The sound of a chisel striking stone echoed from the western alcoves of Entry hall 029 with the sharp, jarring violence of a desecration.
It was the fourth hour after midday. In the quiet hours between food distributions, when most of the refugee families were resting upon their straw pallets, a group of five displaced hired blades had entered the Gallery of the Thousand Witnesses. A massive vaulted row of stone pillars connecting the twenty-ninth and thirtieth entry halls.
The row of stone pillars was forty paces wide and two hundred paces long, flanked on either side by forty-four deeply recessed niches carved from dark green-wave marble. Within each niche sat a life-sized effigy of an ancient water mapper or Wave-Scribe, depicted in solemn contemplation. Some held folding brass star wheels. Others held heavy sounding leads or unrolled scrolls of lead foil. Their clothes were rendered in cascading folds of stone-hard drapery that seemed to ripple like water frozen in mid-flow.
The hired blades had stopped before Statue #0044: an effigy carved from pale, crystal-clear pale limestone, depicting an elder scribe seated cross-legged with an unfolded bronze sounding chart resting upon his knees. His stone-hard eyes were turned toward the ceiling vaults in eternal vigilance, his stone fingers curled gently around a finely detailed eight-sided plumb-bob.
