The sound that stopped Qiao Ming in Entry hall 108 was a sound he had never heard in three hundred seasons of mapmaking.
It wasn’t the drip of water drops falling from a ceiling rosette. It wasn’t the hollow splash of a dislodged stalactite plunging into the sump. It was a sharp, persistent hiss—the violent chemical hiss of cold liquid striking hot stone, followed by a faint, wet sizzle that rose and fell in rhythmic three-second pulses.
He halted upon the narrow walkway of dark flaky rock that skirted the western outer edge of the hall. The water in the central basin was pitch-black, still as black glass, reflecting the pale emerald soft glow of the halite ribs overhead. The air was colder here than in the Avenue of Teachers, stripped of all earth-heat warmth. It smelled intensely of packed lime, scorched chalk, and the sour, bitter-salt tang of skin-burning potash.
He raised his horn lantern, turning the beam toward an arched niche carved into the northern wall six arm-lengths above the water level.
Within the niche sat the Seventh Nun of the Pearl Deep pit.
The statue was carved from a single block of semi-clear white alabaster, four arm-lengths tall from stone base to crown. She wore the monastic robes of the Pearl Sisterhood—deep, layered cowls that framed a face of sublime, youthful austerity. Her stone hands were folded across her breast, holding a string of eighty-one ball-shaped beads carved from stone-hard ocean-foam.
