Beyond the five-hundredth step, the grand stairs narrowed between two sheer curtain-walls of black red stone that had been smoothed by water-friction until they mirrored the orange flare of the overhead furnaces. Here, sixty arm-lengths above the Fourth Landing, the dense white mist of water drops began to thin, snapped away by the powerful heat updrafts venting from the Central Round hall.
Qiao Ming climbed with the same unvarying rhythm, his bare calloused feet making soft, measured slaps against the stone. With every twenty paces, his toes detected the subtle increase in heat streaming from the stonework beneath. The bedrock was absorbing thousands of heat calories from the foundries above, but the deep water-pressure veins within the stone remained chilled by the boundless dark waters of the lower halls.
The air smelled of heated slate, rusted lead, and the dry, bitter tang of crushed hard coal. It was an unnatural air for a place carved from the bones of an undersea mountain. The salt that usually lined the margins of the steps had been baked into a grey, powdery ash that puffed into small clouds around his ankles as he walked.
Along the red stone walls, ancient water-meters—slender bronze rods graduated in inches and deep-water lengths—stood anchored in lead sockets. For eight hundred years, these rods had marked the quiet seasonal rise of the tide-floods, recording when the winter moon-tide line-up crested over the sixth terrace. Now, the bronze was blackened by soot, its markings obscured by greasy films of…
