The thirty-sixth hour of nonstop running brought a strange, heavy clarity to Qiao Ming’s thoughts.
He no longer heard the separate sounds of the House—the roar of the distant water-mills, the scrape of Yan Zhiqiu’s boots, or the dry rattle of the void-locusts in the ceiling chimney pipes. All of it had dissolved into a single, pulsing continuum of shaking that rang directly through the soles of his bare feet. The pale limestone flags of Entry hall 355 were cold, but beneath the chill he could feel the huge, sleeping mass of forty thousand tons of bedrock, anchoring his knees with every stride.
His left arm was mottled with dark purple bruising where the rawhide straps of the chest-harness had ground into his chest muscle muscles. The cut on his forearm had dried to a dark, tar-like crust along its edges, but from the center of the wound, a nonstop, sluggish trickle of dark salt-blood continued to feed the drain tube. The blood was darker now, thickened by dehydration and the cold stone draft, dripping with the slow, steady persistence of oil from an ancient lamp.
Every heartbeat sent a dull, throbbing ache through his temples. His vision was narrowed to a bright circular tunnel four paces wide: the stone floor, the glowing silver bead, and the tuned rim of the bone ladle. For thirty-six hours, his eyes had not looked up into the darkness. They had stayed locked upon the seam between the flags, tracking the micro-fractures in the…
