The shadow of the iron keel fell across the outer steps exactly three minutes before the fifth bell struck the drowned arches.
It wasn’t a natural twilight. The darkness cast by the Celestial Sovereign was dense and greasy. He smelled of scorched animal fat, rotten-egg fire-melted rock waste, and the cold void through which the flagship had dragged its heavy, slow bulk. Suspended forty arm-lengths above the shattered pediment of Entry hall 101, the great vessel hung on humming anti-gravity spires. Its ribbed copper plating wept dark streaks of water drops onto the pale marble below. Every plate of its hull had been scavenged from dead void-cruisers, welded together with coarse brass seams and heavy with iron braces that creaked under the pull of the Hall’s internal gravity.
Qiao Ming stood with his feet set wide upon the third stone temple steps. The pale limestone was cold, wet with the morning mist that always rolled inward from the lower water tanks, but the soles of his feet knew the grip of every vein. His calloused toes, widened by years of balancing upon algae-slick banded limestone, locked into the shallow fluting of the step. Beneath his coarse hemp trousers, his calf muscles held the steady, unmoving stance of a man who measured tides rather than armies. He wore his knee-length coat of boiled oilskin, aged to the color of dark amber and stiff with dried sea-salt. Across his chest ran the worn harness of bridle leather, its cast-copper rings green with…
