The inside of Air-flow Chimney pipe 144 was a tunnel of choking darkness.
Qiao Ming crawled through the narrow stone shaft on his elbows and knees, his oilskin coat dragging against the wet white chalk-stone walls with a soft, wet hiss. The duct was barely two feet wide, carved directly through the hard speckled rock bedrock seventy arm-lengths above the tiered arena floor, designed to carry exhaust vapors away from the lower sound kilns.
The air inside was hot, foul with the sharp reek of stale sulfur, boiled bitter pine-resin. The coppery stench of the Scholar’s infected blood.
Every three feet, Qiao Ming’s calloused bare knees pressed into smears of fresh mud and yellow spider-silk fibers left by the intruder who had crawled through this pipe before him.
He carried no lantern. The open flame would have burned up the meager oxygen in the confined space and alerted the Scholar to his approach. He moved in total darkness, his hands sliding along the slick white chalk-stone, his fingers reading the tiny seams and chisel-marks carved by the First Dynasty masons.
Ahead of him, thirty paces down the sloping shaft, a faint, flickering light was visible.
It was the pale, lilac glow of the Scholar’s spiritual sight, with the dry, high-pitched screech of a royal diamond-tipped hand-drill biting into phonolite stone:
