The smell of boiling machine oil met them three hundred paces before they reached the threshold of Entry hall 312.
It was a thick, greasy stench that coated the roof of the mouth like rancid lard, utterly foreign to the clean stone chill of the Drowned Dao. Mixed with it was the screech of dry iron grinding against stone—a sound that made the hair on Qiao Ming’s forearms stand on end.
They moved along the upper narrow high walkway of the outer aqueduct, staying low beneath the shadow of the corbelled top stone ledge. Qiao Ming’s bare soles found silent purchase on the narrow stone ribs. Meanwhile, Yan Zhiqiu moved like a hunting cat behind him, her broken slate cradled against her ribs to prevent its bronze fittings from clinking against the wall.
When they reached the overlook above the Grand Atrium of Sovereign Oaths, they stopped.
The atrium below was three hundred paces wide, paved with huge six-sided flags of dark green hard speckled rock. Along the northern wall, rising seventy arm-lengths from the floor to the vaulted springers, stood the Great Wall of the Promise. It was an unbroken expanse of polished black stone, carved during the final hours of the Dry Era, bearing thirty thousand lines of micro-inscribed text that recorded the names, old family sects, and final vows of every master who had voluntarily undergone turning to stone to build the Ark.
