The Causeway of the First Law was carved from a single six-sided monolith of dark hypersthene. He projected across the quicksilver lake like a jet-black finger pointing at the heart of creation.
Qiao Ming stepped onto the bridge, his bare soles making immediate, intimate contact with the carved surface. The stone was not flat. It was engraved from end to end with tens of thousands of tiny ideograms, cut to a depth of one point a tiny fraction of an inch by diamond-tipped burins during the first century of the Great Flooding. The characters were so small that fifty of them could be covered by the palm of a hand. But each stroke was sharp, unbending, and filled with a faint, silvery soft glow that came from the quicksilver below.
The texture underfoot was extraordinary. The carved grooves provided an unbending, non-slip purchase that held the animal fat-treated skin of his feet like the cleats of a mariner’s boot. He could feel the shape of the ancient words through his arches: the radicals for water, weight, stone, and duration pressing into his calluses with physical clarity. Every step was an act of tactile reading, his soles absorbing the mathematics of the First Epoch through the simple friction of his stride.
