The white marble flags of the dais gave off a dry, ringing click beneath the wooden soles of Yan Zhiqiu’s scholar slippers as she walked toward Desk Twelve. Behind her, Qiao Ming followed with the heavy, silent stride of a land-mapper, his bare feet gripping the cold stone with renewed certainty. In the vast gloom of the Scriptorium of the Drowned, the single horn lantern resting upon the corner of the twelfth desk cast a warm, three-sided beam of amber light across the uncarved jaw crest of the great giant beast.
Desk Twelve was carved from a single, unbroken section of stone-hard whale jawbone, measuring eight arm-lengths in length and three arm-lengths in width. Its surface had been planed to exact flatness by stone-rubbers during the First Epoch, then polished with fine foam-stone and sturgeon oil until it possessed the soft, creamy sheen of ancient ivory. Unlike the eleven desks that preceded it, its clean expanse bore neither ink stains nor chisel gouges. It was an open, unwritten field of bone, waiting at the terminus of ten thousand years of history.
Yan Zhiqiu stopped before the center of the desk. She set her leather satchel upon the marble floor, unbuckling the brass clasps with fingers that were steady despite the sub-zero chill. She reached into the velvet-lined inside. She withdrew the relic that had accompanied her across seventy leagues of flooded ruins and through fifty shattered entry halls: the Broken Slate of the Yan-Luo Dynasty.
