The sound phenomenon began exactly when the animal fat lamp at the fourth terrace burned down to its third copper ring.
It didn’t arrive as an explosion or an underground thunderclap. It began as a faint, metal shivering within the deep granite stone floor, so subtle that only Qiao Ming’s bare feet, attuned to twenty seasons of tidal deep ring, detected the change. He had been sitting upon the third step of the southern avenue, mending a frayed knot in the eighteenth fathom of his horsehair line with an ox-bone needle-point arrow. The cold granite beneath his heels seemed to warm, not with heat, but with a deep-seated sound shaking that hummed at exactly one hundred and fourteen cycles per second.
He paused his hands, the bone needle-point arrow poised above the black horsehair cord.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu looked up from her field notebook. She set her soapstone pencil down upon the stone. “The floor is singing, Caspian.”
“It is not the floor,” Qiao Ming said softly, laying his palms flat against the granite flags. “It is the lower halls. The statues are chiming.”
He unslung his Folded brass star-compass and laid its flat back directly against the stone floor. Through the bronze casing, the shaking amplified. The silver rete trembled within its bezel, the tiny pierced stars shivering like water beetles on the surface of a pond. The internal fine-scale gears gave off a faint, rhythmic rattle, translating the ground-shaking tremor of the foundation beds into measurable increments…
