The walls did not echo their voices; they answered them.
Entry hall 808 was a long, narrow gallery five hundred paces in length, flanked on either side by sheer walls of crystal-clear frost that rose thirty arm-lengths to a vaulted ceiling of dark hard black rock. Cut into the face of the ice walls, arranged in regular rows that stretched from floor to top stone ledge, were forty thousand small, sound resonators. Fluted niches three inches across, each carved in the shape of an open lotus flower.
When Qiao Ming’s bare feet crossed the bronze doorstep of the gallery, the soft slap of his skin against the stone did not die away into silence. The sound entered the nearest lotus niches, rang within their crystal-clear cavities, and emerged as a low, musical chime that passed from niche to niche down the entire length of the hall.
Within seconds, the entire gallery was singing.
It was a vast, harmonized chord—a deep, ringing murmur shaking at thirty-two point four cycles per second, the deepest hum of the sub-bass register. The air inside the gallery pulsed with the note, shaking through the fabric of their clothes and setting up a sympathetic hum in the hollow bone styluses at Qiao Ming’s belt.
