As the first amber sphere moved twenty paces down the central current of the Grand Silt Canal, Yan Zhiqiu dropped the granite steps to the water’s edge.
Her movements were graceful and unrushed, measured against the slow rhythm of the underground tides. Her dark silk robes, hemmed with the silver wave-patterns of the Yan-Luo dynasty, rustled softly against the cold dark rock cut stone blocks. The silk was stained with the dry salt of three months of flight, but its weave remained tight, dyed with the deep indigo of marsh-plants that no longer grew under the sun.
In her left hand, she cradled the second lantern—a broad six-sided frame woven from pale green winter bamboo, sheathed in semi-clear thick parchment made from beaten fish-bladder and bleached parchment.
On the six facets of the thick parchment skin, she had inscribed the old family seals of the matriarchs of the Yan-Luo line.
At the center rested the royal cipher of Empress Yan Huaisu. A stylized river gull soaring above a broken wave, rendered in vermilion ink mixed with crushed red stone. Beneath it were the names of seventy-four ages of women who had ruled the marsh kingdoms and coastal cities before the great deluge. Queens who had opened granaries during the droughts, mothers who had stitched sea-cloaks for drowned sailors, and daughters who had perished in the high sieges when the dikes collapsed.
