The passage connecting the fourteenth check chamber to Entry hall 985 smelled of sulfur, cold glass, and crushed burning acid.
Unlike the sandstone, dark rock, and hardened timber arches of the preceding tiers, this hall had been raised entirely from massive stone shafts of pure fiery glass. Black glass quarried from the underground roots of the drowned Central Continent during the earliest years of the First Epoch. In those ancient decades, before the sky was lost to the waters, the master-masons under the command of the First Sovereign had cooled each molten metal tube of glass in deep-sea whale-oil and soaked salt water. He locked the atom-deep lattice in a state of permanent, high-pressure tension. Twelve huge columns, each four arm-lengths in width and eighteen arm-lengths tall, stood in two parallel ranks of six, supporting the huge transverse heavy beams that bore the dead-weight of the Ark’s main upper navigational bridge.
The floor was dry here, raised three arm-lengths above the flooded halls by an apron of dressed white quartz steps that had remained untouched by the rising bilge.
Yet the dry stone brought no reassurance to the soles of Qiao Ming’s feet.
As he mounted the quartz steps, his bare skin detected a high, whistling shaking running through the stone grain—a pitch so sharp and thin that it set the fillings of his back teeth to aching. The black glass pillars were humming.
