The Great Silt Plaza had never seen daylight.
Built in the third tier of the Ark’s inside cave, the plaza covered forty square leagues of terraced cut stone stonework, originally designed as a muster ground for the armies of the pre-flood empires. Since the flooding of the lower provinces, it had become the final safe hall for three million one hundred and forty-two thousand human beings. Refugees from seven drowned continents who had fled upward before the rising black tide. They had arrived with nothing: fishermen without boats, farmers without land, scholars clutching watersoaked scrolls whose ink had run into grey streaks, and children who had forgotten what a green leaf looked like. They were the leftovers of empires whose palaces now lay five thousand deep-water lengths beneath the salt.
For three weeks, the plaza had been a landscape of grey misery. The air had been freezing, choked with the smoke of smoldering driftwood and the bitter stench of burning seaweed. Families had huddled together on wet flat stone slabs beneath scrap-canvas tents. He listened with scared hearts to the distant, metal groans of the dying hull, expecting every hour that the black water in the central canal would overflow its banks and drown them in their sleep. Every morning, burial squads had moved silently through the terraces, collecting the bodies of the elderly and the young who had succumbed to the damp cold. Fear had driven men into narrow, jealous corners, guarding stale crusts of bread with drawn knives.
