The breeze arrived at the end of the sixth watch, blowing from the southern dome toward the northern threshold.
It began not with a roar, but with a gentle, dry fluttering of the thick parchment margins where the Great Parchment Roll lay anchored by the three thousand mortal tokens. The air, which had remained stale, heavy, and tightly packed throughout their journey through nine hundred and ninety-nine underground halls, suddenly stirred. It smelled faintly of ozone, crushed cedar boughs, and the cool stone petrichor of snow-water running over sunny slate.
On the pale marble terraces, a sudden panic seized the refugees.
To men and women who had spent their entire lives in the breathless, unchanging calm of the underwater vaults, moving air was a harbinger of doom. In the lower chambers, wind meant only one thing. A sky shifted weight caused by a total rupture of a seawall, or the sudden, violent drainage of an upper pool plunging millions of tons of salt water down an air-flow shaft.
Mothers threw themselves across their sleeping children, shielding their small bodies with rough hemp blankets. Old men grabbed their wooden staffs, bracing their heels against the risers as if preparing for an incoming tidal bore. The yellow flames of seventy animal fat lamps flickered wildly, casting leaping, jagged shadows across the giant stone columns.
