When they returned to the warmth of Entry hall 003, the peat fire was still glowing like an underground star inside the dark belly of the salt-kiln.
Qiao Ming hung his wet sounding line upon its cedar pegs, wiped his eight-sided lead line-weight with a dry linen cloth, and set his bare feet upon the warm soapstone apron. The shift from the vast, chilled grandeur of the Sunken Rows of pillars to the sheltered intimacy of the sick room was an old, familiar comfort to him, like a diver emerging from forty deep-water lengths into an air-bell.
Yan Zhiqiu did not sit right away upon her stool.
She stood in the center of the nook, her bare soles planted firmly upon the dry flags, her head tilted slightly as she listened to the muffled, ringing humming of the chimney pipes eighteen arm-lengths above. The journey through the rows of stone pillars had altered her stance permanently. The defensive, hunched tension of a hunted courier had been replaced by the wide, balanced carriage of someone whose feet had learned to read the bedrock.
She reached up and touched the linen bandage around her left forearm.
“In the outside world,” she said, her voice clear and ringing in the warm room, “we believed that armor was made of forged iron, dragon-scales, or layered defensive formations powered by spirit-stones. When the void-borers arrived, the dragon-scales shattered like dried mud, and the spirit-formations collapsed the moment their batteries ran dry.”
