The stairs of the sixty-first entry hall did not wind around a tower. They clung to the outside fluting of a single marble pier that rose four hundred arm-lengths toward the ceiling vault.
Qiao Ming adjusted the hemp strap of his wicker basket against his left collarbone. The morning air in the sky tier was noticeably different from the heavy, salt-drenched air of the lower galleries. Down below. There, the daily surge battered the bases of the stone emperors, the air was dense with salt water, crushed shells, and the rotten-egg exhalations of sunken water tanks. Here, four hundred arm-lengths above the high-water line, the mist was cold and thin. It tasted of condensed rainwater, ancient lime, and the faint, frosty bitterness of high clouds trapped beneath stone.
Small kittiwakes and white-winged petrels roosted in the carved acanthus leaves of the pier capitals. As Qiao Ming climbed the narrow spiral steps, the birds watched him with dark, unblinking eyes. They didn’t take flight. They had observed his ascent every fifteen days for more cycles than his memory could measure. They merely shifted their webbed feet against the damp stone, tucking their beaks into their breast feathers against the draft.
“Peace to your nests,” Qiao Ming murmured, keeping his voice low so as not to wake the echoes that slept in the groin vaults.
Every thirty steps, he paused to allow his calves to loosen. The climb was grueling on cold muscle, especially when carrying two pottery flasks of fresh water, a horn of dried lichen, and his survey kit. His bare toes gripped the damp marble treads with the practiced ease of an animal that had never known flat grassland. The marble was banded with faint veins of pale green snake-like, cool as river ice against his calloused soles.
He reached the high landing of Entry hall 064 an hour before the solar noon. The platform was narrow, bordered by a low roof wall of fluted white marble worn smooth by hundreds of years of damp winds. Before him opened the round hall known in his charts as the High Vault of the Sunken Spirit vein.
The scale of the chamber was vast. The dome overhead spanned sixty paces across. It was built from massive linked arch stones of pale limestone that came together upon a single circular opening at the very apex: the Oculus. Through that dark sky-slit, pale grey daylight fell in a solitary, straight column, cutting through the drifting cloud-mist like a straight-line of silver dust. There was no sky visible through the opening—only an endless, uniform grey vapor that hovered beyond the roof of the world, neither brightening into true sunlight nor darkening into night.
Directly opposite the landing, recessed into the southern pier forty feet above the floor, sat Nook II.
To reach it, Qiao Ming had to cross a narrow bridge of stone wall-brackets, each no wider than a sailor’s foot, projecting from the curved wall of the round hall. He didn’t look down into the shadow of the central deep gap. He placed his hemp-bound sandals flat against the limestone, his toes feeling through the cordage for the rough white spar-stone veins that provided traction against the dew. In his right hand, he held the horn lantern, its single animal fat wick trimmed low to conserve rendered ray-fat.
He stepped into the dry shadow of Nook II and lowered his basket to the marble floor.
The skeleton of the Blind Astrologer sat in the full lotus stance on a raised stone base of grey veined stone.
The bones were astonishingly light, exhibiting the fragile air holes of sea-foam-stone. Decade upon decade of living in the dry, thin air of the upper tier had very thirsty the skeleton, leeching away the heavy stone salts that usually crusted remains in the drowned cross-halls. The skull was tilted backward at an angle of sixty degrees, oriented always toward the dark sky-slit of the Oculus overhead. The jaw hung slightly parted, as though frozen in the middle of a syllable addressed to an uncaring zenith.
Where eyes had once rested in the sunken sockets, two spheres of dark lapis lazuli had been pushed in. The deep blue stone was flecked with minute grains of golden pyrite, mimicking star-patterns that had vanished from the mortal world before the deluge.
“Good morning, elder,” Qiao Ming whispered. He knelt upon the cold flags and set his basket before the stone base. “The seventh tide pulled back an hour before dawn. It was gentle. The water did not rise above the fourth step of the Lower Basin. I have brought you your share.”
From his basket, he retrieved a small brush fashioned from the moulted bristles of sea-otters. With slow, rhythmic strokes, he swept away the fine lime dust that had gathered across the Astrologer’s collarbones and ribs. He cleared the dead moss from between the finger bones of the crossed feet, treating each fragile bone with the tender patience a mother might grant a sleeping infant.
Next, he drew out a circular wreath woven from dried mountain-sage lichen, cut by hand from the highest northern top stone ledge where no sea-spray ever reached. The lichen was pale silver, crackling faintly between his fingers like dried paper. He lifted the wreath with both hands and set it gently atop the Astrologer’s parietal bone, letting the soft silver stems frame the smooth skull.
From the padded pouch of his basket, he took two small white pearls, recovered months ago from a deep oyster bed exposed during the lowest neap tide. He laid them delicately atop the lapis lazuli spheres. To the dead, who could no longer gaze into the dark sky, the cool pearls were eyelids that would never burn with salt.
Finally, he took a cracked celadon saucer and poured five drops of pure rainwater from his baked-clay flask onto the hyoid bone in the throat, before setting the leftover water at the base of the stone base. The drops soaked into the porous bone right away, turning the grey surface a deep, semi-clear ivory. He lit no candle. Out of respect for the Astrologer’s sightless vigil, Nook II was kept strictly in the dark.
Only then did Qiao Ming turn his attention to the relic resting in the Astrologer’s skeletal lap.
The skeleton’s bony fingers were curled firmly around the outer framework of an ancient brass gearwork: the Tide-Clock of Nine Eons.
It was a star-ring ball-shaped clock, roughly the size of a human skull, forged from salt-resistant sky bronze. Green rust crusted its lower support gimbals in pale turquoise florets, but the nested rings within the sphere remained bright and uncorrupted. As Qiao Ming leaned close, his ear picked up the sound: a minute, metal pulse, clicking once every dozen breaths as internal balance weights shifted through oil.
Qiao Ming drew his handheld Brass star-compass from his chest sling. He turned the outer sighting rule, aligning the engraved aiming sights with the dark sky-slit of the Oculus and the brass rings of the ancient clock.
The reading was clear. The chrono-drift was expanding. The clockwork pulse of the Tide-Clock was slowing by a split second with every passing season.
Qiao Ming adjusted the thumbscrew on his sighting ring. For twenty cycles, his own counts had recorded slight discrepancies in the arrival of the noon flood—sometimes three minutes late, sometimes five minutes early. He had attributed the errors to rough churning in the drain tube tunnels or buildup of mud in the lower under-road drains. But the brass gearwork before him did not measure local water drag. It was tuned to the primal spinning balance of the entire stonework.
He knelt closer to the cold stone and examined the spiral stone carving chiseled around the circular border of the nook floor. The characters were carved in Ancient Seal script, their sharp edges filled with gold leaf that had faded to dull ochre under hundreds of years of water drops.
He traced the spiral with the tip of his forefinger, feeling the crisp incisions beneath his calloused skin. He read the words aloud in a low, quiet voice that barely stirred the cloud vapor:
“The tide is not pulled by the moon. There is no moon beyond the dome. What pulls the water is the breathing of the Sovereign sleeping beneath the Twentieth Tier. When He inhales, the stairs are dry. When He exhales, the halls are swallowed. His pulse slows by one beat every millennium. When His pulse ceases, the tide will reach the Oculus, and the sky will fill like a cup.”
Qiao Ming’s finger stopped on the final character.
A chill ran down his neck, distinct from the cold draft blowing down through the ceiling sky-slit.
For cycles beyond his counting, he had accepted the rhythm of the waters as a benign and natural presence—the rhythmic, motherly breath of an ocean that had washed the world clean of all confusion. He had calculated his daily charts by the hours of ebb and flood, trusting that when the seventh tide drained away, the white steps of the middle galleries would always dry in the damp air, offering up their silver-scaled fish and purple kelp.
He looked down into the dark deep pit beneath the ledge-stone walkway.
Four hundred arm-lengths below, hidden in the pitch-black floor of the lower cross-halls, the dark salt water lay resting in its water tanks. But he sat beside the bone-dry skeleton of the Astrologer. Then, he could feel it: a faint, rhythmic pulse throbbing up through the giant stone marble pier. It wasn’t the rushing of wind, nor the crashing of waves against an outside shore.
It was a slow, huge breathing.
The waters were a breath out. When the tide rose twenty arm-lengths in twelve minutes, it was the lung-stroke of a huge entity trapped at the bottom of the world. And according to the clock in the Astrologer’s hands, that breath was growing heavier, slower, and more fatigued.
If the breath slowed, the pause between breath in and breath out would widen. And when a drowning creature finally ceased to breathe, its lungs did not empty. They filled to bursting.
Qiao Ming touched his forehead to the edge of the stone base, bowing before the lapis lazuli eyes.
“Sleep quietly, elder,” he whispered into the shadow. “The water is four hundred arm-lengths below your knees. The sky is empty. I will keep your watch.”
He carefully repacked his brush and flask into the wicker basket, fastened the strap across his chest. Then he began his careful crossing along the stone wall-brackets toward the northern gallery. The metal clicking of the Tide-Clock followed him across the gulf, counting down an eon that was rapidly running dry.