The stone under Qiao Ming’s bare soles had lost its ancient warmth.
For seven hundred leagues through the lower vaults of the Primordial Ark, the dark rock flat stone slabs had carried the faint, rhythmic pulsation of the keel. A slow, deep-rock heartbeat that smelled of damp flaky rock, cold river-silt, and the stone oil used to lubricate the huge bronze bearings of the lower steering oar. That shaking had been the compass by which three hundred ages of water-scribes paced the dark. It had told the soles of their feet whether the vessel rode high upon a deep-sea heat or pitched into the trough of a drowning epoch.
Now, at the threshold of Entry hall 981, that rhythmic thrum had fractured into an irregular, sickening shudder.
The shaking reached through his calloused heels as a dry, chittering rasp, resembling iron shavings ground between two millstones. Cold water swirled around his ankles, but it was no longer the clean, stone-rich salt water of the middle vaults. It was thick, sticky, dark as boiled elderberry syrup. That left a rainbow-bright, violet scum across his skin that refused to wash away in the eddying current. Where the liquid touched the hem of his heavy oilskin coat, the animal fat-dressed hemp stiffened into brittle crinkles, shedding tiny black flakes of dead wax.
