The sky vault above Entry hall 877 was a fine, detailed diagram of pre-deluge astronomy, frozen in diamonds and star-black glass.
Qiao Ming lifted the Folded brass star-compass from its dark rock base, holding the circular housing with both hands before his chest. The instrument had belonged to his teacher, Old Master Lu, and to his teacher’s teacher before him. Its geared circles and reticulated rete plates were worn down by eighty years of salt spray, grease, and thumb-rubbing, yet the engravings remained razor-sharp. On the surface of its graduated limb, thirty-six star-patterns of the ancient hemisphere were engraved in silver inlay, each star marked with a tiny punch-mark no larger than a grain of sand.
He remembered the winter night thirty years ago in the flooded pump-hall when Old Master Lu had pressed the heavy brass disc into his young, frostbitten hands. An instrument is only as honest as the eye behind the peep-sight, the old land-mapper had whispered through cracked lips as the cold floodwaters rose around their knees. A sect master will lie to gain an army. An emperor will lie to keep a crown. But the star compass can’t lie. If the weighted drop-line hangs two degrees off the upright, the wall will fall, no matter how many prayers are chanted over the mortar. The words had remained burned into Qiao Ming’s mind through every fathom of dark water he had sounded since that night. In every drowned cloister, in every pitch-black drain tube where the…
