Before the fire could touch the steel, the ancient bone had to be prepared. In the vaulted side-nook of Entry hall 712. There, the dark rock walls were faced with slabs of fire-hardened soapstone, Qiao Ming set down his tools upon an ancient stone mortar. The mortar was carved from a single block of dark green jade-red stone, sixteen inches across, its basin polished smooth by ages of instrument makers.
He drew the broken cetacean bone-awl from his breast pocket. The white bone, four inches long and fractured diagonally across its midpoint, had been his constant friend across two thousand leagues of underwater halls. It had sounded forty deep-water lengths of quiet marble rows of stone pillars. It had scratched tide-marks into pale limestone piers. And it had traced the intaglio lines of the Broken Slate through the darkest nights of the high rifts.
He laid the two fragments upon the clean soapstone table, his calloused fingertips lightly tracing the jagged fracture. The break was clean, showing the porous internal bone webs of the deep-sea bone, now impregnated with tiny salt crystals that sparkled like frost under the yellow lantern flame. The tool had reached the end of its natural life as a bone metal pen, but its material memory remained pure.
