The shaking did not announce itself through the ear. It came upward through the damp soles of Qiao Ming’s feet, a dull, rhythmic shudder that rang at thirty-eight cycles per second within the dense pale limestone flags of Entry hall 151.
Qiao Ming had been resting upon the dry sixth terrace of the Stone porch of Low Slack, his back braced against the fluted stone base of an unnumbered herald. He had slept for three hours, wrapped in his heavy coat of boiled oilskin, his bare feet tucked into the warm sheepskin lining of his bed-roll. In the underground silence of the Upper Hundred entry halls, sleep was usually a deep, dreamless full-body VR, governed solely by the measured dripping of water drops from the barrel vaults. Yet when the thirty-eight-hertz wave rolled through the foundations of the world, his eyes opened instantly into the grey gloom.
He rose without haste, rolling his sheepskin into a tight metal tube and binding it with two turns of tarred marline. The stone under his bare toes was cold, holding the slick, bitter-salt film left by the retreat of the morning surge. He slid his arms into the stiff sleeves of his oilskin coat, smelling the familiar bitterness of aged linseed and salt spray. Across his chest he buckled the greased harness of cured steer-leather, checking each tool by touch in the darkness. The walrus-bone styluses, the horn flask of rendered sheep fat, the three smoothed slate tablets, and the heavy, sixty-fathom coil…
