The water in Entry hall 009 did not drain entirely even at the lowest slack.
Here, sixty paces south of the cross-hall, the floor pitched downward into a sunken tiered arena known as the Colosseum of Drowned Monarchs. Thirty tiers of dark stone seating dropped into a flooded arena where twelve huge statues stood with their torsos, shoulders, and heads projecting from a permanent lake of deep, see-through emerald salt water.
The salt water was cold as unworked jade, tasting of dissolved white spar-stone, crushed shells, and the clean metal tang of liquid Dao. Because no storm drafts pierced this lower basin, the surface was smooth as a polished black glass mirror. He reflected the high barrel vault where pale living-glow barnacles clung to the ribs like star-patterns of cold blue stars.
Qiao Ming stood on the eighteenth tier of the tiered arena, his trousers rolled past his knees, his bare feet sunk in nine inches of still water.
His toes curled over the lip of the underwater bench, gripping the thin layer of fine white silt that coated the stone. The cold of the salt water was intense, creeping up his shins with an icy, numbing ache, but he welcomed the sensation. It kept his attention sharp. In the lower basins, inattention was a quick path to slipping off an unmapped ledge into the fifty-fathom drain pits that lay beneath the arena floor.
He unslung the Knotted Horsehair Sounding Line from his shoulder.
He was here to record the silt settling around the stone stand of Statue 0048—the Sovereign of the Drowned Horizon. The statue was sixty arm-lengths tall, carved from white Parian marble, but only its neck, chin, and calm, crowned head rose above the surface of the green pool. The water lapped gently against its stone earlobes, making faint licking noises in the stillness.
Qiao Ming swung the eight-pound lead line-weight in a low, careful arc and dropped it three paces from the Sovereign’s right temple.
The lead plunged with a soft plup, trailing bubbles through the crystal water. It sank four deep-water lengths before coming to rest upon the underwater shoulder of the titan.
As Qiao Ming leaned forward over the stone railing to check the knot at the water’s surface, a subtle distortion caught his eye.
Fifteen paces away, half-sunk in the emerald glass, was the Sovereign’s left eye socket.
The eye was carved wide, without pupil or iris, in the classical manner of the First Epoch. But inside the dark hollow behind the stone brow, something was bending the light.
It wasn’t a shadow, nor was it a strand of drifting bladderwrack. It was a sight ripple, like molten glass poured into clear oil. A faint shimmer moved across the inside curve of the marble eye socket—a fluid, waving form whose edges possessed an index of refraction nearly matching to that of the surrounding salt water.
“A glass cephalopod,” Qiao Ming whispered, his breath catching in his throat.
The creature was a Shui Jing Huan Xiao—the Silver Glass Octopod. It was an ambush hunting beast native to the deep pillared hall vaults of Stratum I, possessing a flesh of living liquid crystal that made it virtually barely noticeable in still water. Only when it moved could the eye detect the faint shearing of refracted light along its mantle and the crystal-clear suction discs of its eight arms.
The cephalopod had made its lair inside the hollow brain-cavity of the marble Sovereign, using the empty eye sky-slit as its hunting blind.
Qiao Ming did not move. He kept his feet locked to the underwater bench, holding the horsehair line motionless between his thumb and forefinger.
The cephalopod was attracted by the lead weight.
To deep-sea hunting beasts that lived in the lightless drain pits, the dull metal shaking of soft lead cutting through water was an irresistible curiosity. Also, the fresh sheep fat packed into the plumb’s base released a thin, fragrant slick of animal fat into the water that the creature’s chemical receptors had already tasted.
Slowly, with terrifying grace, a crystal-clear tentacle slid out of the Sovereign’s stone eye.
The arm was six feet long, thicker than Qiao Ming’s forearm at the base, tapering to a whip-thin tip of flawless transparency. As it extended through the green water, the light of the overhead barnacles bent through its flesh, splitting into faint rainbow halos along the margins of its skin. Inside the center of the semi-clear arm, Qiao Ming could see the faint, pulsing thread of its forearm nerve—a hairline of cold silver light that fired with rhythmic spark discharges.
The tentacle reached toward the underwater lead line-weight. Its clear suckers flared, tasting the water two inches from the metal weight.
If the creature seized the lead, its tentacles would whip through the line with the strength of a high-pressure winch. At best, Qiao Ming would lose his sixty-fathom braided cord. At worst, the sudden moving jerk would drag his bare feet off the slick dark rock tier into four deep-water lengths of freezing salt water, where three more tentacles waited in the dark socket.
Qiao Ming did not pull the line. A sudden jerk would trigger the cephalopod’s hungry strike reflex.
Instead, he reached into his oilskin coat with his left hand and withdrew the Folded brass star-compass.
He opened the backup sighting rule—the sight vane fitted with a thin lens ground from sea-glow-stone. He angled the mirror toward a shaft of pale daylight filtering through a high window row slit high on the southern wall, catching the beam on the star compass’s silvered reflector.
By adjusting the fine-scale thumb-screw, he focused the beam into a tight, packed pencil of aligned radiance.
He aimed the light directly at the Sovereign’s left eye.
The aligned beam pierced the green water like a lance of silver needle-fire. The instant the packed light struck the cephalopod’s semi-clear mantle, the physical property that gave the creature its camouflage became its undoing.
The crystal flesh caught the aligned wavelengths, scattering the beam through its internal tissues like a lit up chandelier. The entire creature flared into brilliant, blinding clear sight. A radiant, glowing phantom of electric blue and violet light, its eight arms thrashing in startled agony as the focused daylight overwhelmed its deep-adapted optic nerves.
The tentacle whipped away from the lead line-weight.
With a muffled whoosh, the cephalopod tightened its mantle, ejecting a cloud of defense ink from the Sovereign’s eye.
The ink was not black. It was a dense, milky soft glow that glowed with cold turquoise fire, expanding through the water in billowing clouds that fully masked the statue’s face. Through the glowing mist, the shimmering outline of the creature shot backward, retreating through the skull drainage channel into the dark, fathomless foundations below.
Qiao Ming waited until the water settled.
The turquoise soft glow of the ink slowly drifted across the surface of the pool, coating the marble cheek of the Sovereign in a shimmering veil of cold glowing that faded to grey after twenty breaths.
He drew a long, measured breath out, the cold air burning his throat.
Slowly, smoothly, he reeled in the horsehair line hand-over-hand, coiling the wet cord into his palm. The eight-pound lead weight broke the surface. Then, the sheep fat in the base was intact, bearing only a faint half-round indentation where a single crystal sucker had grazed the grease before the light struck.
He knelt upon the underwater tier, setting the brass star-compass upon his knee to record the sight settings of the meet.
The reading showed the refraction index had returned to the baseline of pure salt water. The creature had fled to at least thirty deep-water lengths depth.
Qiao Ming dried the glow-stone lens with a scrap of clean linen and returned the star compass to its oiled case.
He looked across the water at the Sovereign’s empty eye socket. The stone was dark once more, peaceful and still.
There was no malice in what had just occurred. The cephalopod was not a monster bent on evil. It was merely a hungry inhabitant of a drowned house. That made its nest in the skull of an emperor who had died ten thousand seasons before its egg was laid. The Sovereign held up the ceiling, the water gave the creature a home, and the light from the sky had protected the land-mapper.
“You should find smaller fish to hunt, cousin,” Qiao Ming murmured into the quiet hall. “Lead will give you indigestion, and my cord is not for weaving nests.”
He gathered his gear, stepped backward up the underwater steps, and emerged onto the dry dark rock terrace of the tiered arena.
His bare feet left dark, wet tracks across the grey stone, tracks that steamed faintly in the cool air as the water evaporated. That left only thin white rings of dried salt upon his skin.
Ahead, through the massive southern archway, lay Entry hall 010 and the Central Shaft—the deep pit where the floor fell away into the underground foundations, and where the fiftieth fathom awaited his longest line.