The threat did not come from the air; it came from beneath the stone.
Even as the smoke from the three destroyed breach-crawlers drifted into the high window row angled slats, a subtle, high-pitched shaking began to shiver through the white green jade doorstep beneath Qiao Ming’s bare feet. It wasn’t the deep, reassuring eighty-cycle hum of the bedrock, nor the sixty-cycle rush of the underground drainage race. In the water-mapping science of the Drowned Dao, every stone possessed an inherent ringing signed name. When a stone was subjected to shearing stress, the hum climbed into shrill, dissonant registers that sounded like screaming wire.
It was an acute, needle-like rasping at six hundred and twenty Hertz—the sound of thousands of hardened void-iron jaws shaking at high-pitched speed.
Qiao Ming lowered his balance point, sinking down until his bare knees touched the cold jade of the threshold. He pressed the palm of his left hand flat against the joint where the western door post met the living hard speckled rock floor.
Through the calloused skin of his palm, he felt the micro-fissures opening.
The ten thousand queen locusts had not pulled back to the flagship. Unable to pierce the ninety-arm-length curtain of silver-blue light from the air, the swarm had dropped into the lateral drainage gutters, crawling through the porous mortar joints beneath the floor slabs. They had reached the foundation seam directly beneath the four-inch silver bead.
