At the midpoint of the ritual raised stone road, forty paces from the Iron Arch and forty paces from the High Dais, Qiao Ming came to a deliberate halt.
He stood exactly at the sharp-angled center of the Grand Central Round hall. Directly beneath his bare soles, hidden beneath eight arm-lengths of solid Carrara marble, lay the Keystone of the Seven Seas—the master drainage valve that had controlled the water levels of the central tiered arena during the age of the Drowned Patriarchs.
Beneath the Carrara paving, forty feet of dry lime mortar and packed river silt separated the raised stone road from the main channel of the South Aqueduct. For seven hundred years, the patriarchs of the Second Epoch had routed the mountain runoff through this very axis, dampening the shock of ground-shaking tremors by floating the entire round hall floor upon an underground buffer of high-pressure salt water. Zhu Heling’s land-mappers had seen only flat stone when they seized the tiered arena. Lacking the sounding records of the ancient order, they had failed to see the cavernous void humming directly beneath their marching ranks.
He looked up toward the towering prow of the Brass Sovereign. Hanging forty arm-lengths above the floor, secured to the ship’s forward ram by four heavy chains of cold-cooled black iron, was Yan Zhiqiu.
