The heat struck them before their feet crossed the arched portal of Entry hall 986.
It wasn’t the comforting, dry warmth of a domestic hearth, but the choking, rotten-egg scald of white-hot salt water venting from burst high-pressure channels. Deep within the keel of the Primordial Ark lay the thermobaric boilers of the First Epoch—huge ball-shaped pressure-vessels forged from soul-hardened star-fallen bronze, designed to capture the earth-heat marrow streaming from the stone-hard spinal column of the World-Serpent. That ancient heat was piped through the lower tiers to drive the massive bilge ejectors and maintain the internal warmth of the sleeping statues.
Now, that life-giving blood-flow system had turned into an instrument of destruction.
The air inside the gallery was a dense, blinding fog of white steam that condensed upon Qiao Ming’s face in scalding rivulets, running down his neck into the coarse wool collar of his undershirt. Beneath his bare feet, the flat stone slabs were so hot that he had to keep moving, shifting his weight from heel to toe with quick, rolling strides to keep his callouses from blistering against the scalded rock.
The Valve Gallery was four hundred arm-lengths long and barely four arm-lengths broad, hemmed in on both sides by massive copper pipe hub trunks as thick as mill-wheels. Mounted along these tarnished trunks were forty-eight main solitude valves. Huge handwheels of cast bell-bronze, each six feet across, fitted with threaded steel spindles that controlled the flow of high-pressure underground steam.
