The chamber of the Sluice-Gate was shaped like the inside of a huge bronze drum, forty arm-lengths across and fifty arm-lengths high, its curving walls lined with plates of cast iron two inches thick, secured to the living dark rock bedrock by square-headed bronze drift-pins. Overhead, four massive wooden capstans, each carved from the trunk of an ancient hardwood tree and bound with hoops of hammered copper, sat upon raised granite stone stands. Their handspikes polished was dark and greasy by the palms of six ages of gatekeepers.
Through the center of the floor cut the throat of the water gate: a sky-slit ten paces wide and twelve paces tall, framed by massive stone jambs of black dark rock. Beyond the opening, the darkness was total, filled with the terrifying, rhythmic roar of five hundred thousand tons of displaced water rushing through the bypass water chutes of the lower galleries.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the opening, his bare toes curling over the cold iron doorstep. The updraft of air forced through the gate was freezing. It smelled of ancient slime, crushed shellfish, and the bitter copper stench of an ancient ocean that had not seen a ray of sunlight since the dawn of the world. The draft was so violent that it whipped his oilskin coat against his thighs with the crack of a snapped sail, yet he stood unmoving, his feet planted wide upon the flags.
