The descent into the lower work vaults beneath the Central Peak felt like climbing down into the gullet of a dying giant beast.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan followed a narrow spiral stairway cut directly into the living granite. The steps were slick with green slime and slick water drops that dripped constantly from the vaulted ceiling forty feet above. With every hundred paces they dropped, the surrounding heat rose by three degrees, the cool, crisp mountain air giving way to a choking, humid fug that tasted of sulfur, boiled iron, and stale pond scum.
At the three-hundredth step, the spiral stair opened into a vast underground gallery known as the Seventh Sluice Vault.
The scale of the Precursor stonework was staggering. Arches of carved dark rock, thirty paces wide, spanned an underground canyon through which the sacred Spirit Spring had flowed for thousands of years. On either side of the deep gap, massive iron channels—some as thick as the trunk of a three-hundred-year-old oak—disappeared into the darkness, secured to the rock face by star-iron mounting brackets that had begun to sprout thick florets of reddish-brown rust.
In the center of the gallery stood Foreman Wu.
The old water-turner was a man of sixty winters, his spine bent into a permanent crescent from four decades of hauling water gate chains. He wore a patched leather apron soaked in grease and water. His bare feet were calloused to the toughness of boiled ox-hide. Beside him stood two junior apprentices holding smoking…
