The drainage chimney pipes of the First High court smelled of four hundred years of cold stone rot and drowned dark rock.
The channel was barely four paces wide, a circular drain tube tunnel carved from dense oceanic stone, slick with black kraken silt and colonies of brittle, hexactinellid glass sponges. The sponges grew in pale, tubular lattices along the ceiling, crackling under the slight shifted weight of their wake like thin fine china underfoot. At six thousand deep-water lengths below the sky, there was no air, no light, and no warmth. Only eleven hundred bar of crushing salt water sliding through the dark at three knots toward the southern sea-floor trench.
Through the copper drain tube, Ren drew another lungful of high-pressure salt water.
His brittle-bone ribs, fused with ancient quartz fractures from the lapidary’s burn in Ostraka, throbbed with a slow, rhythmic ache that matched the shaking of the overhead machinery. Above them, through forty feet of dark rock ceiling, the muffled grind of the dreadnought’s sea-floor dredge continued. A deep, earth-shaking churn that sent fine stone dust sifting down through the channel joints like grey snow.
Beside him, Deep-Diver Ren swam with flat, easy strokes. The smuggler’s flippered diving boots barely stirred the silt. His scarred brass faceplate was turned sideways, his ear pressed against the wet stone of the channel wall. He listened to the sound reverberations passing through the bedrock.
