The underground dark rock tunnel dropped for two miles into the cold, ancient marrow of Mount Khorat.
Here, far beneath the burning palaces and the flooded cellars, the rock didn’t smell of sulfur or potion-made burning acid. It smelled of deep earth, chilled dark rock dust. The dry, metal fragrance of three-hundred-year-old iron.
The walls were not dressed brick or plastered limestone. They were solid mountain bedrock, carved during the First Epoch with huge bronze channeling chisels whose tooth-marks ran in parallel, rhythmic flutes along the stone like the ribs of an ancient giant beast.
At the terminus of the tunnel, the rock opened into a massive six-sided chamber carved out of black dark rock bedrock.
And there, dominating the entire southern wall of the chamber, stood the Cinder Gate.
It was a stone-built titan that made the gates of the Upper Citadel look like garden wickets. Forty feet high and thirty feet wide, its twin leaves were forged from cold-rolled pig iron six inches thick, heavy with level beams of stone-hard oak that had been soaked in stone oil before the First Dynasty fell.
Across the center of the portal, three massive level iron locking bolts—each thick as a draught ox’s torso—slid into recessed granite sockets on either side of the arch.
