The stone books did not yield to the touch. When Yan Zhiqiu laid the flat of her palm against the spine of the nearest folio on Terrace Three, she felt only the chilling, unbending thickness of solid chalcedony. The pages, once supple sheets of bleached mulberry fiber and wild hemp, had soaked in water rich with dissolved limestone for ten thousand years. Ion by ion, the plant fiber had been evicted by liquid quartz dust, until every fiber, every brushstroke of carbon ink. Every dried drop of reading-oil had stone-hard into semi-clear white agate.
“You can’t open them,” she said, her voice dropping into the quiet respect of a scroll-keeper before an unbreachable tomb. “If you took an iron chisel to this seam, the volume would not open along its leaves. It would shatter into conchoidal shards, like flint striking an anvil. The words are trapped inside the stone lattice forever.”
Qiao Ming walked the outer edge of the terrace, his bare soles making no sound against the thick layer of dry white chalk-stone dust that blanketed the flat stone slabs. He held his hardwood staff level, using it as a sighting gauge against the upright uprights of the dark rock shelving. His keen eyes, accustomed to reading the minute deflections of timber and stone under load, measured the bow of the level lintels.
