The water did not creep through the drainage gratings as it had during the cyclical seven-day washes of the middle hundreds of years. It arrived instead with the low, grinding weight of a continent sliding into a trough, forcing air through the air-flow shafts of Entry hall 901 with a high, fluting shriek that caused the petrels roosting in the upper soffits to take wing in blind panic.
Qiao Ming stood upon the third landing of the Iron Heron Gate, his bare soles planted against the wet pale limestone flags. The stone was shuddering. It wasn’t the light, rhythmic tremble of a high-pressure water gate clearing its water chutes, but a gut-deep shaking that travelled up through the dense bones of his ankles, into the marrow of his shins. Then it settled in the base of his spine like an unspent hammer strike. Below him, the basal sump was turning from pale rainwater grey to the pitch of boiled pitch. The black tide had breached the outer sea-doors.
Across his shoulders hung the familiar weight of his harness: boiled oilskin stiffened by salt, patched at the right elbow with sharkskin, its bridle leather straps darkened by seventy seasons of salt water. His left hand cradled the heavy octagon of the lead line-weight. At the same time, his thumb traced the oiled horsehair braid of his sounding line.
