Across the tiered rows of stone pillars of Entry halls 092 through 096, the vast sea of lanterns had completed its first outward circuit of the Grand Cross-hall.
The amber glow reflected from the mica rosettes eighty deep-water lengths overhead bathed the stone terraces in a soft, twilight clarity. Three million mortals sat upon the banded limestone benches in quiet contemplation, their low murmurs dying away into the rhythmic lap of warm water against the marble weirs. The damp chill of the underground air had vanished, replaced by the sweet, dry warmth of ten thousand animal fat wicks and forty-eight thousand banked hearths.
Then, from a high granite rostrum overlooking the water gate of Entry hall 094, a sound emerged.
It was a single, pure musical tone—clear, piercing, and ancient as the first breaking wave upon the ancient shores of the world.
The sound came from an old blind musician named Master Bian, from the drowned coastal province of Donghai. He stood upon the stone rostrum wearing a frayed, salt-bleached robe of hemp, his watery, sightless eyes turned toward the floating lights. In his weathered, arthritic fingers he held an ancient transverse flute carved from the bleached rib of a deep-sea baleen giant beast, fished from the Bohai depths three ages before his birth.
