The formal council did not assemble on a raised dais or before an emperor’s canopy.
Qiao Ming sat upon the fifth riser of the circular marble stairs that dropped into the central round hall. His bare feet rested two steps below, his toes curling over the smooth, rounded lip of the white stone. Across his lap lay his sharkskin field ledger, its pages of oiled flax paper blank and receptive, weighted on the left by his boxwood measuring rule and on the right by his bone ink-horn. Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu sat with her boots drawn up against her chest, the Broken Slate resting flat across her shins, its surface dark and cool in the golden twilight of the Genesis Well.
Arranged in nested semicircles on the steps above and around them sat seventy-two men and women. The chosen delegates of the three thousand four hundred survivors.
They hadn’t been elected by ballot or selected by lineage. They were the people who knew the work of the world. There were carpenters with split fingernails. Herbalists who could identify ninety roots by their bitter smell in the dark. Stone-cutters whose shoulders were broader than ox-yokes. Mothers who had nursed twins while wading through three deep-water lengths of cold salt water. And fishermen whose skin was lined with salt-crusts that never fully dissolved.
