The air inside the shift hall between the second and third entry halls smelled of crushed chalk and chilled copper.
Here, fifty paces beyond the low waterline of the morning wash, the floor flags were dry. The stone had exchanged the dark, slick sheen of wet slate for a pale, powdery grey that felt like dry flour beneath Qiao Ming’s bare soles. His toes spread against the seams of the banded limestone slabs. He gripped each tiny ridge with the unconscious habit of a mariner on a pitching deck. Even so, here the floor was motionless and had been motionless for twenty thousand seasons.
To his right, the grand passage opened into Entry hall 003: the Hall of the Fluted Chords.
It was a huge box-shaped nave, eighty arm-lengths from stone temple steps to top stone ledge and nearly three hundred paces in length. Unlike the low-vaulted cross-halls of the water-gates, the roof here was a soaring coffered barrel vault of white green-wave marble, striped with pale green veins that looked like stone-hard river weed. Flanking the central walkway stood twenty-four massive stone columns, twelve to the north and twelve to the south, each carved with thirty-two deep upright flutes running from torus to capital.
As the morning tide pulled back through the lower drainage labyrinths beneath the floor, it pulled a tremendous volume of displaced air through the underground drain tube shafts. The air had nowhere to rise except through the hollow foundations of the columns. Driven upward by the sky draft, the currents entered narrow slits at the stone stands and rushed through the fluted stone shafts, transforming the entire entry hall into a giant stone wind instrument.
The chord was already sounding when Qiao Ming stepped past the entry portal.
It wasn’t a roar, nor was it the sharp whistle of wind through a window-chink. It was a dense, ringing deep drone, steady as the hum of a huge bronze singing bowl struck with a padded mallet. The pitch anchored itself in the deepest tone of Huangzhong—the Yellow Bell, the prime sound from which the ancient masters derived all measures of length, weight, and volume before the floodwaters rose.
Qiao Ming paused, letting the shaking travel from the flat stone slabs into his calloused heels, climbing through his shin bone and settling into his hip bones. He closed his eyes and breathed with the sound.
The House possessed forty-seven separate rows of stone pillars that could sing, but the Third Entry hall was the most sensitive. The twelve-hour draft was clean. Then, the twenty-four pillars rang in three linked octaves, producing a ringing chord so pure that water droplets falling from the ceiling would hang momentarily in the air, held in mid-air by the sound pressure before striking the floor.
Yet this morning, a jagged grain marred the lower fifth of the chord.
Qiao Ming tilted his head. He held his breath, his slate-grey eyes scanning the southern row of pillars.
“The seventh column,” he murmured into the droning air. “The Pillar of the Autumn Chime.”
The seventh pillar was not sounding a pure tone. It emitted a thin, wheezing flutter, like the breathing of a man with salt-congestion in his lungs. The pitch had drifted half a comma sharp, dragging the surrounding six columns into a dull, pulsing sour note that caused the hairs on Qiao Ming’s forearms to stand stiffly against his oilskin sleeves.
He walked down the dry walkway, the eight-pound lead line-weight swinging gently against his hip with every stride.
At the base of the seventh column, the draft was coming up through the floor grating with enough force to billow the skirts of his amber coat. He knelt upon the dry stone, his knees clicking softly. The stone stand was carved with shallow reliefs of stylized clouds and diving cormorants. But around the intake sky-slit—a narrow, level slit three fingers wide—the stone had piled up a deposit of coarse grey debris.
Qiao Ming set his bone metal pen between his teeth, unhooked his leather pouch, and leaned close to the sky-slit. The air rushing from the slit was cold and tasted of underground iron and ancient oyster-beds.
Inside the intake channel, lodged firmly across the stone sound reed, was a mass of hardened sea-sponge twisted together with the broken spine of a sun-star. The surge from the last night’s moon-tide line-up had carried the flotsam up from the drowned basements, wedging it directly into the column’s throat.
“You have swallowed a bone, old singer,” Qiao Ming said, his voice quiet beneath the organ drone.
He took the bone metal pen from his mouth. Carved from the dense rib of a storm-ray and smoothed with foam-stone, the tool was eight inches long, narrowed to a blunt, non-marring wedge. Iron tools were forbidden against the sounding pillars. A single scratch across the sound reed would permanently alter the column’s deepest hum, leaving it tone-deaf for an eternity.
With slow, patient hands, Qiao Ming worked the tip of the bone wedge behind the hardened sponge. The dried sponge was hard as horn, crusted with sharp salt nodules that bit into the calluses of his knuckles. He didn’t pull with sudden force. He rocked the metal pen sideways, feeling for the fracture lines in the dried joint padding until he felt the mass loosen with a faint, dry pop.
He drew the blocked path out into the light.
It came away in two pieces: a pale, brittle clump of sponge and the segmented arm of a deep-sea urchin, bleached white as fine china by the bitter-salt water.
The instant the throat-slit cleared, the intake draft surged inward with a sharp gasp. The seventh column shuddered beneath Qiao Ming’s palm. The wheezing flutter vanished, replaced in an instant by a deep, ringing tone that surged up the thirty-arm-length shaft of the pillar and burst into the vaulted ceiling.
The sour note in the hall dissolved.
The leftover twenty-three columns took up the restored hum, their shakes aligning into an unbroken, ringing chord that seemed to lift the weight of the marble roof several inches into the clouds. The air in the entry hall grew remarkably calm. The tiny droplets falling from the ceiling rosettes lined up themselves into straight, glowing beads that caught the silver twilight filtering through the high archways.
Qiao Ming rested his forehead against the cool marble of the column for three breaths, letting the sound wash through his skull until his pulse timed together with the 114-hertz drone.
“Better,” he whispered. “Much better.”
He stood, dusted the brittle crumbs of sea-sponge from his trousers, and laid the leftovers neatly upon a recessed stone base beside the wall so that the scavengers of the upper galleries might make use of the calcium.
From his chest harness, he withdrew the Folded brass star-compass.
He flipped open the backup fine-scale plate—the sound register—and held the instrument at arm’s length, aiming the sight vanes toward the center of the nave. Inside the brass frame, three tiny silver wire needles, each tuned to a different ringing interval of the Drowned Dao, trembled in response to the surrounding pressure waves.
The central needle came to rest exactly upon the engraved mark of the Yellow Bell.
The readings were balanced. The sound circuit of the Third Entry hall was once again complete.
At the far end of the hall, raised upon a semi-circular dais of green veined stone, sat the statue of the Cantor of the Silent Chant.
The figure was forty arm-lengths high, draped in monastic robes that fell in severe, straight folds to the floor. The Cantor’s head was thrown back, mouth parted in an open, soundless vocalization, and both stone hands were raised before its chest with the fingers curved inward, as if cupping an invisible sphere of sound.
Overhead, nesting swallows with fork-tails darted between the Cantor’s raised stone forearms, their high, piping cries weaving through the organ drone like silver embroidery on grey wool.
Qiao Ming walked to the base of the dais and bowed low, his palms pressed flat against his thighs.
“The throat is clear, venerable master,” Qiao Ming said to the stone. “The lower valves are venting without blocked path. The Seventh Pillar sings its fifth once more.”
The Cantor stared into the vault, silent and calm. Across its sculpted cheek, a thin seam of white spar-stone caught a stray shaft of pale daylight, giving the impression of a pale tear that had frozen in place long before the ocean learned to flood.
To an outsider, the empty hall and the roaring stone pillars might have seemed lonely—a monument to an extinct priesthood whose names had been scrubbed clean by salt. But Qiao Ming felt no loneliness here. The music of the pillars was not a lament for what had been lost. It was the nonstop, living breath of the stonework itself, counting the hours between the tides and assuring the sleeper that the roof would not fall while the pillars remained in tune.
He unslung his leather water-skin from his belt and checked the stopper. It was nearly empty. Only two mouthfuls of salty liquid remained at the bottom.
The singing of the columns had stirred his thirst, and the air of the third entry hall was dry from the rushing drafts. Ahead, through the southern cross-hall, lay Entry hall 004 and the Cistern of White Lichen, where fresh water condensed from the lips of the Weeping Scholars.
Qiao Ming slung his sounding line over his shoulder, latched his star compass case, and set out across the shaking floor toward the sound of dripping water.