For ten thousand nonstop years, the eyes of the First Sovereign had remained closed against the ruin of the drowned world.
Now, in the total sound null of Entry hall 892, eight hundred arm-lengths above the green jade dais, the stone-hard eyelids of the huge giant statue began to part.
There was no sound of fracturing granite, no shower of stone dust, and no violent shudder along the earth-shaking joints of the dark rock throne. The black star-black glass of his huge face—thirty arm-lengths wide from cheekbone to cheekbone, chiseled with the austere exact shape of an elder great realm—softened with the fluid grace of ancient glacier ice warming under a high-sky dawn. Along the curved margins of his long, stone-hard eyelids, a razor-thin line of blinding violet fire appeared, stretching two arm-lengths from corner to corner like the first arc of dawn over an empty ocean.
Qiao Ming stood perfectly motionless beside the Heart-Vein Sluice, his bare feet planted side by side upon the warm jade pavers. He tilted his weathered head back, his neck muscles corded and taut as his grey eyes looked directly up into the towering gloom of the vault.
He didn’t shield his brow with his arm. He didn’t squint against the sudden radiance. A map maker who had spent three decades sounding lightless drain pits with lead and cord, reading depth markings by the scarred touch of his fingertips in pitch-black water, had no terror of light. To a land-mapper, light was simply the…
