The first warning came not as sight or sound, but as a sudden, sickening shaking through the soles of forty-two hundred pairs of iron boots.
In the center of Entry hall 120, Grand Commander Tie Xuan stood upon the roof of his steam command-car, raising his golden sight magnifying glass to watch his vanguard reach the green snake-like archway. The soldiers were thirty paces from the cedar doors, their void-steel axe-spears leveled, their breath misting in the cold air.
Suddenly, the command-car bounced two inches into the air.
THUD.
The six heavy iron wheels left the stone floor for a split second, landing back on the pale limestone flags with a harsh, metal rattle of mid-air springs. Across the four-hundred-pace floor of the basin, four thousand soldiers staggered, their locked ranks swaying like reeds in a sudden squall.
“Earthquake?” the commander of the Pyre-Furnace Court shouted from his flying chariot thirty arm-lengths above. “The foundations are shaking!”
Before Tie Xuan could answer, a horrific, sucking sound erupted from the floor beneath their feet.
Along the outer edge of the vast basin. There, the pale limestone stone floor met the bases of the dark rock pillars, sixty-four massive drainage grates of cast bronze suddenly blasted upward into the air! The four-hundred-pound grates were thrown ten arm-lengths high like coin-tosses, propelled by geysers of high-pressure black froth.
