The ribbon of black dark rock was three arm-lengths wide and wound through the frozen sea like a road through an ocean of glass.
To the left and right, barely a single pace from the dark fiery stone, the starlight ice lay in thirty deep-water lengths of total, pitiless frozen stillness. If a traveler stepped six inches off the dark rock curb into the blue crystal, his boots would instantly adhere to the glassy floor. Within ten heartbeats the cold would climb through the soles of his shoes to petrify the marrow in his shins.
Yet within the boundary of the seam, the air was almost gentle.
The dark rock was of the dense, vesicular variety quarried from the deep-sea roots of undersea volcanoes, pitted with tiny air cavities that trapped and distributed heat with remarkable uniformity. It radiated a dry, stone warmth of eight point four degrees above freezing—enough to melt the frost from their clothes, thaw the ink in Yan Zhiqiu’s horn well, and allow their lungs to expand without the terrifying rasp of internal rime.
Qiao Ming walked along the centerline of the dark rock channel, his bare feet reveling in the rough, porous texture of the fiery rock. His horn-hard soles, which had been turned to wooden slabs by the extreme cold of the open plain, were now flushed with healthy, dark olive color, his veins standing out like cords across his insteps.
