The calfskin parchment was thirty arm-lengths long, five arm-lengths wide, and smelled of dried sea-lavender, rusted red stone, and the smoke of pine-soot ink.
Qiao Ming moved along the eastern edge of the Master Table, his bare feet sliding silently across the mirror-polished dark rock floor. In his hands he held two heavy tube-shaped rollers of sea-bronze, each weighing twenty pounds, engraved with the degrees of the lunar zodiac. With slow, rhythmic movements, he unrolled the great parchment across the twelve-arm-length table, smoothing out the stiff, amber-tinted thick parchment with the calloused palms of his hands.
As the scroll flattened beneath the bronze weights, the massive stonework of the House revealed itself in breathtaking sharp-angled fidelity.
Every arch, row of stone pillars, drain tube, drainage grate, and underground water tank between Entry halls 001 and 300 had been recorded in careful Chinese vermilion, lamp-black, and ground lapis lazuli. But this was not merely a static drawing of stone. The ink used by the ancient land-mappers had been ground with crushed mother-of-pearl and crystal-clear sea-mica, suspended in distilled rainwater drawn from the lips of the Seventh Patriarch. Through a subtle, ringing coupling with the surrounding Drowned Dao, the lines on the thick parchment shone with faint, living light. Where water was rising in the outer halls, the drawn channels darkened to the deep hue of indigo. Where drainage gates were dry, the parchment held the pale, chalky gray of sun-bleached bone.
