They stood before the first giant statue of the Third Epoch at the fourth hour of their march.
It didn’t sit upon a throne, nor did it carry the weapons or scepters of the martial emperors whose monuments populated the lower porticos. The statue was eighty arm-lengths tall, carved from a single seamless mass of glass-fused stellar ice that possessed the deep, semi-clear hue of a midwinter twilight sky. It stood with its head bowed slightly forward, its massive stone-hard hands folded across its solar nerve web in the ancient gesture of universal payback.
Its clothes were carved in long, tubular pleats that cascaded down its calves like frozen waterfalls, pooling around a stone stand of unpolished black granite that rose four paces above the floor of Entry hall 756. But it was the face that held Qiao Ming’s gaze.
The features were neither young nor old, neither masculine nor feminine. The brow was wide and smooth as a polished slate. The eyes were closed in deep, rock-steady peace. And the sculpted lips were parted by the width of a knife-blade, as though the figure had begun to pronounce a single, final syllable of farewell when the frost overtook its blood.
