The first major assault upon the inside outer edge of the Eighty Courtyards came not from the sky, but through the drowned throat of Entry hall 038, known throughout the stone-built scrolls as the Narrow Strait.
Here, between the outer tidal reservoirs and the inhabited residential arcades, the underground canal tightly packed into a jagged dark rock gorge barely twenty paces wide. Sheer cliffs of black granite rose eighty arm-lengths to a vaulted ceiling hung with ancient, hardened stalactites. At the base of the gorge, six feet of icy seawater flowed smoothly over a bed of polished boulders, serving as the main drainage channel for the mountain’s upper spillways.
It was the only breach large enough to permit the passage of armored landing craft without boring through miles of solid bedrock.
At the second watch of midnight, the water in the strait began to hiss and bubble. A vanguard of twelve hundred elite shock troops from the Golden Sovereign Auxiliary Banners entered the gorge, advancing in twenty low-slung iron assault barges propelled by silent underwater steam turbines.
The invaders were confident. Clad in ornate suits of gold-trimmed bronze layered-scale armor that deflected mundane blades, armed with repeating steam carbines that discharged pellets of high-pressure sulfur, they believed they were marching into an underground butcher shop of helpless refugees. Their officers stood at the prows with drawn steel sabers, whispering harsh orders into brass speaking tubes. ‘Sweep the lower drain pits,’ the lead captain commanded, his voice dripping with high-born scorn…
