The approach of the four-hundred-foot warship to the ancient stone wharf of the Seventh Gate was a study in total water-mapping silence.
The Brass Sovereign, designed by the engineers of the Iron Bureau to be driven by screaming coal-fired boilers and clanking screw-propellers, now moved without a wisp of smoke or a clockwork shaking. Stripped of her engines, her broken boilers cold and drowned beneath sixty deep-water lengths of water in the upper round hall, she glided across the emerald lake like a phantom galleon returning from the pre-flood world.
Qiao Ming stood at the starboard bulwark, holding a three-inch braided thick ship rope of soaked wild hemp in his blistered hands. He didn’t call out orders. He didn’t shout to imaginary deckhands. In the huge stillness of the Scroll hall basin, a human whisper carried for half a league across the mirror-like water.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu held the bow spring-line, her white robe fluttering faintly in the cool, pine-scented breeze that drifted down from the library terraces. The Broken Slate rested securely in an oiled leather sling across her back, its green eerie glow glowing softly against her spine.
“Speed is zero point two knots,” Qiao Ming murmured. His eyes tracked the relative shifted weight between the ship’s bronze dragon prow and the giant stone granite blocks of the quay. “Drift-slack is neutral. The underwater doorstep is two deep-water lengths off our starboard bilge.”
