The drying of the stone floor was completed during the fifth watch, two hours before the morning assembly.
Qiao Ming walked the central avenue of the pillared hall with his wooden ruler held low. The shallow film of water that had covered the granite flags upon their arrival had pulled back entirely, draining through the outer edge deck drains into the lower channels. The stone beneath his bare soles was bone-dry, pale gray, and warm with the surrounding heat rising from the deep core of the world. Not a single drop of salt water remained in the joints. The quartz and pink rock crystals in the granite sparkled under the lantern beams like coarse diamond dust scattered across a ballroom floor.
He halted at the marble threshold of the central round hall.
There, laid out across the white marble floor between the Genesis Well and the Primordial Loom, rested the Great Parchment Roll.
It was a huge sheet of mountain-hemp thick parchment thirty arm-lengths long and twelve arm-lengths wide, pieced together from forty-eight matched webs of wild hemp woven by the guild of weavers during their winter encampment in the dry upper balconies of the four hundredth entry hall. The fabric had been sized with thinned fish-glue and chalk dust until its surface was smooth as polished boxwood, unbending to moisture and supple enough to receive the finest lines of charcoal and ink. To make this paper, two hundred women had gathered the tough dry stalks of river hemp from…
