The dark rock wall behind Qiao Ming was forty arm-lengths thick, composed of dense, dark columnar prisms quarried from the roots of an extinct deep-sea rift during the First Epoch. When he pressed the back of his bare skull against the rock, he felt neither malice nor comfort in the stone. There was only the huge, choking weight of stone apathy. The dark rock had existed for five hundred million years before the first ark was carved into its flank. It would exist for five hundred million years after the last human lung filled with salt water.
To a younger land-mapper, stone had seemed like an ally—a permanent foundation against the dangerous, shifting tides of the ocean. He had spent his youth seeking hard ground, believing that if a man could only anchor his foot to unbending bedrock, he could withstand any storm.
Now, he sat in the dust of the writing hall floor. He understood the terrible deceit of that belief. Stone did not love the men who shaped it. It didn’t care whether it served as the vaulted ceiling of a safe hall or the roof of a mass grave. It supported forty thousand sleeping refugees with the same indifferent smooth speed with which it would crush their bones if the arches snapped.
