The entrance to Entry hall 125 was not a portal; it was a dropping throat.
Qiao Ming stepped down a winding stairs of thirty-six narrow steps carved directly into the living hard speckled rock bedrock. The steps were steep, each riser barely four inches high and slick with a greasy film of dissolved white chalk-stone that smelled like wet plaster and old sea-marrow. His bare soles gripped the damp rock with familiar, gut caution, each toe flattening against the concave hollows worn into the steps by ancient water-scribes. He carried his ash-wood sounding staff in his right hand, the iron shoe tapping lightly against each step to test for hidden fractures in the stone.
As he reached the bottom of the flight, the air became intensely cold.
The heat plummeted twenty degrees below that of the upper rows of stone pillars. The vapor of his breath rose in dense, white clouds that mingled with a low-hanging blanket of skin-burning mist hovering two feet above the floor. The mist was heavy with the sharp reek of potassium hydrate and bitter sulfate salts, burning the lining of his throat until he adjusted his boiled linen breathing mask across his mouth.
He stepped out into the Salt-Weeper’s Crypt.
