At the northern terminus of the Great Aqueduct, where Entry hall 035 met the high underground castle walls of the land-wide keel, stood the massive spout known as the Patriarch’s Lip.
Carved from a single spur of black amphibolite fifty arm-lengths high, the spout was shaped in the likeness of an ancient Daoist water mapper whose weathered, stoic face gazed down upon the northern courtyards. His stone lips were parted in a calm, eternal breath out, designed to discharge pure, ice-cold meltwater drawn from ancient ice-slow underground water beds trapped deep beneath the frozen bedrock of the mountains.
For seven days, however, the Patriarch’s Lip had been weeping only a thin, murky trickle of discolored water. In the northern courtyards—Entry halls 036 through 080—over four million refugees had only stale water from the backup drain pits to drink, tasting of sulfur and dead algae. Infant fevers were beginning to rise, and the clan leaders had sent urgent messengers to the central writing hall.
The sheer upright scale of the monolith was humbling. From the dry basin floor, sixty deep-water lengths of sheer black rock soared into the gloomy heights where the ancient masons had left heavy bronze eyebolts and stone foot-bosses anchored into the cliff face. Below the mouth lay a huge plunge-basin sixty paces wide, surrounded by stepped cut stone terraces where the water marshals waited with empty buckets and measuring sticks.
