Entry hall 321 had always been the quietest room in the outer rings of the House.
In the old surveying registers kept by the Seventh Mapmaker upon scrolls of cured sharkskin, the chamber was recorded as the Cloister of the Weeping Weavers. Arranged in three nested semicircles around a central pool of still salt water stood three hundred life-sized statues carved from pure, semi-clear white alabaster. They depicted the master silk-weavers of the Third Dynasty, the women who had spun the gossamer sea-silk that wrapped the corpses of the sovereigns before the great waters fell.
Their stone clothes had been carved with an impossible, breathtaking delicacy. The pleats of their sleeves were barely a quarter-inch thick, so thin that when the seasonal draft blew from the western angled slats, the marble drapery would vibrate with a faint, crystal-clear whisper like the rustling of dried autumn leaves. For two hundred years, Qiao Ming had come here at the turning of every third moon to check the salt-drainage around their stone stands. He knew them not as symbols or monuments, but as silent sisters who shared his solitude.
When Qiao Ming stepped through the northern portal, there was no whisper.
There was only a terrible, powdery stillness that smelled of burnt lime, stale sulfur, and cold vinegar.
