The evening watch in Entry hall 003 was marked by the slow settling of the peat embers and the deepening of the shadows across the soapstone vault.
Qiao Ming sat upon his driftwood stool, his bare feet resting flat upon the warm hearth apron. In his hands, he held his slate workbook and a soapstone pencil, ready to record whatever the survivor of the outside world chose to lay before the House. Beside him, the Folded brass star-compass sat open upon the low table, its sight prism tilted upward, capturing the faint amber glow of the fire like a patient, metal eye.
Across the hearth, Yan Zhiqiu sat straight-backed upon her stool.
She had wrapped her yak wool blanket around her shoulders like a royal scholar’s mantle, her bandaged left arm resting inside the fold of the wool, her right hand flat upon the clean face of the Broken Slate. Her dark eyes, reflecting the scarlet heart of the embers, held a terrible, lightless distance. The gaze of someone who was looking through forty leagues of solid dark rock into a burning sky that no one in this room could see.
“Where does one begin,” she whispered, her voice carrying the dry, raspy timbre of wind blowing across dead reed-beds, “when the sky itself has been murdered?”
