The Moon-Pool Chamber beneath the overhead frame was a six-sided vault of black dark rock, forty paces across, through the center of which opened a circular well twenty arm-lengths wide. Within that well rested the water.
It didn’t splash. It didn’t ripple. It sat within the stone throat like a disc of black glass, polished to an impossible mirror finish. It reflected the flare of the four bronze oil torches mounted on the walls. The surface was perfectly still, yet it exuded a freezing, stone chill that made the breath plume from the lungs in thick white clouds of frost that hung motionless in the dead air. This was the black tide of the 920th level. An ontological flood that had risen through the upright channels of the lower mountain, held at bay only by the air-locks and water-pressure equalization valves of the upper tiers. The water smelled of ancient iron, crushed shale, and the faint, sweetish rot of ancient sea-moss.
Qiao Ming stood at the edge of the moon-pool, his bare feet grey with stone dust, his oilskin coat buttoned to the throat against the biting cold. In his hands he held his Knotted Lead Line, the sixty deep-water lengths of horsehair braid freshly rubbed with a cake of rendered sheep fat until the cord was supple, waxy, and water-repellent. He coiled the line with slow, deliberate loops around his left forearm, checking every single knot with his calloused thumb, ensuring that no strand of star-fallen wire had parted…
