The climb from the decorative moulding to the master bearing-joint was twelve upright arm-lengths of sheer, unpolished granite.
Qiao Ming did not use climbing ropes, nor did he use iron crampons. He climbed with his bare, calloused feet and his left hand. He used the ancient spreading-sockets that Master Lu-Ban’s apprentices had cut into the curved flank of Buttress Number One twelve thousand years before. His right arm hung limp at his side, the torn shoulder weeping dark blood that left a crimson trail up the grey stone. But his legs were pillars of salt-hardened bone that lifted his eighty-pound frame with steady, unrushed power.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu climbed like an eagle, the Broken Slate secured across her spine by its crossed leather straps, her boots finding every foothold with gut certainty.
They reached the master bearing-seat beneath the springing line of the central arch.
Here, sixty arm-lengths above the floor, the eight huge granite stone props ended in an eight-sided collar of dark hard speckled rock that encircled the Eighty-Ton Keystone. The air at this height was freezing, smelling of ancient stone and cold void-ozone that seeped through tiny hairline fissures in the outer ceiling.
Before them lay Relief Spreading-Wedge Number Three.
