The descent of the focused sound wave from the high ceiling was a phenomenon that surpassed the visual limits of mortal sight.
Seventy arm-lengths above the floor of Entry hall 150, the sound wave did not move as invisible air. Tightly packed by four hundred and eighty reflections between the nine thousand eight hundred and forty bronze bells, the air had achieved a nearby thickness five times greater than sea-level air. It dropped through the lightless vault as an inverted cone of pure, shimmering refractive light—a swirling vortex of aligned sound that bent the torchlight into strange, nested rings of violet and emerald.
Yan Zhiqiu lay pinned flat against the Sixth Tie-Beam, her teeth grinding hard into the dried sea-sponge clenched in her jaws.
Even with her ears plugged with animal fat-soaked silk, the sheer physical shifted weight of the dropping wave pressed against her shoulder-blades with the weight of an iron slab. Beside her, young Ah Shan squeezed his eyes shut, his hands clamped over the lambskin-wrapped limbs of his composite bow. He watched through squeezed eyelids the terrifying spectacle of the air itself turning into a solid, singing piston.
The forty tie-beams groaned all at once.
The stone-hard cedar, seasoned by three thousand years of Atlantic salt water, held the staggering strain without splintering. Designed by ancient naval master builders who had built the keels of epoch-crossing arks, the beams bent four inches at their centers, absorbing the lateral moving thrust and transmitting the shaking harmlessly down the…
