Qiao Ming rose to his feet. He didn’t stumble. He didn’t sway. The total numbness that had frozen his stride and locked his fingers had vanished, replaced by a cold, hypnotic, and terrible certainty. His bare calloused feet moved across the white marble flags with the silent, hungry grace of a sleepwalker walking toward the edge of a cliff.
He walked directly past Desks Ten, Eleven, and Twelve. He didn’t look at the uncarved bone. He didn’t look at the empty ink-stones. He didn’t look at the tiny green bottle of amnesiac solute that sat waiting in its niche. He walked straight to the circular red stone rim of the central sounding well.
He stopped at the very edge. His bare toes curled over the curved stone lip, hanging out into the black, fathomless air of the sixty-fathom shaft.
From the depths of the void, a sound updraft rose to meet him—a low, rhythmic, twelve-hertz suction that smelled of ancient salt, crushed shale, and cold, deep-sea water. It was the breathing of the deep pit, rhythmic as the lung of a giant beast resting upon the seabed. It was the same darkness that had swallowed his bone-awl. It was the same darkness that had swallowed the woman whose cut silk sleeve had slipped through his fingers ten thousand years ago.
