Blood-crusted military couriers rode horses into the ground at the governor’s central postal station. But the city’s high teahouses still pretended the empire was at peace.
Through the morning fog, the clatter of hooves on frozen cobblestones was relentless. A dispatch rider in a salt-stained leather vest tumbled from his foam-flecked mount at the yamen turnstile, his knees collapsing into the dirty snow as clerks rushed out with wooden buckets of water. The horse’s flanks heaved erratically, its eyes rolled back into white terror before its hind legs buckled beneath its belly. It didn’t rise again.
Yet three doors down the avenue, behind the carved red stone screens of the Cloud-Pavilion Tea House, string lutes played delicate court melodies. Wealthy grain merchants in otter-lined silk robes sipped autumn-harvested tips from celadon cups, discussing the fluctuating price of silk bolts in the southern royal capital.
Pei Jing sat at an unpainted pine table in an open-front noodle shop across the thoroughfare.
His straw cape hung over the back of the low wooden stool. Before him sat a wooden bowl filled with coarse buckwheat noodles sunk in dark, salty turnip broth. It was flanked by two cold boiled duck eggs. He ate with careful, steady rhythm, chewing each mouthful thirty times before swallowing, his jaw muscles moving with clockwork silence. Beside his clay vinegar pot, he had rested the Black Mountain Whetstone on a clean rag. He listened to the street murmurs. Then, his thumb unconsciously tested the hollowed dark rock face…
