The spiral water chute of Entry hall 852 had been designed to bleed moving speed from the seasonal overflows, twisting down through sixty leagues of solid bedrock in a row of ribbed helical steps.
Qiao Ming slid along the outer curve of the dark rock gutter, his bare heels digging into the hardened settled mud to check their speed. The water was no longer boiling. Here, half a league beneath the breach, the pouring inflow was mixing with the ancient, ice-cold drainage of the middle water tanks, producing a thick, lukewarm soup that hissed against the cold stone walls like grease dropped on an anvil. Every footfall needed total focus. His soles, stained dark by decades of salt water and animal fat, were toughened like cured leather, reading every groove cut into the floor by the chisel-masters of the First Epoch. He knew which stones were prone to flaking off under heat, which flags harbored hidden drainage fissures, and where the ancient ballast-stones had settled an eighth of an inch deeper into the silt.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu held her footing with remarkable poise, her calloused soles gripping the polished banded limestone where the current was shallowest. In her right hand, the Broken Slate trailed in the foaming water, casting an emerald wake that split the debris into twin waves of yellow foam-stone and shattered ice. Her breath came in steady, measured draws, each breath in timed together with the rhythm of the downward rush. The lineage of the Gate-Wardens…
