The Titanic Water-Lock of the Inner High court didn’t look like a door. It looked like the end of the world carved in stone.
Looming sixty feet above the roofed porch terrace, the entrance was barred by two massive valves of solid deep-sea dark rock, each forty feet tall, twelve feet wide, and six feet thick. The faces of the valves were bound in thick, overlapping bands of cold-forged star-iron, fastened to the stone by rusted gold-silver metal rivets that shone dull green in the dark water. At the seam where the two huge giant pillars met sat the central locking disc. A circular slab of deep-sea granite sixteen feet in width, cut cleanly with three nested high-pressure tracks and punched holes in by ninety-six needle-valves bored through solid rock.
Beneath the seabed, deep within the underground footings of the trench, water was moving.
Ren could feel it through the soles of his boots. A low, rhythmic pulse like the heartbeat of a buried giant. It wasn’t a natural earth-heat flow. It was the internal high-pressure breath flow of the Tri-Fold Water-weight Balance Rune, the master locking matrix engineered four hundred years ago by the Arch-Jurists of the Seventh Dawn.
