The floor beneath their feet had begun to breathe with the rhythm of an eight-oared galley.
In Entry hall 840, two leagues north of the Three Prongs, the dark rock road widened to eight paces, supported by huge transverse arches of black iron that rose directly from the main bottom spine-beam twenty deep-water lengths below. Here, the earth-heat channels did not vent nonstop vapor. They operated under high, pulsating head. They were driven by the massive clockwork strokes of the three central bilge-pumps located in the lightless roots of the World-Ship.
Every three point three seconds—eighteen times in every minute—a deep, massive thump shook through the fiery flat stone slabs.
The stroke was not violent, but it carried the huge, high-pressure power of sixty thousand tons of water being displaced through iron cylinders. With each pulse, a wave of rich, humid heat surged northward through the dark rock pavers, raising the surface heat to twenty degrees above freezing, before slowly decaying over the next three seconds as the intake valves reset in the deep.
Qiao Ming walked with his body fully relaxed, his bare feet striking the dark rock in exact synchrony with the pulse.
Thump—step.
Thump—step.
His soles hit the stone exactly as the heat crest reached the pavers, absorbing the maximum heat into his arches, then lifting smoothly as the cooler trough followed. It was the ancient marching rhythm of the Keelson Sounders—the pacing technique by which mortal land-mappers had walked sixty leagues of freezing iron without freezing…
