Across the pale green jade of Entry hall 884, Qiao Ming began the unrolling of the great chart that had occupied thirty years of his solitary life.
The scroll was sixty feet in length, made from the cured hides of deep-water rays that had lived in the lightless trenches of the South. Stiffened with boiled linseed oil, sanded with fiery foam-stone, and bordered with green sea-silk, the thick parchment had endured three decades of salt damp, freezing spray, and coal-oil smoke without cracking or rotting. It smelled of animal fat, pine pitch, and old iron gall-ink. The signed name aroma of a lifetime spent recording the measurements of a drowned world. The parchment was thick, heavy, and cool, possessing the stringy toughness of boiled leather, yet flexible enough to lie flat upon the polished stone without buckling.
He knelt at the edge of the Sovereign’s dark rock footstool, his bare knees cold against the stone polish of the jade. His rough, salt-calloused hands moved with the deliberate respect of a priest laying out a sacred shroud. He placed the heavy head-roller—a six-inch metal tube of stone-hard pear-wood bound in beaten copper—against the curb of the Heart-Vein Sluice.
Yan Zhiqiu knelt beside him, taking the western edge of the thick parchment to keep it from curling against the floor. Her fingertips traced the dark green sea-silk border, feeling the fine, tight stitches that had kept the edges from fraying through thirty years of damp wandering.
