The second station of the safe hall was carved from semi-clear rose-veined marble quarried from the deep-sea reefs of an unrecorded cosmos, possessing a warm, flesh-like luminosity that seemed to drink the emerald beam of the diving bell and return it as a soft, amber blush that made the surrounding water glow like dawn upon an unplowed snowfield.
Qiao Ming and Yan Zhiqiu stood at the base of the stone base, thirty arm-lengths beneath the fingertips of the two huge hands.
The statue did not depict lovers locked in embrace, nor a mother suckling a child, nor an emperor distributing grain to his subjects. It depicted two huge, beautifully rendered hands—eighty arm-lengths from the wrists to the fingernails—rising from the coarse grey rock floor, their palms cupped together in the gesture of a gardener lifting water to a wilting seedling. But separated by a deliberate gap of three paces between the fingertips. The marble was carved with body fidelity so deep that the veins across the backs of the hands appeared to pulse with warm blood beneath the stone skin. The whorls of the huge fingerprints were engraved with tiny trigrams of the ancient water-system registers.
Within that open, unconstrained sphere of water drifted the Golden Void-Vines.
