The stone folds of the First Scroll-keeper’s mantle hung from forty arm-lengths overhead, cascading down the statue’s curved flanks in ribbed sheets of dark green jade and sea-limestone. Beneath that overhang lay a dry, sheltered hollow twenty paces broad, protected from the cold ceiling drip and the cross-drafts of the western nave.
Three hundred and twenty refugees—the elder weavers of the southern salt-pans, nursing mothers, and thirty small children wrapped in patched kelp blankets—lay huddled within the recessed shadow.
The air under the drape was dense and warm with the smell of wet wool, dried cod, and old sheepskin. A single iron fire bowl, banked with crushed olive-stones to prevent telltale smoke, cast an amber glow across the limestone flags. In that low light, the faces of the children were pale and round, their eyes wide as they listened to the dull, rhythmic thudding of Conclave picks striking the stone floor three halls away.
Yan Zhiqiu knelt near the outer hem of the carved stone cloak. Her notched hook-blade rested across her knees, its steel edge wiped clean with mutton grease. Beside her, forty militia archers sat with their backs against the statue’s stone base, their horn bows unstrung to save the sinew from the humid air, their bone-tipped arrows laid out across strips of dry lambskin.
