The cold in Entry hall 988 did not arrive on a wind, nor did it carry the honest chill of mountain snow. It was a motionless, hungry stillness that sat within the stone like an iron stake driven into the heart of the earth.
As Qiao Ming’s bare feet touched the first landing of the long dropping stairway, the skin of his soles adhered instantly to the frost-coated flat stone slabs. He had to tear his heels free with each step, leaving tiny flecks of calloused skin upon the white rime that carpeted the hall. The cold was so intense that it ceased to register as a heat. It felt like sharp needles of glass driven deep beneath his toenails, freezing the marrow of his shinbones until his ankles moved with stiff, wooden creaks.
Along the walls of the gallery, thousands of stone niches had been carved into the living rock of the keel. In each niche rested the hardened funerary urn of an ancient master-shipwright who had died during the five-hundred-year voyage of the Great Flooding. For sixty ages, these ashes had rested in quiet dignity, sheltered by the thick dark rock ribs of the lower vessel. Each urn was sealed with a plug of green river-jade, inscribed with the dead artisan’s guild-mark: an adze, a caulking mallet, a sounding plumb, or an auger.
