The footsteps sounded like the murmur of an unending surf rolling across gravel.
Through the great arched portal between Entry hall 002 and Entry hall 003, the human tide poured without pause. It had been seven hours since the outer sky died. The cold from the put out high sky had settled deep into the upper galleries of the Hall, driving millions of freezing souls downward along the ancient drainage avenues.
They came in unending columns: families carrying wicker baskets bound with hemp rope, elders leaning upon staves of dried kelp-stalk, mothers holding infants beneath layers of quilted rags stiffened with salt-frost. Their eyes were wide, glassy with the hollow daze of people who had watched their world burn to black cinders and freeze into silence within the span of a single afternoon.
Qiao Ming stood atop the raised land-mapper’s platform at the midpoint of the hall. The platform was a squared slab of white Pentelic marble, three paces wide, perched six arm-lengths above the floor flags upon four slender bronze pillars that looked like the legs of a water-strider.
From this vantage, his grey eyes swept across the vast, moving mass of humanity. Below him, the passage was forty paces wide. It was flanked by alternating statues of the Ancient Navigators, their giant stone faces tilted downward in calm, eternal contemplation of the moving stream.
