The pullback of the defeated Conclave vanguard from Entry hall 120 looked less like a military retreat and more like the departure of chastened pilgrims from a sacred shrine.
As the fourteenth ebb drew the leftover surface water down into the lower drainage drain tubes, the thick black mud of the Sunken Navel began to harden into a dense, leathery clay. Using the temporary wooden causeways laid out by the refugee carpenters, three thousand two hundred disarmed fighters filed slowly toward the northern ramp leading back to the Grand Stairs.
They carried no weapons, no banners, and no iron armor. Clad only in their gray linen undergarments and woolen travel-cloaks, each man carried a small woven rush-bag containing three dried kelp-wafers, a handful of salted cockles, and a small clay flask of fresh rainwater. Rations provided to them by the very people they had intended to exterminate.
Grand Commander Tie Xuan walked at the rear of the column, leaning upon a simple walking stick of dried bamboo given to him by a refugee elder. When he reached the crest of the ramp, he paused, looking back over the vast, silent basin one last time.
The four-hundred-pace floor was fully quiet. In the center of the dark plain, his amazing six-wheeled steam command-car sat buried to its roof in the hardened silt. Its brass fittings shone dully in the gray light of the high window row shafts—a permanent, unmoving monument to the folly of bringing war into a house of water.
