They stood upon the threshold of an ocean turned to jewel.
Before them opened the Glacial Nave of the Third Drowned Epoch—an underground vault so huge that the eye could not find its northern boundary. It stretched twelve leagues into the dark, four leagues from eastern mountain wall to western foundation bridge pillar. He rose three hundred arm-lengths to a vaulted ceiling formed entirely from nonstop, flawless slabs of dark cobalt crystal that caught the faint, eternal soft glow of the floor and reflected it in deep, shimmering pools of sapphire and violet.
The floor was not stone. It was a boundless, mirror-smooth plain of solidified starlight salt water. Pure, semi-clear ice thirty deep-water lengths thick that rested upon the ancient dark rock bottom spine-beam of the World-Ship.
And rising from that frozen sea, arranged in huge, streaming avenues that came together toward a distant mountain of ice in the far north, stood fourteen thousand massive statues.
They were huge figures, eighty to one hundred arm-lengths in height, carved from single blocks of glass-fused blue ice, pale star-jade, and black star-fallen iron. They stood upon underwater daises that rested ten arm-lengths below the ice surface, their sculpted shoulders and crowns rising into the cold air like the masts of a drowned armada.
