The Grand Central Cistern of Val-Khorat had not been designed for human habitation. It was built during the First Epoch to cool the thirst of an empire. A titanic underground cathedral carved out of solid mountain dark rock, vast enough to hold six full-rigged galleons abreast beneath eighty-foot Romanesque stone vaults.
Now, it was a tiered arena of drowning misery.
The water was a churning, black lake six deep-water lengths deep, fed by eight massive intake aqueducts that plunged from the ceiling like roaring waterfalls. Across the surface of this poisonous inland sea rose twenty massive stone piers. Huge granite platforms, each eighty feet square, built to support the vaulted ceiling arches.
On those twenty isolated stone islands huddled over three thousand low-city refugees.
They were crowded shoulder-to-shoulder on the cold, wet flat stone slabs, cut off from the shoreline by swirling moats of boiling, potion-made run-off. A few smoky pitch torches burned on iron support posts, their bloody orange glare lighting up a sea of white, upturned faces. Weavers from the upper wards, draymen clutching their draft harnesses, apprentice scribes whose leather satchels were soaked in river muck, and hundreds of shivering children wrapped in soggy horse blankets.
Ren Vale emerged onto the northern gallery overlooking the water tank, his boots crunching in the dry lime dust of the upkeep walkway.
