The dome was built from three thousand six-sided blocks of stellar ice, fitted together without a single grain of mortar.
It soared one hundred and sixty paces across the ceiling of Entry hall 803, rising to a central six-sided keystone that was five arm-lengths in width. The ice was not see-through like the lenses of the High window. It was a solid, milk-white substance that looked like polished mutton-fat jade, dense enough to absorb the light of their animal fat lantern and scatter it in a soft, pearl-like radiance that removed all shadows from the floor.
Qiao Ming halted in the center of the round hall. His bare feet stood upon a circular bronze plate four paces across, engraved with the sixty-four hexagrams of the ancient Book of Changes.
He looked up, his grey eyes tracing the linked seams of the dome. Each six-sided block was cut with a raised three-inch tongue along three of its facets, and a corresponding three-inch groove along the other three. That created a self-locking honeycomb structure that grew stronger as the weight of the mountain pressed down upon its crown.
“No mortar,” Qiao Ming observed, his voice carrying the deep, appreciative respect of a builder inspecting the work of an elder guild. “Not a scrape of lime or lead. The blocks are held together by atom-deep holding power. When two surfaces of glass-fused ice are ground perfectly flat and brought together under total zero, the molecules weld across the joint. The three thousand blocks…
