The jagged fracture margin between the scepter’s socket and the Broken Slate was a linked puzzle carved by total violence.
To the untrained eye of an uninitiated scavenger, the broken neck of the star-fallen iron shaft appeared merely as a ruined stump, cut beyond recovery by an ancient chisel blow. But under the focused beam of Yan Zhiqiu’s storm lantern, every tiny facet told a story of deliberate, calculated metalworking cleavage.
Qiao Ming knelt on the dark cobalt flags of the twelfth step, his bare knees padded from the zero-point floor by a double-folded pad of oiled seal-leather. His broad, calloused hands moved with the unrushed care of an instrument maker dressing a brass compass needle. His bare feet, planted behind him on the cobalt flags, felt the world-size thickness of the bottom spine-beam seventy-two deep-water lengths below.
From his wooden tool kit, he selected a flat scraper fashioned from boiled narwhal horn. Horn was softer than star-fallen iron and could not scratch the crystal-clear lattice of the socket. But it was stiff enough to dislodge the microscopically thin glaze of empty pocket frost that coated the thirty-two fracture facets. Beside the scraper lay a swatch of clean lamb’s wool soaked in clarified pine resin, an ancient river-pilot’s solvent used to lift oily films without leaving chemical residue upon delicate brass gears.
