The small archive room of Entry hall 350 was built into the western stone support prop of the Gateway gorge.
It was a quiet, dry chamber six paces square, lined with shelves of slotted slate where the original lead tablets of the First Epoch land-mappers were stored in level ranks. The air in the archive was sweet and bone-dry, smelling of cedar oil, powdered chalk, and the beeswax with which the ancient clerks had sealed their bronze tablet cases.
Qiao Ming sat upon a low three-legged stool of stone-hard oak, his oil lamp resting upon the slate workbench before him.
In his lap lay his great field ledger: a heavy volume bound in tanned sharkskin, containing one hundred leaves of thick, oiled thick parchment that had been treated with cedar resin to resist the moisture of the deep halls. The book was thick, its pages covered in his own neat, square characters, recorded in waterproof black ink made from lamp-black, fish-glue, and powdered gall-nuts.
He laid his bone writing metal pen beside the ink-stone, took a sip of fresh rainwater from his horn flask, and began the formal summation of the Outer Octant survey.
For seventy days, through forty-two complete cycles of the forty-hour tide, he had walked the boundary.
