The Outer Scroll hall of Entry hall 010 had never heard the sound of human screams.
For ten thousand seasons, this long, vaulted hall—eight hundred paces in length, lined with twelve tiers of recessed stone shelving that held three million slate tablets recording the sky-high soundings of the drowned eras—had known only the quiet flutter of storm petrels and the slow, rhythmic dripping of the southern drain tube.
Now, the Scroll hall was choking on terror.
The final wave of outer impacts had struck the outer barrier twenty minutes past midnight. The backup tenders of the Jade Court, stripped of their steerage arrays during the descent through the frozen void, had snapped across the upper roof ledges of the outer curtain, showering the outer castle walls with millions of pounds of flaming astral iron and burning potion-made fuel.
The shudder had knocked four entire tiers of ancient slate tablets from their shelves, shattering hundreds of years of water-mapping history into jagged shards of gray stone that covered the floor like broken tiles.
Through the smoke and falling debris, more than two million refugees from the northern castle walls were tumbling into the Scroll hall, fleeing the spreading fuel-fires in the outer halls. They packed the central aisle from wall to wall, their panicked bodies pressing against the delicate stone railings of the lower galleries.
