The gates of the Glacial Nave were not made to open for mortal hands.
They stood fifty paces wide and sixty arm-lengths high, forged from solid sea-bronze six feet thick, heavy with upright ribs of star-fallen iron that had been hammered into shape upon the underwater anvils of the First Epoch. Across the face of the bronze doors ran a nonstop relief depicting the Great Ark Nadir sailing across an ocean of drowning stars, while along the central seam where the two leaves met, hundreds of linked teeth of clear ice-slow ice—each as thick as an ox’s torso—clamped the portals together in an iron-hard ice-cold embrace.
Cold poured from the seam like an invisible curtain of iron, freezing the air into dense white fog that pooled around Qiao Ming’s bare ankles.
In the center of the right leaf, at the height of a man’s chest, sat a royal keyway. An eight-sided recess carved from black green jade, flanked by two coiling bronze dragons whose eyes were set with unpolished star-sapphires. In the throat of the recess, a raised box-shaped boss projected four inches from the stone, carved with a complex intaglio pattern of broken sky spirit veins.
Yan Zhiqiu walked slowly to the keyway. She reached into her tunic with both hands and withdrew the Broken Slate.
