As the Brass Sovereign drifted toward the center of the flooded tiered arena, a sound began to rise from the dark depths beneath the hull.
It wasn’t the clanking of iron, nor the grinding of seized gears, nor the violent roar of the falling waterfalls. It was a sound so deep, so pure, and so huge that every person in the hall—refugees, captured legionnaires. The two mapmakers upon the deck—felt the air in their lungs vibrate with sympathetic deep ring.
It was the singing of the Ten Thousand Statues.
The Grand Central Round hall had been designed as a huge sound resonator. Its curved marble walls, curved ceiling vaults, and nested tiered seating were engineered to amplify the deepest frequencies of running water while dampening the harsh, dissonant clatter of mortal industry. When the ten thousand statues began their song, the sound waves did not interfere destructively. They phase-locked into a nonstop standing wave that transformed the three-million-cubic-arm-length hall into a huge sound chamber.
Thirty deep-water lengths below the surface, underwater beneath eighty thousand tons of pure mountain salt water, the vast underground galleries of the Drowned Dao had filled with water. In those sunken alcoves stood ten thousand life-sized statues carved from grey dark rock and green snake-like, each representing an ancient master of the water-mapping lineages.
