Beyond the central tiered arena of the Grand Cross-hall lay the outer moat basins of Entry halls 090 through 094.
Here, the water was fifteen to twenty deep-water lengths deep, filling a series of nested sunken galleries that surrounded the innermost safe hall of the Ark. In these underwater chambers stood fourteen hundred and twenty stone giant statues—warriors, scholars, canal-engineers, and priestesses of the earliest dynasties—standing waist-deep and neck-deep in the crystal-clear salt water.
During the hundreds of years of darkness, these underwater giant statues had been invisible to the mortal world.
They had slept beneath cold, black water, their carved faces obscured by layers of dormant silt and dark stone films. Refugees who had peered into the deep trenches during the retreat had seen only terrifying, shadowy shapes in the deep pit, imagining them to be underwater sea-monsters or the stone-hard corpses of ancient giants waiting to pull the living down into the drowned mud.
Tonight, the sea of lanterns changed everything.
As the ten thousand floating vessels reached the outer edge of the cross-hall, thousands of rafts drifted over the underwater galleries.
The light from the animal fat flames pierced deep into the water. Because the sweet cooled water from the high aqueducts had displaced the muddy churn of the floodwaters, the salt water in the moat basins was as see-through as polished beryl crystal.
