The sound of the sledgehammer hitting limestone was unlike any sound that belonged in the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues.
For ten thousand years, the only percussion in these vaults had been the measured, sound rhythm of the tides. The hollow thrum of water filling the drainage drain pits, the gentle click of slate tally-pins dropping into bronze sockets, and the soft scrape of Qiao Ming’s horsehair brush against salt-crusted robes. In the quiet solitude of his stewardship, every shaking had its proper place in the grand water-mapping ledger. The creak of the keel roof beams as the moon entered moon-tide line-up, the trickle of water drops along the air-flow vaults, the slow settlement of silt in the lower clarifiers.
Now, the gallery echoed with the brutal, rhythmic slam of a potion-made trip-hammer. A steel-shod ram weighing two hundred pounds, lifted by a clanking steam-ratchet and dropped every three seconds onto the breast of Statue Number 0512.
CLANG-THUMP.
The statue was carved from a single block of dense, grey Pentelic limestone. It depicted Master Scribe Lu Ting—the water mapper who had calculated the curve of the Ark’s lower keel during the Great Flooding. He sat cross-legged upon a stone stand of black hard speckled rock. His stone hands held an open scroll across his lap. His stone eyes looked forward with the calm, incorruptible stillness of one who had seen whole continents dissolve and recorded their depths without trembling. For three hundred years, Qiao Ming had paid respects to this…
