The third watch of the quiet night found Qiao Ming walking alone through the dark avenue of dark rock columns.
He carried no lantern. His bare feet moved with silent, confident familiarity over the dry granite flags, his horn-hardened soles reading the subtle variations in the floor’s dressing. The tooth-chisel lines of the threshold, the smooth abraded paving of the central hall, the lead-poured seams between the foundation slabs. In his right hand he held his eight-pound lead line-weight, suspended from three spans of oiled horsehair cord. As he walked, he swung the weight in a slow, rhythmic circle, listening to the sub-bass sound drone it cast against the massive piers.
He stopped before Column VII—the Pillar of the Prime Master builders.
The huge metal tube of unquarried dark rock rose forty paces in girth, climbing into the unending twilight of the barrel vault eighty arm-lengths overhead. Within the dark, polished surface of the stone, the stone-hard dark shape of the First Master builder sat in high relief, his stone knees crossed upon an uncarved stone base, his huge granite hands resting flat upon a pair of bronze measuring tongs that were embedded directly into the rock. Flanking him within next-door flutings were the reliefs of the Master of Sluices and the Scribe of the Great Spirit vein, their profiles frozen in eternal stone-built deliberation.
