The threshold of Entry hall 100 did not surrender its silence easily.
Qiao Ming stood at the boundary where the polished dark rock flags of the outer rows of stone pillars ended in a jagged doorstep of milk-white halite. For three hundred seasons, his bare feet had known the exact texture of every flat stone slab between the intake water tanks and the ninety-ninth portal. The smooth, cool slip of water-worn pale limestone, the coarse bite of river-sand embedded in high-pressure mortar. The greasy film left by low-tide algae. Here, however, the stone ended. The doorstep beneath his splayed toes was crystal-clear, formed from countless thousands of paper-thin salt sheets that crackled like dry eggshells under the slightest shift of his weight.
He leaned forward, adjusting the oiled rawhide harness across his shoulders. From the harness hung his seasoned wooden ruler, two bone-awls bound in copper wire, the horn flask of sheep fat, and the eight-cut-lead sinker. The weight was familiar, an anchor against the shifting air currents that drifted through the open archway.
Behind him lay the known world of the Ark: two miles of orderly rows of stone pillars, five hundred cut stone water tanks, and ten thousand silent judges whose stone stands he had scrubbed clean of crust with his boar-bristle brush. Before him, the star-jade gates stood half-parted, revealing a transverse nave that sloped steeply downward into an unmapped dusk.
