The heat of the small charcoal fire bowl between his bare feet acted as a chemical spark upon Qiao Ming’s frozen nerve endings. The blood began to circulate through the deep thigh vessels of his legs. Then, an intense, searing ache throbbed in the marrow of his shins—the exact sensation of tissues thawing after extreme ice-cold exposure. And with that physical thaw came a violent, uncontrolled eruption of cellular memory.
It didn’t arrive as an abstraction of words or dates. It struck his sense cortex with the brutal, blinding force of a living presence.
He saw the writing hall not in the quiet amber glow of their single lantern, but lit up by the wild, leaping blue glare of emergency eerie-glowing lamps hung from the dark rock rafters. The air was warm, choked with steam and the ear-splitting, percussive roar of three hundred thousand tons of salt water hammering against the Great Lintel.
He was sitting at Desk Eleven. The black salt water had already covered the white marble floor flags to the depth of four inches, swirling around his bare ankles in freezing, foam-flecked eddies. His right hand was cramping wildly around a bamboo-handled badger-hair brush, driving pine soot ink across the supple surface of a fresh whale-thick parchment roll.
