The smell of the battlefield had changed from scorched pine amber to the cold, dry stench of crushed metal.
Outside the thirty-first gate. There, the grand row of stone pillars of Entry hall 380 stretched into the underwater gloom, the avenue had ceased to look like a highway of dressed stone. For two hundred paces in every direction, the paving was buried beneath a massive, shifting dune of gray-black settled mud. It wasn’t river sand, nor was it fiery grit washed down from the vents.
It was iron dust.
More than sixty thousand void-locusts had crumbled against the ninety-arm-length curtain of the White Jade Barrier. Their armored back shells, machined from sintered void-bronze and cold-worked pig iron, had not burned away into nothingness. They had shattered into tiny filings that drifted down through the stale water-vapor like heavy, metal snow. Mixed with the crushed wreckage of the three breach-crawlers and the shattered cast-iron gearbox of the void-dredger, the powdered residue had piled up into a nonstop castle wall forty feet high.
The mound banked up against the outer face of the silver light curtain.
Every time a low-hum pulse rang along the Great Ink-Line, ripples moved across the surface of the iron dune. It formed fine, detailed sharp-angled patterns resembling Chladni figures on a brass sound-plate. The dust was so dense that it began to smother the lower drainage grates, choking the outbound under-road drains with heavy, magnetic slurry.
