At the five-hundredth step, the grand stairs opened onto the Fourth Tier, the broad walkway that circled the outer edge of the Central Round hall’s foundation. Here the stonework bore the raw, unhealed scars of the final assault that had broken the defensive line of the allied sects three moons ago.
The grand row of stone pillars railing of white Pentelic marble, carved with three hundred reliefs of the Drowned Patriarchs, was shattered into jagged stubs. Great gouges six arm-lengths long had been torn through the stone floor where Zhu Heling’s steam-driven battering rams had advanced. That left deep troughs filled with crushed stone, rusted bolts, and the black, thick, sticky residue of heavy lubricants.
Across the walkway, the bodies of eighteen brass automatons lay where they had fallen during the siege. Their clockwork limbs were twisted into unnatural angles, their copper boiler plates punctured by fighter spears, their gears frozen in a cake of dried silt and congealed animal fat. From their open upkeep hatches, thin trickles of rust-stained water dripped into the cracks between the floor slabs.
The stench here was choking: scorched pig fat used to lubricate the treads, acrid battery acid, rotten-egg coal-gas, and the coppery tang of old bloodshed that had dried into the porous limestone.
