The smell of burning oil met them at the threshold of Entry hall 375 with the force of a potion-made explosion.
It wasn’t the sweet, pine-scented vapor of boiled pine amber or the clean, stone ozone of the hadal silt. It was the greasy, choking stench of raw void-fire-oil and liquid sulfur, burning with a low, green-fringed flame that crawled across the wet pale limestone flat stone slabs like boiling syrup. In the pre-flood texts, void-fire-oil had been classified as an unquenchable spiritual poison. A potion-made waste-product distilled from dead stars that clung to stone, wood, and flesh alike. It burned until every combustible molecule was reduced to acidic melted rock waste.
High above the floor, hovering sixty arm-lengths in the air beneath the arched ribs of the Grand Gallery of the Siphon-Gates, hung three armored dread-skiffs.
The vessels were each thirty paces long, their hulls built from layered plates of rusted through void-iron and banded copper, suspended upon high-pressure steam-jets that roared from ventral nozzles like angry waterfalls. From their iron bomb-bays, tube-shaped canisters of high-pressure fire-oil were tumbling downward in a steady, coordinated bombardment. It shattered upon the floor and erupted into pools of four-hundred-degree green fire.
The Scholar had calculated the shape of the outer edge. He knew that Entry hall 375 was the sole surviving bottleneck connecting the northern arc back to the Barrier of White Jade.
