The rhythmic, clockwork clatter of the twelve-bobbin world-size head echoed down the five hundred arm-lengths of Entry hall 727: The Braid Flume. Qiao Ming stood at the driving station, his broad shoulders and calloused arms turning the heavy bronze hand-crank with the steady, unvarying rhythm of a master mariner.
With every revolution of the crank, the twelve bronze spools danced around each other in a complex, linked figure-eight orbit. Eight strands of jet-black stallion hair and four strands of shimmering star-silver filament crossed and recrossed, converging at the apex of a polished boxwood cone where they were tightly packed into a round, dense twelve-plait cord no thicker than a goose quill.
Five hundred arm-lengths down the gallery, Yan Zhiqiu walked backward along the bronze rails, her hands guiding the traveling tension carriage. The carriage rolled on four flanged bronze wheels, carrying a counterweighted swinging weight that kept an unvarying tension of forty pounds upon the emerging line. Her dark eyes were fixed on the tension pointer, her small, scarred hands making tiny shifts to the brake-screw whenever the line threatened to surge.
“Tension forty pounds!” Yan Zhiqiu called out, her voice ringing clear and triumphant above the clockwork clatter. “The braid is tight! Twelve picks to the inch! The star-silver is centered in the core!”
