The burn of potion-made acid does not heal with tea and philosophy.
In the shadowed gallery thirty arm-lengths above the floor of Entry hall 120, Qiao Ming knelt behind a pierced low roof wall of dark phonolite, his oilskin coat pulled tight around his shoulders. Below him, in the flooded nave where the shattered stalactites of the White Tiger lay half-sunk in milky salt water, a solitary figure moved through the gloom.
It was Ji Mingchuan.
The Scholar had bandaged his chemical burns with strips of yellow spider-silk torn from his inner coat, binding his chest and right forearm tight against the throbbing pain. His ivory robes were ruined, streaked with black burning acid soot and gray intake-silt, but his bearing remained stiff. It was driven by a wild, feverish driving force that disregarded the agony of his flesh.
He stood before the stone base of a backup monument: the Scribe of the Seven Moons, a seated figure carved from dark green soapstone whose stone hands held an unrolled scroll of sky laws.
From his vantage point thirty arm-lengths above the floor, Qiao Ming watched every tremor of the intruder’s limbs. The high gallery was paved with narrow slabs of dark hard speckled rock, supported by arched stone wall-brackets that thrust out from the eastern high window row wall like the ribs of an upturned ship. The air up here was thin and cold, drafty with the faint, whistling suction of the upper air-flow shafts that connected this sector to…
