The threshold of the Grand Central Round hall was not merely a doorway. It was the boundary between the ancient world of silent stone and the roaring, blazing bright dominion of the machine.
As Qiao Ming crossed step seven hundred and fifty, the stone beneath his bare feet gave a sudden, sharp shudder. It wasn’t the high-pitched shaking of a steam-hammer or the grinding of heavy gears. It was a deep, underground heave that traveled upward through thousands of arm-lengths of solid mountain stone—a low, rhythmic pulse that rang at two cycles a second.
Every drop of water drops clinging to the fluted dark rock columns leaped into the air in a spray of fine droplets. In the brass oil-gutters, the heavy grease broke into nested standing waves that slopped over the margins onto the polished floor.
The guards flanking the portal stumbled, their heavy iron boots scraping against the flags as they fought to keep their balance. “Earthquake!” one of the younger legionnaires cried, clutching his fire-lance with both hands.
“Silence, fool!” General Meng barked, planting his heavy cleaver into the floor to steady himself. “The foundries are merely blowing down the main steam-drums for the noon cycle.”
Qiao Ming did not stumble. His bare feet gripped the shuddering stone with natural fluidity, absorbing the ground motion through his ankles and knees like a diver riding the swell of an offshore reef. He looked down at the bronze disc in his hand. The ground-shaking pulse was with a massive…
