Beyond the Avenue of the Cog-Towers, the roadway tightened into a long, vaulted gallery lined with rows of polished dark rock tables. This was Entry hall 655, known in the ancient blueprints as the Gallery of the Punched Ribbons. Here, the air was entirely stale, sealed away from the tidal drafts of the outer chimney pipes by double airlocks of cold cast iron.
Seated at each dark rock table was a life-sized iron-puppet fashioned from jointed plates of glowing bronze and burnished steel. There were one hundred figures in all, fifty on each side of the central aisle, sitting in attitudes of eternal, motionless concentration. Their jointed fingers, tipped with tiny hardened steel styluses, rested poised above nonstop rolls of thin punched holes in copper ribbon that emerged from slotted brass canisters beneath the tables.
Qiao Ming walked slowly down the aisle, his bare horn-hard feet making no sound against the dust-covered flat stone slabs. His eyes swept across the silent ranks of scribes. Unlike the stone statues of the upper halls, whose drapery and postures expressed human sorrow and pious devotion, these bronze figures possessed no individuality. Their faces were smooth, featureless masks of polished brass, pierced only by twin watching sky-slits fitted with dark green quartz lenses.
