The floor ended without warning, snapped clean away by a huge earth-shaking fracture that ran from the western mountain wall to the eastern foundations.
It was Entry hall 776, known in the ancient navigational charts as the Deep gap of Absolute Glaciation. Here, the dark dolerite flat stone slabs gave way entirely to a cliff edge of pure, glass-fused starlight ice that dropped vertically into an indigo void eighty-five paces across. The opposite lip rose twelve arm-lengths higher, crowned by a shattered stone railing whose carved balusters looked like jagged icicles turned to stone.
Cold rolled upward from the rift—a heavy, sinking heat wave of total zero that seemed to solidify the marrow inside their bones.
Qiao Ming halted three feet from the edge. His bare soles stood upon the glassy ice, his toes digging into micro-fissures in the crystal-clear surface. Beneath his feet, looking down through twenty feet of see-through ice, he could see the dark, stone-hard ribs of the Ark Nadir’s internal frame. Huge beams of black star-fallen iron, thirty arm-lengths thick, bolted together with bronze rivets the size of shield-bosses.
“Two hundred deep-water lengths,” Qiao Ming said, his voice flat and calm. He didn’t need to cast the lead to know the depth. The sound pitch of the air rising from the fissure carried the hollow deep ring of a deep ballast sump. “The ice has bridged the upper third, but the floor below is open to the keel.”
