The hall was silent as a tomb hall of kings, but the kings who stood here were cast from living brass. Entry hall 667 stretched before them in a long, massive nave flanked by thirty-six eight-sided stone bases. Upon each stone base stood a huge brass statue, twenty arm-lengths in height, representing an Imperial Navigator of the Ashen Court.
Unlike the engineers of the cog-towers who held wrenches and slide-rules, these navigators were dressed in flowing ritual robes cast with fine, detailed relief patterns of ocean currents and world-size orbits. In their uplifted hands, each statue supported a massive clockwork star-ring sphere. A complex cage of nested bronze rings, equinoctial bands, and zodiacal colures four paces in width.
Qiao Ming stepped onto the first stone base, his bare horn-hard feet gripping the fluted bronze base. He looked up into the face of Navigator Nine. The statue’s features were calm, austere, and carved with deep, sorrowful hollows beneath the eyes. Its bronze hands, jointed at the knuckles with threaded steel pins, cradled the sky sphere with infinite delicacy, aligning the polar axis with a point high in the dark ceiling vault.
Yan Zhiqiu approached the base of the stone base, setting down the Broken Slate on a granite bench. She lifted her horn lantern, shining its amber beam up into the inside of the bronze sphere. Inside the nested rings, tiny brass planets, mounted on geared outward spokes, hung suspended around a central sun of burnished gold.
