The rasp of steel on slate was the only sound that cut through the heavy, rhythmic breathing of twenty pack mules in the stable below.
In the dark hayloft of the Resting Ox Inn, the air smelled of dry oat straw, horse sweat, and pungent lamp oil. Cold draft leaked through the gaps between the unplaned cedar wallboards. He carried the faint, smoky tang of the country capital’s coal fires. A solitary rush lamp burned on an overturned grain tub. It cast a small circle of yellow light across Pei Jing’s crossed shins.
He sat on a folded burlap sack, motionless as an iron anchor.
Across his knees lay the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber. Its twenty-jin hard dark metal steel blade was unpolished, retaining the mottled, slate-grey texture of the cold-forging hammer.
In his right hand, Pei Jing held his Black Mountain Whetstone.
The whetstone was four fingers wide and eight inches long, quarried from the dense dark rock beds of the Mist Peak foothills. Its surface was dark as soot, soaked with refined rapeseed oil that had seeped deep into its tiny pores over three seasons of nonstop upkeep.
Shhh-clack.
Pei Jing set the stone against the main edge of the blade at an exact angle of eighteen degrees.
