Seventy arm-lengths above the red stone floor, the air was warm, dry, and smelled of stone-hard cedar resin, ancient dust, and the sharp, wild scent of seabird guano.
Yan Zhiqiu lay prone upon the broad level surface of the Sixth Tie-Beam. The beam was four arm-lengths wide, carved from a single trunk of ancient sea-cedar that had absorbed salt and stone lime until the wood was as dense and unbending as black iron. Her body was wrapped in dark-dyed kelp-cloth that matched the deep shadows beneath the vaulting. Her notched hook-blade lay beside her hip, muffled in greasy rags. And her amber eyes looked down through a narrow gap between two huge bronze bells into the vast, twilight floor below.
To her left and right, spanning twenty parallel cedar beams across the width of the hall, forty refugee snipers were in position.
They lay motionless as carved stone gargoyles. Each hunter had bound his bow-limbs in strips of soft lambskin to eliminate the dry creak of bending horn. Their bowstrings were spun from twelve-strand silkworm gut soaked in mutton fat. And their arrows, tipped with sharpened bone wedges, were set ready across their left knuckles. A dozen storm petrels, roosting in the carved hollows of the ceiling stone wall-brackets above their heads, preened their feathers in quiet indifference, having accepted the scent of the silent hunters as part of the hall’s natural fauna.
