The air in the third cargo hold did not circulate; it festered under eight sea-weights of artificial pressure.
Yan Zhiqiu crouched on the upper air-flow narrow high walkway, twelve arm-lengths above the deck, looking down through the iron grating into the lit up horror of the Siphon-Vaults.
The hold was sixty arm-lengths wide, seventy arm-lengths long, and framed by huge ribs of riveted void-iron. Under ordinary maritime service, a space of this size would have held sacks of hadal grain, barrels of cured salt-pork, or coils of spare anchor cable. Here, every timber beam and cargo tie-down ring had been ripped away to accommodate a heavy-duty potion-made butcher shop.
Arranged in eight parallel rows, like wine casks in a cellar, stood one hundred and twenty-four tube-shaped glass vats.
Each vat was eight arm-lengths tall and four feet across, built of two-inch-thick rolled heat-proof glass heavy with bronze bands and tightened with turnbuckles. The vats were filled with a thick, sticky, amber-tinted amniotic fluid that gave off a faint, sickly eerie glow. Floating suspended inside each metal tube, held upright by leather collars and copper harness straps, were human beings.
They were mortal refugees captured from the outer entry halls. Fishermen from the flooded reefs, stone-cutters from the lower quarries, weavers, and children who had strayed too far from the safety of the forty-arm-length archways.
