The click that echoed through the Vault of Absolute Zero was the sound of ten thousand years of arrested driving force re-entering the physical universe.
It began within the six-sided shaft of the newly joined scepter. The cold-drawn star-fallen iron, having accepted the hardened shale of the Broken Slate back into its crown, sent an immediate high-pressure impulse down through the water-lily throne. Beneath the cobalt terrace, three deep-water lengths of solid crystal shuddered as sixty massive clockwork linkages of drawn glowing bronze disengaged their safety pawls.
The disengagement rolled through the twelve tiers of the dais in a dropping cascade of metal strikes. Each tier possessed its own series of locking cams, forged from star-iron alloys that had resisted warping under sixty mountain-crushing pressure of ancient pressure. As each cam tripped, a deep, ringing hum—shaking at the exact sixty-four Hertz deepest tone of the bottom spine-beam—surged outward into the see-through star-sapphire floor.
Qiao Ming stood with his bare feet firmly planted upon the eleventh step. Through the oiled leather of his knee pads and the animal fat-coated calluses of his soles, he felt the huge transfer of potential energy into moving motion.
“The bottom spine-beam is unhooking its moorings,” Qiao Ming said. His voice carrying the was calm power of an old river-pilot who had felt the timbers of a hundred barges groan beneath the spring freshet. “When an ark rests in dry dock for ten thousand years, the hull takes a set. The timbers stiffen, the caulking crystallizes…
