The shift from the small domestic warmth of Entry hall 003 into the outer avenues of the Fourth Century was marked by a sudden, steep drop in heat and the rising smell of ancient, undisturbed limestone dust.
Qiao Ming walked three paces ahead, his bare feet moving across the damp pale limestone slabs with the silent, rhythmic regularity of a metronome. His toes, calloused by twenty years of wading through gritty marine grit, curled slightly at each stride, tasting the texture of the floor flags before bearing his full weight. Behind him, Yan Zhiqiu carried the Broken Slate nestled securely against her ribs inside a sheath of greased sealskin, her light travel pack slung over her left shoulder and her unstrung recurve bow wrapped in oilcloth across her back.
Neither of them spoke. In the huge, sound-swallowing reaches of the lower nave, speech was an expensive indulgence that invited unwanted sound echoes from the upper high window row arches.
Forty arm-lengths above their heads, the ceiling of the transit avenue vanished into a dense layer of stale maritime vapor. It wasn’t fog in the ordinary mortal sense, but the cold breath out of the stone lung—a mid-air of tiny salt water droplets and aerosolized white lime-chalk that clung to the transverse ribs like damp fleece. Whenever a distant surge pulsed through the outer hull channels, the vapor shifted lazily. It showed brief glimpses of massive stone wall-brackets carved in the likeness of horned river-beasts whose granite muzzles cried long streamers…
