The Cloister of Seven Thousand Murmurs had returned to its eternal, sacred peace.
As Qiao Ming stepped across the white marble threshold of the grand central nave, the chaotic violence of the preceding days felt like a distant, dissolved nightmare. The air was warm, smelling of pure beeswax, damp lime, and the clean stone water that flowed through the shallow marble runnels along the aisles. Overhead, the soaring groin-vaults of pure white Carrara stone reflected the gentle, amber glow of the oil-sconces. That created a vast cathedral of quiet soft glow.
And from the seven thousand statues of Carrara marble came the sound that gave the cloister its name: the eternal murmur.
The sound properties of the nave were the crowning achievement of Architect Yan Luochen, who had designed the cloister during the zenith of the First Dynasty. Every statue was carved from a single block of dense, fine-grained Carrara marble, hollowed along its inside upright axis by a three-inch sound core that opened through the mouth and nostrils of the figure.
Beneath the marble flat stone slabs ran a maze of twenty-four underground chimney pipes. It carried the warm, vaporous air displaced by the deep underground water beds. As this air rose through the hollow cores of the seven thousand statues, it set their stone vocal folds into tiny shaking. That set off a layered chord of seven thousand deepest tones that merged into a single, seamless ringing drone.
