The defense of the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues could not be fought with swords.
Qiao Ming stood on the high watching terrace of Entry hall 201, looking westward down the grand axial spirit vein. Ahead of him lay twenty-five unmapped chambers—Entry halls 201 through 225—known in the master blueprints as the Labyrinth of the Drowned Siphons. Here, the stonework abandoned the grand, open amphitheatres of the upper cloisters. He condensed into a dense, linked matrix of narrow vaulted halls, non-Euclidean rows of stone pillars, and deep underground high-pressure locks.
In his hand, he held the Great Parchment Roll of Ten Thousand Vaults, unrolled across a stone plotting table of polished black hard speckled rock.
The ink upon the parchment was ancient, drawn in walnut gall and powdered lapis lazuli by the First Master of Works three thousand years ago. It depicted the entire high-pressure blood-flow system of the sector. Thirty-six upright water gate-gates, forty-eight sound drain tube tubes, and eighteen underground overflow reservoirs that could be flooded or drained in minutes by manipulating the main balance weight winches.
“A sword cuts only one man at a time,” Qiao Ming murmured, running his calloused index finger along the blue ink-lines of Siphon Nine. “And the blood it draws fouls the stone. But a water gate can turn an army without touching a single hair of their heads.”
