In Entry hall 140, the dead sang with human throats.
The hall was a massive half-round tiered arena eighty paces wide, stepped in twelve dropping tiers of dark green coarse grey rock that ended in a deep circular pool of black salt water. Around the tiered arena, seated upon massive thrones of carved hard speckled rock, sat sixty huge statues.
They were the Choral Kings. The sovereign philosopher-monarchs of the First Epoch who had governed the sixty great provinces of the old family world before the oceans rose.
Each statue was twelve arm-lengths tall, draped in heavy stone mantles carved with the sky-high charts of their forgotten realms. Their stone heads were thrown back toward the coffered small roof-dome overhead. Their carved mouths were sculpted wide open in oval chambers three feet deep, lined with plates of beaten sea-bronze that functioned as sound whistle-boxes.
As the flood tide surged through the lower intake drain tubes forty arm-lengths below the tiered arena, tightly packed air was forced upward through hollow channels carved through the monarchs’ spines.
The air rushed into their throats.
The sixty kings began to sing.
It was an extraordinary, terrifying music. A four-part requiem of pure, underground majesty that rolled through the tiered arena with the power of an ocean storm.
