The ceiling of Entry hall 132 was an inverted forest of sound.
Qiao Ming stood upon the eastern stone railing of the Gallery of Lithic Carillons, his calloused bare feet resting flat against the cool, dark phonolite. The floor beneath his soles was shaking with a nonstop, tiny tremor—a musical humming that rose through the foundation piers from the deep high-pressure drain pits forty deep-water lengths below.
Around him, stretching three hundred paces through the vaulted nave, hung twelve hundred and forty lithic bells.
They were suspended from the massive groin ribs by heavy chains of forged sea-iron, each link three inches thick and coated with a protective lacquer of boiled shark oil to resist the humid salt mist. The bells were carved from single blocks of dark green phonolite—the sound ringing-stone quarried from the roots of the First Mountain before the ancient deluge.
They ranged in scale from delicate crystal chimes no larger than a hazelnut, hanging in clusters of twelve from the spandrels of the arches, to giant stone bells the size of grain silos, twelve arm-lengths across at the mouth, suspended above the central fairway like black iron cooking pots.
As the draft from the western air-flow chimney pipes brushed through the high vault, the bells stirred.
