The stone-hard bone of Desk One felt cold and strangely smooth, like a slab of dense wax that had hardened in an ice-cellar. It had been carved from the neural arch of a deep-sea giant beast whose skeleton had stone-hard in the silt beds of the First Epoch. The natural curve of the bone formed a shallow, inclined writing surface two arm-lengths deep and three arm-lengths wide, flanked by two raised ridges that prevented scroll weights and ink-stones from rolling off the edges.
On the upper left corner of the desk sat an ink-stone of fine-grained black dark rock, carved in the form of a cormorant with its wings folded tightly against its flanks. In the hollow of the bird’s back, a dried cake of carbon ink remained intact. A flat disc of pressed pine-soot and staghorn glue, stamped with a royal seal that had long since rusted into dull purple. Beside it lay an ink-stick of the same composition, worn down at a forty-five degree angle by the rhythmic circular grinding of a right-handed writer.
Qiao Ming stood before the desk, his bare feet planted upon the white marble floor flags. He didn’t right away reach for the leather metal tube. Instead, his gaze moved systematically across the writing accessories, reading their wear with the sharp, careful eye of a land-mapper inspecting an abandoned benchmark.
