Beyond the Seventh Sounding Shaft, the transit avenue narrowed into a high, tunnel-like passage whose walls were lined with huge engaged columns of banded agate and grey onyx.
At the terminus of this passage, marking the entrance to Entry hall 406, stood the Arch of the Total Exclusion. The arch was twenty arm-lengths high, its arch stones carved from alternating blocks of white Carrara marble and dense black dark rock. That created a stark, alternating pattern that looked like the striped hide of a deep-sea hunting beast. The floor beneath the arch was laid with massive slabs of dark snake-like, polished to such a high degree that the glow of their flickering lantern flame appeared like a drowning star trapped beneath six deep-water lengths of frozen black ice.
Carved across the broad frieze of the stone upper wall, in letters three spans high, was the complete fifth clause of the Exclusion Edict.
Yan Zhiqiu stood beneath the center of the arch, her head thrown back, her lantern held high above her shoulder. Her breath plumed in the freezing air, forming pale, semi-clear wreaths that drifted upward to graze the carved marble moldings. Her eyes darted from character to character, drinking in the sharp, ancient incisions that had defied sixty hundred years of deep-sea damp.
