The heat in the access hall dropped twenty degrees in the space of forty paces.
When Qiao Ming crossed the threshold into Entry hall 350, the air ceased to smell of warm pine resin and damp wool. It smelled of supercooled salt water, frozen iron, and the dry, lightless frost of a deep-sea trench. The chamber was known in the ancient water-mapping logs as the Cryogenic Crypts of the Sunken Spires, a vast underground gallery where the foundation keel of the House grazed the edge of an active sub-oceanic frost seep. In the pre-flood epoch, the ancient masters had deliberately channeled this sub-zero salt water through the floor channels to keep the hardened bone archives of the First Dynasty in unending frozen stillness. That kept the soft marrow from decaying in the damp heat of the lower earth.
Here, the black water running through the lateral gutters was chilled to four degrees below zero, prevented from turning to solid ice only by the sixty sea-weights of deep water pressure and the sixty-percent stone salt saturation.
The floor before him was paved with dark purple red stone. But unlike the dry flat stone slabs of the upper terraces or the wet pale limestone of the rows of stone pillars, the red stone here was coated in a nonstop sheet of salt-ice half an inch thick. It was clear as window glass, brittle as mica, and dangerous as wet grease. High overhead, sixty arm-lengths above the frozen floor, long crystal-clear icicles of…
