There is a silence that comes before the shattering of continents—a heavy, choking stillness where the air itself seems to freeze within the lungs.
On the sixteenth dawn of the siege, that stillness settled over the Hall of Ten Thousand Statues like an iron shroud.
High atop the sounding gallery of Entry hall 050—the supreme central chamber located three thousand arm-lengths directly beneath the mountain’s jagged capstone—Qiao Ming knelt on the cold dark rock platform. His bare feet were planted firmly upon the ancient foundation stones, his weathered hands steady as he held his sixty-fathom horsehair sounding line.
The line was no longer hanging slack. Suspended thirty arm-lengths above a tuned dial of planished black shale, the five-pound lead bob was shaking with a terrifying, nonstop hum that sounded like the anger of a trapped hornet. The braided horsehair cord was stretched taut as a bowstring, pulled two feet off true upright toward the northwest by a huge, unnatural gravity pull.
Beside him, the Folded brass star-compass sat unfolded upon a low slate tripod. Its aiming sights, fine-scale rings, and micro-air-pressure bellows were trembling in violent agitation, emitting sharp, metal chimes as the needles pegged against their stops.
The tracking data was world-ending. Forty-two million tons of refined star-fallen iron, brass armor plate, and harvested Dao-veins—the supreme flagship of the high sects, the Celestial Sovereign—had dropped through the boiling sulfur clouds. It was no longer cruising the upper stratus. It had brought its huge four-league keel to rest just one…
