The ice-slow ceiling had not shattered all at once. It had dissolved under the boiling spray of Zhu Heling’s sulfur drills, slumping downward in grey avalanches of slush and steam before tearing away into the upright shafts of the lower deeps.
Qiao Ming stood on the lip of the eighth water gate-weir in Entry hall 851, the soles of his bare feet planted firmly against the scalding pale limestone. The stone was slick with hot stone slurry, stinging the thick yellow horn of his skin with the bite of dissolved burning acid, yet his splayed toes gripped the ribbed chisel-grooves without flinching. Hundreds of years of standing upon wave-lashed stepped stone bases had taught his arches how to hold fast against rushing water, whether it ran freezing from the northern floes or boiled like animal fat from the fractured vents above.
Behind him, through the vapor that choked the upright hall, the rhythmic, thunderous thudding of Zhu Heling’s mechanized advance echoed down the shaft. It wasn’t the organic pulse of the Great Tide. It was the clockwork hammering of eighteen-piston steam rams, iron tread-plates grinding against stone-hard coral. The high-pitched shriek of rotary bits chewing through ancient granite. The scholar had abandoned his robes and star wheels for an iron ribs. Inside his hollowed chest, a brass-geared clockwork engine thumped with high-pressure malice, venting clouds of black coal-smoke and boiling acid into the clean channels of the House.
