The Silt-Cutter’s Yard in Entry hall 907 was a vast, sunken terrace carved into a natural shelf of banded green snake-like, where for eight hundred years the stone-salvagers had dragged up the drowned carvings of the lower levels to scrub them free of black scale and hardened worm-tubes. The air here was bitter and rank with the stench of stale mud, rotting marsh-grass, and the sour chemical pungency of the pickling salt water used to dissolve limestone crusts from ancient stone carvings.
Black water was already swirling across the snake-like flags, four inches deep, lapping against the stone curbs with a rhythmic, sucking slap. The water was icy cold. It carried ribbons of oily soot from the flooded water chutes below. Qiao Ming’s bare feet splashed through the rising film as he walked into the yard, leaving brief, clean wakes that were instantly swallowed by the dark tide.
At the far end of the terrace, knee-deep in the rising salt water, an old man was struggling with a block-and-tackle lashed to a tripod of rusted iron poles. He wore a ragged tunic of greased sheepskin, his thin, bird-like legs bare and purple with the cold, his white hair plastered to his skull by the spray. He was heaving on a wet hemp rope, his breath tearing from his throat in ragged, whistling sobs, yet the heavy load beneath the tripod did not budge an inch.
