It was during the fourth watch of the artificial night. Just then, the oil lamps along the high roof ledges of the residential tier had been trimmed down to blue pilot flames, that the stone began to sing.
Qiao Ming lay upon his folded sheepskin mat in the land-mapper’s cubicle of Entry hall 915, his boots discarded in the corner, his bare feet uncovered in the cool draft that drifted through the high window row slits. He hadn’t been asleep. For forty years, through seven major floods and thirty seasonal inundations, he had trained his senses to read the subtle variations of deep water pressure through the soles of his feet. To an ordinary man, a floor of dressed granite was merely an unbending surface upon which to walk or sleep. To Qiao Ming, it was a sound chest muscle, a vast slate upon which the underground currents wrote their intentions in tiny shakes. He had been lying in the dark, watching the thin crusts of dry salt along the seams of his leather harness flake away as the humidity climbed.
Tonight, the floor had ceased to be an inert mass of limestone. It had become an active resonator. It hummed with a nonstop, low-hum chord that rang directly in the bone marrow of his heels. It shook at a pitch that caused the copper buckles on his harness hanging from the wall-peg to tinkle softly in the dark like tiny silver coins shaken in an earthen jar.
