Master Mason Lu sat upon a simple cube of unpolished gray granite, three feet above the dry flags of Entry hall 128.
Unlike the massive, towering giant statues of the outer porticos, the statue of the ancient mason was life-sized—no taller than Qiao Ming himself. He was depicted as an elderly man with broad, heavy shoulders, thick wrists, and a face worn into deep, patient creases by seventy years of exposure to quarry dust and cold winds.
He wore a plain linen tunic with sleeves rolled to the elbows, cinched at the waist by a wide leather apron that bore the carved pockets of his trade: an awl, a wooden ruler, and a compass. His bare feet, wide and calloused, rested flat upon the stone stand, their toes splayed exactly like the feet of the living land-mapper who stood before him.
In his left hand, the mason held a heavy eight-sided lead line-weight, its horsehair line looped three times around his thumb.
In his right hand, resting lightly across his thigh, he held the chisel.
It was eight inches long, eight-sided in cross-section, forged from a dark, rainbow-bright metal that held a faint, violet sheen beneath the yellow light of Qiao Ming’s lantern. The metal was not stone, nor was it ordinary iron. It was Primordial Sky-Iron, cold as interstellar void, its cutting edge ground to an edge so clean that it seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it.
