The smell of burnt limestone was different from the smell of any other dead thing.
It wasn’t the sweet, sickly stench of decomposing flesh, nor the sharp, bitter tang of charred wood. It was a cold, dry, stone agony. The smell of stone that had been heated beyond its melting point by potion-made fire, releasing ten thousand years of trapped moisture and stone-hard memory in a single, choking gasp of white chalk-vapor.
Qiao Ming halted at the entrance of Entry hall 535, his bare feet coming to an abrupt, frozen stop upon the threshold pavers.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu bumped gently into his shoulder, her breath catching in her throat as her eyes adjusted to the gloomy shadows of the chantry.
The chantry was a small, high-vaulted chapel six paces wide and twelve paces deep, dedicated to the memory of Saint Xuan-Ming. The legendary master who, in the First Epoch, had invented the Knotted Lead Line and mapped the Nine Soundings of the Primordial Trench. For twelve thousand years, his statue had sat upon a simple stone base of unpolished black dark rock at the back of the chapel. A life-sized figure carved from grey Pentelic marble, depicted as an old man in an oilskin coat, with bare feet, holding a sounding-line across his knees.
