The Central Array Well lay directly below the Ancestral Altar. Its walls were made of white jade and brass. Eight star-iron chains reached from those walls into the open shaft and held an upside-down bell above the dark.
Pylon 36 weighed sixty thousand pounds. Around its twelve-foot rim and up its sides ran the words of the founding patriarch’s oath, forty thousand characters in red stone and gold. The last of the old array’s power passed through those words.
The chains glowed red. Sparks jumped between the jade blocks. The bell made no sound Pei Jing could hear, but the vibration reached up his legs and made his teeth ache.
He stepped onto the brass walkway. The grit in his tunic had worked into the cloth over nine days. Beneath his hat he could see the red of the chains reflected in the brass. A narrow bridge led out to the bell. He crossed it and waited while his new core settled to the rhythm of the array.
A sword stroke would release the pressure all at once. He had spent nine days taking the array apart in pieces so that the mountain would still be there when he reached the summit. He wanted the bell to let go of its power in the same way.
