At the far end of the Carrara raised stone road rose the final flight of steps. A grand semicircle of fifty polished green marble risers that climbed to the High Dais of the Central Council. This was the one-thousandth step of the Grand Stairs, the highest point of human assembly in the entire stonework of the Drowned Dao.
Qiao Ming placed his bare right foot upon step nine hundred and fifty-one. The green snake-like stone was cold, smooth as oiled jade, free of the rotten-egg soot that caked the lower tiers. Here. There, the ancient council of patriarchs had once deliberated the cycles of the Great Flooding, the stonework kept its solemn, timeless dignity despite the iron war-machines that crowded the space above.
In the hundreds of years before the flood, the ascent of these final fifty steps was known as the Pilgrimage of the Unbroken Water. Every novice who sought the title of Fathom-Scribe was needed to climb from the roofed porch to this high platform carrying a shallow celadon bowl filled to the brim with sea-salt water. If a single droplet spilled upon the marble, the tester was sent back to the lower water tanks for another three winters of study. The test had not been a display of acrobatic agility. It had been an education in centering the spirit so fully that the movement of the body became impossible to tell apart from the flow of a calm stream.
