The frost did not creep along the ground; it galloped.
Through the jagged breach in the curtain wall of Entry hall 008—where the stern of the Severed Horizon had punched a hole forty arm-lengths wide through the outer dark rock stonework—the cosmic empty pocket of the extinct outer universe was emptying its cold into the Hall.
It was a cold unlike anything known to terrestrial winters. It carried no moisture, no wind, no seasonal gentleness. It was the total, entropic stillness of dead space, entering the high-pressure warmth of the Hall like an invisible wave of freezing glass. As the void-draft struck the warm, stone-rich air of the row of stone pillars, the moisture condensed not into mist. But into solid sheets of black rime that coated the red stone pillars and floor flags in seconds.
Where the black frost touched bare stone, the moisture inside the stonework froze instantly, expanding and popping with rapid, gunshot-like reports that sent sharp splinters of white spar-stone whizzing through the dark.
In Entry hall 008, more than one million two hundred thousand refugees were bivouacked across the lower terraces. They had no idea what was dropping upon them. At first, they thought the sudden hush was a blessing—the dying of the smoke from the ark fires. But within three minutes, the heat on the floor dropped from the warmth of a mild autumn evening to forty degrees below freezing.
