The final twenty paces of the raised stone road brought Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu to the edge of the Sovereign’s innermost dais. There, the quicksilver lake lapped against the sheer black glass foundation of the throne.
Here, in Entry hall 873, the sky stillness was so deep that the falling of a single hair would have rang like a struck zither. The liquid silver moat, one thousand eight hundred and eighty arm-lengths in outer rim, surrounded the central island of star-black glass like an iron-hard moat of molten mirrors. Its water’s skin was huge—nearly five hundred millinewtons per meter—giving the liquid metal a heavy, thick, sticky balance that resisted even the violent air currents displaced by the Sovereign’s huge lungs. It didn’t ripple when trodden near. It lay as heavy and unbending as a sheet of poured armor.
Qiao Ming stood at the end of the hypersthene raised stone road, his bare toes curling over the margin where the black bridge met the raised jade platform of the throne.
The contrast between the materials was breathtaking. The bridge was jet-black hypersthene, carved with the tiny ideograms of the First Law. The dais was pale green jade, glowing with a soft, semi-clear emerald soft glow. And surrounding them both was the unbending, liquid silver mirror of the quicksilver lake. They reflected the millions of ceiling diamonds in a dazzling, unbroken dome of starlight. The glow seemed to float between them, dissolving the boundaries between floor, water, and sky into an…
