The signs of human violence appeared in Entry hall 335.
It was a wide, vaulted chamber sixty paces across, supported by six-sided pillars of green snake-like marble whose polished surfaces were laced with white spar-stone veins. In the center of the hall sat four huge sovereigns of the First Epoch, raised upon a shared dais of dark hard speckled rock three arm-lengths above the floor.
Qiao Ming stepped onto the dais, his bare feet dry once more after the cold wading of the sunken row of stone pillars.
He held his lantern high, letting the yellow light wash over the central figure: Statue #0338, cataloged in the old records as the Sovereign of the Southern High sky. The statue sat upon a high-backed throne, its stone hands clamped around the shaft of an eight-arm-length star-fire scepter.
Unlike the scepters in the earlier entry halls, whose glass-fused heads had suffered only the natural fracture of the ancient cooling, this staff had been deliberately attacked.
Qiao Ming climbed the hard speckled rock steps until his chest was level with the sovereign’s hands.
The glass-fused star-fire core—a mass of dark amber glass the size of a bull’s skull—had been savagely hacked and chiseled. Deep, angular gouges crisscrossed the glassy surface. That left white, crushed impact craters where an iron tool had been driven into the material with heavy sledgehammers. Three large flakes of the precious starlight melted rock waste had been pried loose, leaving raw, jagged hollows that exposed the inner core to…
