The ritual raised stone road of the Grand Central Round hall stretched eighty paces across the open air of the tiered arena, bridging the distance between the high portal of the Iron Arch and the raised marble dais of the ancient council.
It was a bridge of pure white Carrara white spar-stone, three paces wide, without railing or low roof wall. In the days before the Great Flooding, petitioners and sect masters would walk this narrow span above the sacred pool, their robes billowing in the mountain breezes that drifted through the open clerestories. Now, however, there was no water beneath the bridge. There was only the roaring, lightless pit of the lower tier. There, the blast fire raged like an open volcano.
Directly above the raised stone road hung the keel of the Brass Sovereign.
The shadow cast by the iron flagship was not merely an absence of light. It was a physical weight of oppressive, blasting heat. The black-cooled bronze of the vessel’s hull had been baked by hours of fire draft from below, streaming a dry, blistering warmth that struck Qiao Ming’s head and shoulders like a heavy woolen blanket soaked in boiling oil.
Qiao Ming stepped onto the first flag of the raised stone road. His bare feet gripped the marble with steady, unrushed care. The stone here was clean of engine grease, for the wind generated by the heat rising heat of the fire swept across the bridge with the speed of an offshore gale…
