The figure that emerged from the shadows of the southern stairs was a ghost from a dying world.
Ji Mingchuan stood beneath the archway of the high balcony, his hands tucked neatly into the wide, stitched sleeves of his ivory spider-silk robes. To an untrained eye, the Scholar might have appeared as a sky immortal dropped from the highest palaces of the Upper Heavens. His hair was bound in a carved green jade hairpin, his stance was straight and high-born. A faint, pleasant perfume of sandalwood and bitter pine-resin radiated from his clothes.
Yet Qiao Ming’s eyes did not dwell upon the embroidery.
He saw the frayed hems of the ivory silk, dragging in the stone-dust, scorched black by the crushing force of an unsealed void-rift. He saw the Scholar’s gaunt, pale cheeks, hollowed by months of sleepless terror. The wild, feverish rotation of his double pupils, which spun within their irises like the uneven needles of a broken compass.
Beneath the Scholar’s heavy chest-panel, muffled by lead-foil lining, a tiny brass gyroscope was whirring in high-pitched, wild bursts. A clockwork rig struggling to calculate spatial map points in a safe hall that recognized no external heaven.
“A pleasant evening, land-mapper,” the Scholar said, his voice smooth, cultivated, and musical, carrying the practiced cadences of a royal courtier. “I trust your soundings have been fruitful?”
