The hall between Entry halls 318 and 320 groaned with the sound of breaking bone.
It wasn’t mortal bone, but the deep, stone agony of two thousand tons of load-bearing pale limestone being crushed by its own unbraced weight. Along the high vault of the Third Cloister, seventy paces above the damp flat stone slabs, hairline fractures were opening along the bed-joints of the stone beams, tracing zig-zag patterns through the carved friezes of the ancient tidal registers like jagged black lightning.
With every shudder of the foundation keel, a rain of sharp stone chips and fine grey dark rock dust cascaded down from the darkness. It rattled against Qiao Ming’s stiff oilskin coat like dried beans poured upon a drumhead.
He walked at the head of the supply column, carrying two heavy copper casks of the silver ink suspended from a shoulder yoke of cured ash. Each cask held twelve royal gallons of the thick, sticky silt-amber slurry, their cast bronze bail-handles creaking against the iron hooks of the yoke. His bare feet moved with silent, prehensile certainty over the cracked stone floor. His calloused soles tested the balance of every slab before committing his full weight.
Behind him, thirty able-bodied refugee volunteers from the Low Cisterns followed in single file, each pair carrying a slung cask between them on ash poles, their breath coming in short, frightened gasps. At the rear walked Yan Zhiqiu, her broken slate cradled across her chest, her dark eyes scanning the shifting shadows…
