The ink on the first folio did not shine like the fresh carbon glaze of a newly written document, nor did it exhibit the dull, flaking grayness of common secular scrolls. It sat upon the bleached whale-thick parchment with the deep, light-drinking opacity of raw stone soot. It was bound by an animal connective tissue so pure that ten thousand years of cold air had failed to generate a single micro-craquelure along its brushstrokes.
Qiao Ming remained on his knees before Desk One. His right hand, which had spent five hundred years sounding underwater shafts, scraping barnacles from foundation sills, and drawing nautical bearings, rested trembling upon the white marble floor beside his knee. He looked at the signed name in the lower margin:
RECORDED BY QIAO MING, Land-mapper OF THE NADIR.
The characters were carried out in the ancient clerical script of the First Astronomical Bureau. It was a hand characterized by flat level strokes with sharp, upward-curving end-post tails, and compact, load-bearing upright descenders that ended in heavy, square stops. In the second character, MING—meaning dark ocean waters—the water radical on the left had been drawn with three distinct strokes: a drop, a dot, and a rising flick.
