The crossing of the service ledge brought Qiao Ming into an air of heavy, iron-scented gloom.
Entry hall 281 was an eight-sided round hall fifty paces across, its walls paneled with thick slabs of dark magnetic iron that exerted a faint, perceptible tug on the iron buckles of his leather harness. In the center of the chamber, raised upon a circular stepped stone base of three tiers, sat Statue #0281: the Sovereign of the Iron Cinder.
Qiao Ming paused at the bottom step of the stone base, adjusting the strap of his work box.
The statue was sixty arm-lengths tall from its bare stone heels to the crest of its smooth crown. It was carved not from dark rock, but from a single massive nodule of native lodestone—a huge meteorite that had fallen into the ancient sea before the first continents had names. The figure sat with its elbows resting on the arms of a plain stone bench, its massive forearms extending forward in an attitude of total, motionless power.
The most striking feature of the sovereign was its face.
It had no eyes, no nostrils, and no mouth. The entire frontal plane of the head was a single, flat oval of mirror-polished magnetic iron, three arm-lengths wide and five arm-lengths high, ground to such an exquisite flatness that it reflected the yellow beam of Qiao Ming’s lamp with terrifying, undistorted clarity.
