The air inside the Grand Round hall did not taste of salt, nor did it taste of smoke.
It tasted of ancient stone and cold, stone-hard ozone—a dry, ancient air that had remained sealed within the circular core of Entry hall 545 for twelve thousand years. Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stepped through the small eastern upkeep portal onto the outer edge walkway. Then, the sheer massive scale of the stonework opened before them with breathless, awe-inspiring majesty.
The hall was a huge tiered arena of black hard speckled rock, two hundred arm-lengths in width. It rose one hundred and twenty arm-lengths to a soaring, unreinforced hemispherical dome.
Around the outer edge of the room, eight huge flying stone props—each carved from a single course of massive stone granite twenty feet thick—curved inward from the outside walls like the ribs of an upturned galleon, converging at the apex of the dome to support the Eighty-Ton Keystone. A huge, eight-sided block of black dark rock carved with the ancient ideogram for The Deep Anchor.
Directly beneath the keystone, at the exact sharp-angled center of the circular floor, sat the huge monument known as the Sovereign Architect of the First Epoch.
The statue was carved from a single, unbroken mass of black hard speckled rock, thirty arm-lengths tall, seated upon a twelve-sided stone stand of pink coarse grey rock. The Master builder sat cross-legged, his stone hands resting upon his knees, holding a three-foot iron compass in his left hand and a…
