Across all one hundred and four entry halls of the Ark of Ten Thousand Statues, the midnight vigil reached its calm, motionless balance.
The heat throughout the three-mile-long complex had steadied at exactly eighteen point two degrees. The heat-rising air currents, driven by the warm rising plume from the ten thousand floating lanterns and fed by the sweet downdrafts from the high aqueducts, circulated smoothly through every hall and gallery. The stale, choking damp that had plagued the refugee camps for months had been fully replaced by fresh, oxygen-rich air that smelled of mountain pine, river moss, and clean banded limestone stone.
Three million mortals lay sleeping upon the stone terraces.
They slept not with the twitching, fitful terror of refugees awaiting the next total breach, but with the deep, healing medicine sleep of people who knew their foundation was secure. Families lay huddled together on reed mats, wrapped in clean woolen blankets dried by the hearth fires. Former soldiers who had spent weeks with their hands on their sword-handles slept with their arms outstretched, their breathing deep and rhythmic.
In the eastern gallery of Entry hall 072, children who had lost their parents during the mountain retreat slept under the watchful gaze of three huge stone nurses from the Second Dynasty. The stone spirits had draped their glowing spiritual sleeves over the sleeping children, shielding them from the slight draft of the air-flow grates.
