The leather case on Desk Four was heavier than its predecessors, its shark-skin sleeve crusted with a fine, powdery reddish-brown bloom that tasted of rusted iron and sulfur. Qiao Ming drew the whale-tooth pin from the hasp. Then, the bronze staple snapped away with a dry, crumbly snap, its metal having suffered hundreds of years of inter-granular rusting despite the dry cold air.
He lifted the roll from the container. The parchment inside was not whale-thick parchment. It was a flexible foil beaten from pure refined copper, rolled around an iron spindle that had fully converted into red hematite dust. As he unrolled the first two feet across the bone desk, a shower of fine, rust-colored powder rained upon the white marble floor, staining the stone in a pale orange crescent around his bare toes.
“The Chronicle of Rust,” Yan Zhiqiu murmured, bringing the lantern down until the flame reflected across the burnished copper leaf. The text had not been written with a hair brush. It had been cut cleanly into the copper using an iron-tipped metal pen, the strokes filled in with black asphaltum paste to provide contrast against the bright metal.
THE FOURTH CHRONICLE OF THE DROWNED DAO: THE RUSTING OF THE STARS.
