The discharge of the South Aqueduct into the Basin of the Silent Archive was a stone-built masterwork of water-flow shift.
The narrow, forty-foot granite water chute did not end suddenly in a sheer waterfall or a violent spillway. Instead, it opened into an inverted trumpet of polished black dark rock. A flared high-pressure diffuser five hundred arm-lengths long that gradually widened from forty arm-lengths to two hundred arm-lengths. As the cross-sectional area of the channel swelled by eight hundred percent, the racing current lost its moving violence. It spread outward across a vast, mirror-smooth apron of underwater limestone.
The speed of the Brass Sovereign decayed rapidly. From eighteen knots to twelve, then eight, then three, until the great four-hundred-foot warship was gliding across the surface of the underground lake with barely a ripple disturbing the dark salt water.
The sudden absence of sound was overwhelming.
For eighteen months, the lives of Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu had been filled with the heavy-duty clamor of Zhu Heling’s machine invasion. The screaming of steam-drills, the thunder of gunpowder blasting-charges, the clanking of air-powered crawler-treads. The frantic shrieking of three hundred dry, ungreased clockwork gears. Now, within the span of fifty yards, that entire nightmare of mortal iron was swallowed by the huge, ancient peace of the underground deep.
