The bottom of the Grand Central Round hall was no longer a hall of assembly. It was a boiling underground cooking pot of steam, mud, and rushing water.
Through the four main under-road drains beneath the Colonnade of the Twelve Sages, eighty thousand cubic arm-lengths of black tide salt water were entering the tiered arena every minute. The water was not clean mountain rain. It had torn through the ancient coal seams and silt beds of the upper thousand entry halls, carrying millions of tons of black hard coal dust, river gravel, and stone mud.
The slurry rushing through the four main under-road drains was dense with black coal silt and colloidal clay. At a specific gravity of one point zero eight, the fluid exerted forty percent more dynamic drag against stationary structures than pure water. As the torrent slammed against the cast-bronze railings of the lower galleries, the heavy railings bowed outward like bows strung too tight. When the metal reached its yield point, the railings snapped at their anchor bolts, tumbling into the whirlpool with dull, ringing thuds that were swallowed by the roar of the flood.
The slurry rose with terrifying speed, submerging the first ten tiers of the grand stairs in less than two minutes. The lower foundry pits. There, the smelting pots of the Iron Bureau had burned day and night for six hundred days, were fully drowned beneath four deep-water lengths of churning, silt-laden foam.
