The shock of the water took his breath before the cold could reach his skin.
At chest depth, the flood was an unbending, thick, sticky mass. In air, a man moved with the illusion of freedom. In hyper-saline salt water. There, the thickness was nearly one and a half times that of mountain streams, every forward stride needed the waste of twenty pounds of clockwork thrust against the thighs. The current was running at seven knots through the narrow row of stone pillars of Entry hall 088, thick with black silt that ground between his wool leggings like emery dust.
The water was bitter with packed magnesium and zinc salts. Whenever a spray broke against his mouth, it left a sharp, metal bite upon the tongue that made his salivary glands ache. Beneath the surface, the dark green salt water was lit up by clouds of living-glow deep-sea jellies. Delicate, ghostly colonies of stinging threads that pulsed with faint cyan light as the violent rough churning tore them apart.
Qiao Ming planted his calc-cleats into the mortar seam of the eighty-second terrace bench. The seven chisel-teeth on his iron soles bit through the slimy coat of lithophytic algae, anchoring his skeleton against the undertow. He leaned forty degrees forward into the rush of the current, using the Jacob’s staff as a third leg to form a rigid tripod with his limbs.
Behind him, thirty arm-lengths across the churning emerald surface, rose the slender form of Statue #0088—the Maiden of the Water-Compass. Carved from milk-white Parian marble, she knelt upon a lotus stone stand of green jade, her delicate stone palms cupped to receive the water drops dripping from the vault above. Her face possessed the calm, flawless symmetry of an artisan who had died three universal ages ago. For six hundred years she had remained untouched by flood, her stone robe spotless and dry.
Now, the black water was licking at her marble knees. The violent surface rough churning shook her slender stone wrists with tremors that traveled up through her neck to her stone crown. A single hairline fracture was already opening along her left forearm where the weight of the surging foam exerted sideways tearing force against the marble.
Ahead, in the darkness of the flooded cross-hall, something heavy was tearing through the water.
It wasn’t a solitary piece of flotsam. It was a tangled raft of destruction: three waterlogged cedar beams, each thirty feet long and studded with bronze wood slot spikes, bound together by a mass of stone-hard eelgrass and tangled iron wire. Wedged into the center of the raft was a two-ton block of dressed granite, torn from an archway in Entry hall 084.
The entire sixty-foot mass was barreling down the center of the current at five meters per second, aimed directly at the Maiden’s stone stand and the narrow shelf where Qiao Ming stood.
If that timber hit the lotus stone base, the Maiden’s slender marble torso would shear at the waist, toppling eighty tons of priceless pre-diluvian carving into the churning muck of the floor. And if Qiao Ming remained in his footing, the trailing cedar beams would pin his legs against the terrace wall, crushing his thigh bone bones to gravel.
Qiao Ming did not reach for his Jacob’s staff to block the blow. A hardwood staff, braced against sixty feet of moving timber, would splinter like dry straw under twenty thousand pounds of high-pressure driving force.
He reached into his satchel and withdrew his braided lead line.
He didn’t let out the full twenty-five deep-water lengths. With two practiced twists of his wrists, he looped the slack around his left forearm, leaving exactly twelve meters of working line between his right hand and the heavy six-sided plummet.
The lead sinker was twelve pounds of drop-forged metal. Its six-sided facets were sharpened with crisp, water-flow edges designed to cut through dense water with minimal drag. Meanwhile, the hollow animal fat cup at its base acted as a sound bubbling blast bell when driven at high speed.
Qiao Ming lowered his balance point, bending his knees until the salt water washed over his collarbones. His breath came slow and measured through his nostrils, each breath out steadying the rhythm of his heart against the paralyzing cold of the salt water. He began to whirl the plummet.
At first, the lead turned slowly in a low level circle just above the water’s surface, hissing as the brass-beaded knots whipped through the spray. Then, with a smooth, spinning gaining speed driven from his hips and shoulder blades, he brought the line into an upright ellipse.
The lead weight sped up.
Ten meters per second. Twenty. Forty.
At forty-two meters per second, the plummet was a whistling blur of dark metal. The tip speed exceeded one hundred and fifty miles per hour. As the lower arc of the swing clipped the surface of the water, it didn’t splash. It tore a clean, evacuated trench through the salt water. The rapid passage of the six-sided faces created a nonstop string of low-pressure vapor cavities behind the weight.
A nearby vortex formed in the water five paces before him. A spinning funnel of air and spray that depressed the water level by nearly half an arm-length, drawing the surrounding surface currents inward toward its rotating core.
The raft of stone-hard timbers entered the vortex.
The leading cedar beam, caught by the sudden sideways push drop on its starboard flank, began to yaw. Its nose dipped into the depression created by the whirling line, throwing its forward driving force into an unstable angular rotation.
That was the fraction of a heartbeat Qiao Ming had calculated.
With a sharp snap of his right wrist, he extended his arm, lengthening the working radius of the line by three feet. The whistling plummet swept downward in a furious, curved arc, striking the leading cedar beam exactly four inches to the left of its center of flotation.
The impact sounded like a bronze bell struck by an iron maul.
The twelve-pound lead weight, carrying thousands of blasts of heat of striking force, smashed through the waterlogged wood. It splintered the stone-hard grain into a cloud of pale fibers and snapped the bronze wood slot spike that held the timber to the central raft.
The sudden release of clockwork tension was instant.
The cut cedar beam pitched wildly to the left, caught the main current running down the deep channel, and slid harmlessly past the Maiden’s stone stand. It scraped her lotus stone base with nothing more than a trailing skirt of weed.
The leftover raft, unbalanced by the loss of its outer timber and dragging the two-ton granite block, began to spin like a dying waterwheel.
Qiao Ming did not pause to admire the flight path. The spinning mass of timber and stone was now drifting directly toward his chest.
He reversed the rotation of the cord with a whip-like flick of his forearm. The braided line uncoiled, snapping outward across the boiling surface of the pool. The lead plummet flew through the air, looped twice around the protruding granite block, and cinched itself tight against the rough-hewn stone via the rope winch friction effect.
The line went rigid as an iron bar.
The drag of the two-ton block threatened to tear Qiao Ming from the terrace. His calc-cleats groaned against the mortar, the iron teeth screaming as they scraped two inches through the hardened lime. The crushing force pulled his spine taut, sending a blinding pang of strain through the muscles of his lower back.
Instead of fighting the mass with muscle, Qiao Ming threw his body sideways along the curve of the terrace wall. He took the standing end of the line, looped it over a projecting lion-headed waterspout carved into the eighty-third bench, and leaned all his body weight into the turn.
The lion’s stone jaw acted as a friction rope winch.
The braided cord groaned, squeezing water from its silk pores in fine silver mist, but the star-fallen bronze wires inside the braid held without stretching a fraction of an inch. The spinning raft, anchored by its nose to the stone wall, was forced into a wide circular arc by the surging current.
It swept around Qiao Ming’s position like a hooked barge, clearing his shoulders by three spans, and slammed into the dead-water eddy behind the great stone support prop of Entry hall 089.
There, deprived of the main current’s thrust, the timbers settled into the quiet backwash, rocking harmlessly against the drowned benches.
Qiao Ming released the line from the lion’s mouth. His palms were smoking with friction heat despite the cold water, his skin stinging where the braided silk had abraded the meat of his thumb.
He hauled the plummet back to his hand. The six-sided facets of the lead weight were dented where they had struck the stone-hard wood, but the brass eyelet remained true. He checked each fathom of the cord between his calloused fingers, ensuring no wire strand had frayed under the four-ton shock load. The braid was intact, slick with sea-grease and cold silt.
He turned toward the Maiden. The Parian marble was wet to her breast, but her slender neck and bowed head remained upright, untouched by the cedar drift.
“Stand firm, little sister,” he whispered, wiping a film of black silt from her carved knee. “The flood has not claimed your eyes.”
Across the flooded opening of Entry hall 089, the water was still rising. It had reached the seventy-eighth tier of the tiered arena benches, barely four feet below the lower stone beam of the western passage.
The roar of Sluice Gate Nine had changed.
It was no longer a dull drumming. It was a high, strained screech—the sound of bronze plates bowing under millions of tons of head pressure, and of heavy iron gears being chewed to powder by trapped stone.
The air in the cross-hall was growing noticeably warmer, thick with the oily steam of the Boiling Salt Bore rising from the deep under-road drains. The air pressure was climbing steadily. His ears popped again despite the wax plugs, and the smell of sulfur became choking.
Qiao Ming strapped his line back to his belt, took his Jacob’s staff in both hands to probe the drowned footing ahead, and waded out into the deep channel toward the gate.