The crossing from the High Vault to the Gallery of the Hanging Loom was the most dangerous path in Qiao Ming’s entire liturgical circuit.
To reach North-East Archway 48, one could not rely on floor slabs or stone railings. Between the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth entry halls, the high floor had collapsed into the depths during some forgotten ground-shaking convulsion. That left only a row of stone pillars of eight huge caryatids standing shoulder to shoulder against the curving northern wall. Each caryatid was carved from grey-veined pentelic marble in the likeness of a weeping priestess, thirty arm-lengths tall, her hands raised to support a plain stone beam that vanished into the upper mist.
Qiao Ming checked the fastenings of his wicker basket. He tightened the hemp cord around his waist and took a long breath of the thin, cold air. Below the caryatids’ shoulders lay three hundred arm-lengths of sheer upright emptiness—a deep gap where clouds drifted like grey smoke across the silent gulf.
He stepped onto the first priestess’s left shoulder.
The marble was damp with water drops, slick as river mud. Qiao Ming did not hurry. He leaned his torso inward, pressing his palms against the drapery of her sculpted hood, his bare toes curling over the rounded edge of her collarbone. The stone felt ancient and frozen, carrying none of the salt warmth of the lower terraces. Step by step, moving from shoulder to shoulder across eighty paces of empty air, he crossed the weeping line. When he reached the seventh figure, a sudden gust of wind rose from the deep pit, smelling faintly of old mud and crushed snail shells. He dropped into a crouch, wrapping his forearm around the priestess’s braided stone hair until the draft subsided.
On the eighth shoulder, he stepped off onto the solid limestone ledge of Archway 48.
The Gallery of the Hanging Loom opened before him like an abandoned temple nave. The air was filled with an unending, pearl-white haze. Unlike the southern halls, which were periodically scrubbed by the violent drafts of the rising tide, this northern gallery was an eddy of stillness. Mist rose from the lower water tanks through narrow drainage shafts, condensing into tiny droplets that hovered in the air, refracting the grey light into pale bands of lilac and muted silver.
Seventy feet above the gallery floor, nestled in an arched niche carved into a fluted pilaster, lay Nook IX.
A narrow upkeep stairway, notched directly into the stone pilaster by ancient masons, allowed Qiao Ming to climb without ropes. He climbed steadily, his basket bumping softly against his spine, until he reached the sheltered platform of the niche.
“Peace be with you, sister,” Qiao Ming whispered.
The skeleton of the Weaver of Star-Fog rested upon a shelf of white statuary marble.
She didn’t sit upright like the Iron High judge or the Blind Astrologer. She lay curled on her right side in the stance of a sleeper seeking warmth, her knees drawn toward her chest, her head pillowed upon her folded left arm. The bones were exquisitely slender, lacking the rugged thickness of the laborers or the iron-hard turning to stone of the martial sovereigns. Under the soft surrounding light of the gallery, her bone did not look like dry calcium. It possessed the semi-clear, milky glow of mutton-fat jade, so fine that the delicate marrow channels inside her ribs were visible as faint, pale shadows.
Miraculously, she wasn’t bare bone alone.
Clinging to her pelvis and draped over her ribs were the gossamer leftovers of a Celestial Silk Shroud. Hundreds of years of damp air had not rotted the fabric. The weave was finer than spider-silk, shimmering with a faint, rainbow-bright lustre that shifted between pale lavender and cold starlight whenever the mist drifted across the nook.
In her right hand, her delicate finger bones were curled around an eight-inch shuttle carved from mammoth ivory.
The ivory was yellowed with extreme age, its surface polished to a mirror-like finish by fingers that had ceased to move before the oceans rose. Through the oval eye of the shuttle ran a single, unbroken strand of silver-blue thread.
The thread was scarcely thicker than a horsehair, yet it didn’t droop or sag. It emerged from the shuttle, stretched taut across the lip of the nook, and rose straight up into the gloom of the barrel-vaulted ceiling, vanishing into the shadowed stonework seventy feet overhead.
Qiao Ming knelt beside the niche and set down his basket.
First, he performed the Rite of Bone Sweeping. He used his otter-bristle brush. He cleared the fine white lime dust from the folds of the jade ribs, moving with huge delicacy so as not to tear the gossamer shroud. He brushed away two dead moths whose wings had turned to grey powder beside her cheekbone.
From his basket, he retrieved a wreath fashioned from dried frost-lace kelp. The weed had been gathered from the highest cold-water ledge in Entry hall 012, washed in sweet rain, and dried until it was as white and brittle as spun glass. He placed the circular wreath gently around her jade skull, resting it against her temple.
Next, he took three polished moonstone pebbles from his pouch. Each stone was flat, oval, and banded with semi-clear layers that glowed faintly blue in the shadows. He set them in a neat row beside her curled knees.
He filled a clean celadon saucer with cloud-water skimmed that morning from the high rain-pans, floating a single dried white lichen blossom upon its surface, and placed it before her folded hands.
Finally, Qiao Ming took a small beeswax candle from his basket. Unlike the animal fat candles he used in the windy middle halls, this candle was molded from sweet, purified comb salvaged from an ancient dry storehouse in the Upper Tier. He placed it inside a hollowed conch shell to shield the flame and struck a spark with his steel.
The tiny yellow wick caught. As the flame blossomed inside the white shell, its warmth fell across the jade skeleton. The semi-clear bones caught the amber glow, refracting it through the gossamer silk shroud until the entire nook was bathed in a gentle, violet radiance.
“The morning is quiet, sister,” Qiao Ming murmured, resting his hands upon his knees. “The Astrologer still watches the Oculus. The tides in the south are slow today. I have brought you clean rain and mountain flowers.”
The silence of the gallery absorbed his voice without an echo.
Qiao Ming turned his gaze to the ivory shuttle and the silver thread.
He drew his Brass star-compass from its leather case. Loosening the knurled brass locking nut on the central sighting vane, he lined up the crosshairs with the upright line of the thread. He held the brass instrument level against his breastbone, tapping the outer side ring with his thumb to engage the internal swinging weight.
The reading held steady without a tremor. A tension load of four hundred and twenty Newtons. The thread was not merely hanging from above. It was anchored under huge, clockwork strain into the main load-bearing ribs of the ceiling vault.
Qiao Ming leaned closer to the inner arch of the nook wall.
Carved along the curve of the white marble, painted with a pigment made of powdered gold and stone-hard tree-resin, ran a line of flowing cursive calligraphy. The brushstrokes were light and rapid, resembling the wind-whipped surface of a shallow pool:
“We thought the stars were in the sky. When the ceiling cried, the stars fell into the basins. I spun the star-patterns out of water-foam, but the thread broke at the northern spirit vein. If you find the Nineteenth, don’t tie the knot. Let the sky remain unstitched.”
Qiao Ming read the words three times.
The cursive script seemed to waver under the flickering candlelight.
“If you find the Nineteenth...” he whispered, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth. “Do not tie the knot.”
What Nineteenth?
In the official register of his charts, there were eighteen alcoves. He had cataloged them across years of solitary exploration. Eighteen niches sheltering eighteen relic skeletons, each resting at an exact stone-built height, each guarded by distinct stone carvings and relics. He had never found a nineteenth skeleton. He had searched every accessible cross-hall from the silt basins to the high window row roof ledges.
He looked up along the silver-blue thread.
His eyes traced the taut, shimmering line as it climbed through the dim air of the gallery. High above. There, the fluted pilasters met the springing of the transverse vault, the thread entered a minute bore-hole drilled through the centre of an iron cramp.
For the first time, Qiao Ming looked at the ceiling with an analytical eye. He recognized the truth of the stonework overhead: it was a huge roof, a giant stone shell of stone and bronze, painted with glowing ores to imitate a universe that had drowned long ago. The stars were stone deposits. The night was a carved canopy.
With infinite gentleness, Qiao Ming raised his hand.
He extended his right forefinger and brushed the back of his fingernail against the silver thread, striking it like a zither string.
Ping.
The sound was pure, crystal-clear, and terrifyingly clear.
A high, metal chime rang out through the nook. The shaking did not die away. It traveled up the silver wire at blinding speed, disappearing into the ceiling vault. A second later, from deep within the stone ribs overhead, came a low, echoing hum. A vast, metal deep ring that ran along the transverse arches for hundreds of paces, like the strike of a huge tuning fork buried inside the rock.
The kittiwakes resting in the distant capitals took wing in sudden alarm, their white wings fluttering through the grey mist.
Qiao Ming froze, his hand suspended in the air.
The stone ceiling above him had answered the wire. It was hollow in places. It contained channels, iron anchors, and balance weights.
And at the base of that vast, artificial vault sat this delicate jade skeleton, holding the spool of the world’s final seam.
“Do not tie the knot,” Qiao Ming repeated quietly, the Weaver’s warning echoing in his mind. “Let the sky remain unstitched.”
He knelt before the ivory shuttle, lowering his head until his brow touched the cool marble floor before her feet.
“I will remember your words, sister,” he whispered. “I will look for the Nineteenth. And if I find the thread, I will leave it open.”
He let the candle burn within the white conch shell. Its lavender glow would keep her company until the wax was spent. Carefully, with deep awe, Qiao Ming dropped the notched stone steps into the quiet floor of the gallery, his mind heavy with the weight of an unraveled cosmos.