Following the completion of the moss-cleaning rite on the fifth giant statue, Elder Xiu did not return right away to the communal burls. Instead, he led Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu to a secluded nook carved into the dry heartwood of an ancient cypress root twenty arm-lengths above the silt terraces.
The nook was known as the Sounder’s Rest. Here, upon low shelves of polished soapstone, lay the relics of past expeditions. Broken measuring rods of stone-hard bone, coils of stone-hard hemp sounding line brittle with age, and slate tablets whose cut cleanly numbers had been smoothed away by hundreds of years of damp drafts.
Elder Xiu sat cross-legged upon a thick mat of dry, braided marsh-grass. He set his hornbeam staff across his knees and extended both hands, palms upturned, his smooth eyeless face tilted toward Qiao Ming’s harness.
“The elder requests the tools of the line,” Yan Zhiqiu interpreted softly, sitting at Qiao Ming’s left flank. “He wishes to feel the truth of the iron and the bone. In their tradition, a land-mapper’s power does not lie in his words or his seals, but in the straightness of his rule and the true weight of his lead. Without true tools, a traveler is merely a wanderer without a purpose.”
