The stone stands along the Grand Avenue of Seals were not decorative stone bases. They were dry docks for the dead.
As Ren, Mira, and Deep-Diver crossed between the fourth pair of dark rock pylons, the settled mud on the boulevard didn’t drift. It was displaced by a sudden, shuddering suction. Deep within the stone alcoves flanking the avenue, counter-weighted lead pulleys groaned against four hundred years of salt-crusted grease. Titanic chains forged from chilled star-iron rattled inside upright channels. He dragged balance weights upward as five massive figures stepped down from their niches into the silt.
They didn’t move with the lumbering clumsiness of drowned corpses. They moved with the high-pressure care of heavy-duty pile-drivers.
Each guardian stood nearly nine feet tall. It was wrapped in a bulbous, bolted sarcophagus of cast star-iron and hammered hard dark metal-bronze. The armor had been cast to mirror the solemn formal vestments of the First Epoch’s High Scroll hall. Fluted pauldrons shaped like the folded wings of legal vultures, heavy iron mantles riveted directly into their collarbones, and brass cuirasses deeply cut cleanly with linked court covenants.
Yet they weren’t mindless steam-golems.
Through the three-inch-thick circular quartz viewports set into their hemispherical diving helmets, Ren saw what remained of the men inside.
