In Entry hall 112, known in the ancient stone-built registers as the Portico of the Sunken Lyre, the water in the central basin was three deep-water lengths deep and still as a block of green black glass.
Here, surrounded by slender, fluted columns of white alabaster that rose forty arm-lengths to a vaulted ceiling painted with aquatic swallows, sat Statue 0112. The giant statue was thirty arm-lengths tall, sculpted from pale rose-tinted marble, depicting a high-born scholar in the flowing, wide-sleeved robes of the Third Dynasty. In his lap he cradled a seven-stringed stone guqin, its strings carved from single filaments of white green jade no thicker than horsehair. For ten thousand years, the statue had sat with its stone head bowed toward the water, a solitary monument to the poetry of a continent that had slid into the deep pit in a single night.
As the amber light of the Grand Awakening filled the roofed porch, the surface of the pool shivered with nested ripples that matched the rhythmic pulse of the Great Bell. The sound deep ring traveling through the alabaster columns set the green jade strings shaking with a high, crystal-clear shimmer that sounded like wind passing through pine needles.
