The animal fat in the horn cup had stone-hard into something as brittle as chalk.
Qiao Ming pressed the horn spoon into the center of the rendered fat. Then, the surface did not yield with the smooth, buttery rule-following of sea-animal fat. It split with a dry snap, flaking into semi-clear white shards that scattered across the frosted flat stone slabs like fish scales.
“Too cold for mountain sheep,” Qiao Ming said, his voice flat in the dead air of Entry hall 760.
He stood barefoot at the edge of the great transverse deep gap. The floor of dark hard black rock ended here, cleanly cut as if split by a titanic stone-saw, opening into a deep pit seventy paces across. Below the lip, nothing could be seen except the dense, velvet indigo of total distance, through which faint level bands of cyan frost hung suspended like ribbons of drowned silk.
Yan Zhiqiu set her lantern upon an overturned granite cut stone. She unclasped a small leather flask from the underside of her courier satchel.
“Try the narwhal oil,” she suggested, handing the cold flask to him. “The outer whalers of the Frozen Marches mix it with pine resin and rendered seal blubber to keep their harpoon swivels turning in the midwinter drift. It will not crystalize until the liquid silver itself freezes solid.”
