The low wooden bench in the corner of the foundry courtyard was polished smooth by fifteen years of friction.
Pei Jing sat with his feet flat against the packed earth, his spine erect, his knees lined up at exactly ninety degrees. The late afternoon light fell across the stone flags in long, pale slants. It caught the dust motes that drifted from the charcoal heaps. Outside the high outer edge wall, the wind carried the faint sound of iron-rimmed wagon wheels rattling over river cobbles and the distant crying of children from the southern quarter.
He reached into his canvas sack and brought out a box-shaped bundle wrapped in three layers of boiled oilskin.
He unfolded the cloth with steady fingers. He laid the stone upon the bench.
The Black Mountain Whetstone.
Eight inches long, two and a half inches wide, one inch thick. It was carved from dense, fine-grained fiery dark rock quarried thirty years ago from the deepest roots of the Cloudford fault line. Its surface was charcoal-black, flecked with tiny quartz crystals that had been planed to exact flatness by hundreds of thousands of steel strokes.
Beside the stone, Pei Jing placed a shallow wooden bowl filled with clean well-water and three drops of clarified walnut oil.
