Beyond the outer castle walls of the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues. There, the sunken land-wide shelf dipped toward the deep-sea plain, the black sea churned against a landscape of drowned limestone reefs and hardened ridges.
Here, in the maze-like shallows known as Silt Trench 003, the tide was an unpredictable engine of freezing gray water and dense marine mud. The trench was an underwater canyon carved during an elder epoch, its upright walls lined with stone-hard sea-lilies and hardened kelp stalks that rose forty feet from the muddy floor. While the grand dreadnoughts of the Golden Sovereign fleet rode at anchor above the outer bays, their brass hulls glistening in the rotten-egg twilight of the dying sky, the real work of probing the mountain’s foundations fell to smaller, swifter vessels.
Fourteen scouting skiffs from the Jade Court and the backup mercenary banners had slipped into the trench at twilight. Crafted from layered pine and heavy with bronze ribs, each skiff carried eight armed scouts equipped with grappling irons, aimed listening horns, and jars of acid-burning incendiary pitch. Their objective was simple and ruthless. Find an unsealed intake channel, disable the water gate valves, and foul the mountain’s freshwater reservoirs with boiling sulfur.
