A chart drawn in the morning light can be surveyed by the eye. A chart etched in the deep pit can only be read through the tears of the map maker.
In the lamplit office of the Guild of Sounders in Entry hall 912, the amber solvent prepared from the four epoch-silts had completed ninety-nine percent of its sacred work. Across the broad expanse of the giant stone Master Silt Plate, the black dark rock slab shone with breathtaking stone-built clarity. Thirty thousand gold-inlaid stars gleamed under the whale-oil lanterns, marking every sky bright light of the First Era. The silver map point lines linking the thirty-six star-patterns stretched across the stone with unbending sharp-angled care. The deep-water sounding contours along the outer edge were as crisp and sharp as the day they were struck with the diamond lapidary drill.
Yet at the exact sharp-angled center of the table—directly over the three-inch circular depression that depicted the Well of Genesis—a stubborn, iron-hard stone scab refused to yield.
It was a rough, circular crust of purplish-gray stone, half an inch thick and three inches across. The amber solvent had pooled harmlessly around its scalloped edges, beading up like water on oily canvas without softening a single tiny grain of its dense matrix. It sat upon the heart of the chart like an unbending clouded eye over the eye of the cosmos, fully hiding the master valve sequences and the main starting formulas of the thousandth tier.
