At the three hundredth step, the grand flight reached the Third Landing, a half-round terrace paved with slabs of dark red stone. Here the stairs split around the massive central drainage pylon—a hollow column of black dark rock thirty paces in width that plunged four hundred arm-lengths down into the lowest drainage drain pits of the mountain.
Qiao Ming paused at the threshold of the landing.
The floor of the terrace was inlaid with an ancient mosaic of polished river-pebbles depicting the charting of the Drowned Dao by the First Fathom-Scribe. The tiles showed waves of lapis lazuli and black glass parting before a solitary figure holding a knotted cord. Hundreds of years of pilgrim feet had smoothed the pebbles into a seamless sheet of dark stone. But now that sacred surface was blackened by soot, scratched by iron wheel-rims, and spattered with grease from the Scholar’s boiler carts.
Qiao Ming stood near the northern margin where a spreading joint three inches wide ran across the red stone flags. The joint had been packed with pitch and oakum when the hall was built, but hundreds of years of water-scour had washed the packing away, leaving a dark, narrow fissure that plunged into the foundations. From the depths of that slit rose a faint, rhythmic sound: a wet, sucking thrum that shook at ninety-two cycles a second.
