Crossing the hard speckled rock threshold of Bulkhead Twelve, the air shifted into a total, dry stillness. There was no draft here, no faint tidal hiss from the upper chimney pipes, and no scent of petroleum or melted rock waste. This was Entry hall 682, the Sovereign Repository of the Ashen Epoch. A huge eight-sided vault sixty arm-lengths across, whose walls were entirely lined with floor-to-ceiling shelving tiers of cast iron.
Arranged upon these shelves with military care were thousands upon thousands of heavy iron tablets, each two spans long, one span wide, and an inch thick. These were the royal chronicles—forty-eight thousand records of an extinct great realm, etched into acid-resistant star-fallen plate by the scribes of the High Zenith. The air was cool and bone-dry, preserved by sealed airlocks and blocks of calcined lime that rested in bronze trays at the base of every rack.
Qiao Ming walked down the central aisle, his bare horn-hard feet making no sound against the polished hard speckled rock floor flags. He paused before the third shelving tier, his calloused fingertips lightly touching the edge of an iron tablet. The metal was smooth as glass, coated in a micro-film of boiled linseed oil that had dried into an amber glaze, protecting the cuneiform incisions from rusting for fifty hundred years.
