The sounding of the royal hum needed the silence of a tomb and the patience of a deep-sea leadsman.
Qiao Ming uncoiled the Knotted Horsehair Sounding Line with careful grace, letting six arm-lengths of the black braided stallion-hair fall across his forearm. The horsehair was stiff with salt, animal fat, and whale fat, preserved through decades of river surveys in the mountain tributaries. The lead line-weight—eight-sided, heavy, and cold as a river-bed boulder—hung motionless beside the six-sided shaft of the star-fallen iron scepter.
“The scepter is hollow,” Qiao Ming observed, his horn metal pen tracing a narrow sound slit cut into the underside of the shaft. “It is an organ pipe, record-keeper Yan. An eight-arm-length organ pipe designed to resonate at the exact deepest tone of the ship’s keel. When the Ark moved through the stellar currents, the pilot knew the speed and trim of the vessel by the hum of this rod.”
He leaned closer to the slit, inspecting its inside with the focused eye of a sound engineer.
Inside the hollow shaft, suspended along the central axis by tiny spider-web wires of drawn white-gold, was a series of twelve graduated bronze tuning forks. Each fork was tuned to a specific ringing interval, designed to amplify the ground-wave shakes rising from the main ballast tanks sixty deep-water lengths below.
