The water met them at the threshold of Entry hall 365 like an advancing wall of black liquid iron.
It wasn’t the gentle, rhythmic wash of the half-tide that normally cleaned the lower stepped stone bases. It was the violent, churning bore of the spring moon-tide line-up flood, backed up through the shattered under-road drains of the outer breakwaters. Sixty arm-lengths wide and four feet deep, the black salt water surged across the floor of the Drowned Pillar hall, swirling in oily, eerie-glowing eddies around the massive dark rock stone bases of forty stone-hard navigators. For two hundred years, Qiao Ming had surveyed this hall during low slack, inspecting the carved sea-charts engraved upon the stone bases. Now, the water was so high that trailing ribbons of brown kelp wrapped around the navigators’ stone waists like rotting sashes.
The cold hit Qiao Ming’s shins, then his knees, then his waist as the floor dropped along the dropping grade of the thirty-seventh portal.
The water was three degrees above freezing, soaked with salt, sulfur, and the cold stone stench of the deep trenches. It pressed against his stiff oilskin coat with terrifying water-pressure weight. It packed the fabric against his ribs until his breath came in short, constrained gasps. The black current tore at his hips, threatening to lift his bare feet from the stone flags and sweep him into the churning drainage under-road drains at the far end of the hall.
