that burned the membranes of his throat.
Then the floor of the entry hall seemed to drop away.
From the southern tunnel. There, the three currents came together in the dark throat of the drain tube, the main body of the bore burst into the tiered arena.
It was an upright wall of water fifteen meters high.
The face of the bore was an advancing, tumbling cliff of emerald foam and churning black silt, crowned with a crest of white spray that leaped toward the coffered ceiling. As it struck the first pair of huge statues—two seated guards carved from single giant pillars of black dark rock, each forty arm-lengths tall—the impact sounded like the discharge of a hundred siege engines.
The stone guards held their ground against the hammer-blow. The water crested their cut stone foundations regardless. It surged wildly over the stone temple steps, burying the thirty-foot stone stands in a boiling froth of foam. In three heartbeats, the black water climbed their calves, engulfed their stone laps, and rose to drown their carved waists in a fury of emerald foam. The heavy bronze scepters resting in their stone fingers shook with such violence that flakes of turquoise crust tore free, dancing in the spray like green fireflies.
From his perch on the top stone ledge, Qiao Ming pulled his braided cord from his satchel. He passed the line three times around a heavy ledge-stone bracket that anchored the arch above him, securing the working end with a taut rope winch hitch. If the spray or the blast wave tore his boots from the shelf, the silk and bronze wire would hold thirty times his weight against the undertow.
He wiped the salt-spray from his eyes with his sleeve and looked out over the drowned expanse.
The Great Tiered hall was a stone-built cave spanning three hundred paces across. In the center of its floor sat the low, circular stage where ancient astronomers had once mapped the conjunction of underground currents. Now, that entire floor was gone, replaced by a churning, boiling lake that rose with terrifying speed.
The water was alive with cold, pale bioluminescence. Trillions of tiny salt water-plankton, crushed and agitated by the violent shear of the three currents, glowed with an eerie turquoise radiance. The light lit up the underside of the barrel vaults sixty arm-lengths overhead, casting shifting, rippling nets of green light across the ribs and stone panels of the ceiling.
In that ghostly light, the statues appeared to be wading through an emerald deep pit.
The water reached the chest of the third patriarch. The stone beard, carved in fine, detailed, curling ripples of marble, was swallowed by the froth. For a moment, the statue’s calm, unblinking face remained above the surface, staring out through the mist with an expression of massive indifference, before a backup swell broke against its cheek and buried its lips in water.
Qiao Ming withdrew his brass sighting disk.
The instrument was cold as ice in his numbed hands. He braced his elbow against the damp wall, brought the sighting rule to his eye, and peered down through the spray toward the western drainage throat.
Across the tiered arena, at the lowest point of the basin, lay the massive archway of Sluice Gate Nine.
In normal seasons, when the thirty-six-hour tide reached its peak, Sluice Nine was engineered to swallow thirty thousand cubic paces of water every minute. Its massive bronze drop-gate, forty arm-lengths wide and counterweighted with lead-filled water tanks, was supposed to lift automatically as the water-pressure head climbed. That let the flood plunge downward into the unmapped deep-sea trenches below the Ark’s keel.
The sighting dial told a horrifying story.
The water was rising at nearly a foot every twelve heartbeats. At the western arch. There, the massive singing whirlpool of the discharge drain should have formed, there was only a sluggish, choking swell.
A mountain of white foam was piling up against the gate’s intake portal, yet the water was not escaping. Instead of being drawn down into the deep vents, the bore was reflecting off the closed bronze wall of the drop-gate, throwing a massive standing wave back across the tiered arena.
“The gate is choked,” Qiao Ming said aloud, his voice swallowed instantly by the drumming roar of the flood. “The balance weights have failed to pull, or the teeth have taken a bone.”
He lowered the brass instrument. His mind worked through the high-pressure mathematics with the cold care of his training.
The Great Tiered hall had a total liquid capacity of roughly two million cubic paces before the water reached the spring-line of the vaulted ceilings. At the present rate of inflow—fourteen meters per second through the southern breach, augmented by the northern sky drift—the air volume in the upper tiers would be fully put out in less than seventy minutes.
When that happened, the water would not simply stop.
The trapped air in the high vaults would be tightly packed to forty sea-weights. It would seek the weakest joints in the stonework, blowing out the keystones and turning the entire eighty-tier tiered arena into an imploding tomb of shattered limestone.
Beyond the tiered arena lay the long, dry galleries of Entry halls 089 through 100. The inner sanctum where the delicate paper-thin vellums of the first mapmakers and the sleeping forms of the unawakened dead rested in silent alcoves.
If the water breached the retaining arches of Entry hall 090, those halls would drown under eighty feet of hyper-saline mud. The memory of three hundred ages would dissolve into lime and sulfur.
A violent shudder passed through the snake-like top stone ledge beneath his boots.
He looked down. A massive timber—a stone-hard cedar beam sixty feet long and thick as a cart, torn from some ancient sunken roofed porch miles upstream—slammed against the stone stand of the nearest judge. The impact snapped off a three-foot slab of carved marble trim, sending it crashing into the boiling foam. The tree trunk rebounded, spun in the swirling backwash. Then he began drifting along the eastern wall, carried by a circular eddy directly toward the terrace below him.
Behind it came a flotilla of shattered stone-built wreckage. Broken columns, floating wicker baskets crusted with dried mussels, and jagged blocks of porous banded limestone that rolled across the underwater steps like underwater boulders.
The water was already lapping at the seventieth tier of the tiered arena benches. It produced a rhythmic, slapping thud against the limestone risers, each wave throwing fine white foam three arm-lengths into the air. Through the emerald surface, Qiao Ming could see the underwater shoulders of the fourth and fifth patriarchs. Their stone hands remained clasped in meditative seals beneath six deep-water lengths of rushing salt water, unmoving while schools of startled glowing-eels swarmed around their stone fingers.
The cold was creeping through his hemp leggings. Even with the sheep fat rubbed into his joints, the hyper-saline water possessed an unnatural, hungry chill that sucked the heat from bone and sinew. If he remained stationary on this high shelf, the rising humidity and dropping liquid silver vapors would numb his fingers until he could no longer work a knot or seat an awl.
Qiao Ming checked the tension on his tether.
He couldn’t remain perched on this shelf like an observing gull. The gate would not unblock itself. The ancient machinery of the Hall was built with sublime intelligence, but it possessed no hands to clear its own throat.
He unhitched the rope winch knot with a flick of his wrist, coiling the wet silk-bronze line around his left forearm in tight, even loops. He reached into his belt and checked the heavy six-sided plummet.
The lead sinker swung free, heavy and reassuring against his thigh.
To reach Sluice Gate Nine, he would have to cross the upper rim of the tiered arena, cross the flooded cross-hall of Entry hall 088, and go down directly into the swirling vortex of the intake basin.
Between his present ledge and the gate lay two hundred paces of chest-deep water churning with stone-hard timbers and razor-sharp stone debris. Every step would be contested by a current running at eight knots, thick with gritty settled mud that could scour skin to the tendon in minutes.
He unclasped his Jacob’s staff from his shoulder harness. The hardwood wood felt dense, stringy, and alive under his palms. He extended the retractable steel pike from the bottom metal ring with a crisp, clockwork click. He tested the spring lock against the stone of the top stone ledge.
“Hold your breath, old grandfathers,” he murmured toward the underwater heads of the judges beneath the waves. “I am going down to open the throat.”
He adjusted the wax plugs in his ears, tightened his reed satchel against his ribs, and dropped from the top stone ledge into the roaring green flood.