They spilled through the air-flow chimney pipe into the huge, dark expanse of the Great Acoustic Nave—the central chamber of the Sunken Temple.
It was a cave of staggering proportions. The dome above them was lined with thousands of faceted black glass mirrors, arranged in curved curves designed to focus and amplify sound throughout the underground complex. In the center of the chamber, suspended sixty feet above the flooded floor by heavy bronze chains, hung the Great Obsidian Lens. A twenty-foot disc of flawless black fiery glass that caught the pale green eerie glow of the cave like a sleeping eye.
Below the lens, standing upon the narrow stone narrow high walkways that crisscrossed the flooded basin, were thirty elite Synod shock-troopers.
And standing on the central bridge, clad in a flowing white silk mantle trimmed with ermine, was Grand Inquisitor Malakor.
The old aristocrat leaned on his gold-trimmed brass cane, his face covered by his silver-filigree breathing mask, his sunken dark eyes glittering with manic, hungry greed. He saw Mira emerge from the chimney pipe.
“There she’s,” Malakor’s wheezing voice echoed through the sound chamber, amplified by the curved mirrors until it seemed to come from the stone itself. “The Singing Quartz of Khorat. Listen to that timbre. Even through twenty yards of stone, her chest bone rings like a cathedral bell.”
