The heat arrived before the men, carrying the stench of scorched animal fat, rotten-egg stone fuel. The bitter potion-made oil used to prime spirit-furnaces.
In the vaulted throat of Entry hall 104, known in Qiao Ming’s ancient charts as the Threshold of the Water-Clocks, the air was normally cool and dripping with sweet water drops. Six huge pillars of speckled snake-like supported a coffered barrel vault seventy arm-lengths high. Along the base of each pillar ran deep, box-shaped stone troughs where ancient clepsydras had once measured the passage of forgotten cosmic epochs through the steady, rhythmic dripping of copper drain tubes into hollow marble floats.
Now, those troughs were dry, filled with the debris of three days of siege: shattered paving stones, coils of frayed hemp cord, and bundles of green rush-mats soaked in salt water.
Yan Zhiqiu knelt beside the fourth pillar, blowing gently upon the glowing ember of a slow-match. Her ash-gray traveler cowl was pulled back over her shoulders, revealing the corded muscles of her neck, glistening with sweat despite the hall’s chill. Behind her, twenty refugee fighters from the Outer Sects huddled in the shadows of the water-clock recesses. They held hooked polearms fashioned from salvaged iron scrap, and light composite bows strung with twisted sinew.
