Entry hall 540 was the Treasury of the Sunken Mosaic.
Paved during the Second Epoch with five million tiny tesserae of polished lapis lazuli, turquoise, and mother-of-pearl, the floor depicted the Grand Conjunction of the Drowned Stars. A fine, detailed sky-high chart forty paces across that recorded the exact positions of eighty-one sky spheres at the moment the Primordial Flood began. For twelve thousand years, no iron wheel had ever rolled across those delicate stones. Qiao Ming had cleaned them once every decade with a sponge soaked in rainwater, admiring the way the mother-of-pearl stars caught the green drift of eerie-glowing silt.
Now, four heavy iron transport sledges were being dragged across the sacred mosaic by thirty sweating hired blades and twelve armored draft-oxen.
The sledges were low, flat-bedded carriages built of riveted three-inch boiler-plate, each carrying twelve lead-lined chests filled with looted dao-cores hacked from the statues of the lower tiers. The total deadweight of the four sledges exceeded twelve metric tons. The iron runners of the sledges, scored by gravel and grease, cut through the delicate lapis tesserae like plowshares through soft earth, throwing up showers of blue and white stone-dust as they crushed the ancient star-patterns to powder.
