The throat of the earth did not open with silence; it opened with song.
From the dark mouth of Sluice Gate Nine. There, the granite top door beam had shattered into the deep drain tube, the main balance weight gear catch engaged with three huge, rhythmic clangs of bronze against iron. High above in the darkness of the ceiling towers, the eighty-ton lead water tanks dropped smoothly into their upright wells.
The forty-ton glowing-bronze drop-gate, freed from the slanted bite of the stone, rose along its upright runners.
It didn’t hesitate. Driven by the balance weights and lubricated by the surging flood, the massive bronze casting glided upward sixty feet into the overhead housing. The full sixty-foot sky-slit of the First Epoch drainage portal opened to the deluge.
What followed was a stone-built breath out of staggering proportions.
A low, ringing shudder ran through the bedrock of Entry hall 091, traveling southward through the eighty tiers of the Great Tiered hall and shaking the stone stands of the seated judges. Two million cubic paces of hyper-saline salt water, banked thirty feet deep against the stone walls, found their release.
Directly above the underwater gate, the surface of the pool collapsed.
