The southern cliff face rose like a wall of blackened iron, gouged by hundreds of years of acidic rain into deep, jagged fissures.
Pei Jing avoided the central stairs leading to the upper residential terraces where the guild guards had their watch-posts. Instead, he worked his way along the drainage ditch behind the slaughter pens. He stepped across slippery grey slate where stale salt water washed away his scent.
Two hundred paces past the last tanning vat, the rock wall curved into a blind cul-de-sac choked with nettle brambles. The weeds were waist-high, their serrated leaves coated in fine, stinging hairs that cried yellow neurotoxin when brushed. A pair of desiccated swamp rats hung in the thorny thicket, their bellies bloated and hollowed out by leech-like flies.
To an ordinary fighter, the fissure behind the thorns looked impassable and poisoned.
To Pei Jing, it was an ideal temporary workstation.
He set his pack down on a dry slate slab. He drew his hard dark metal cleaver. He used the flat of the heavy blade to press the nettle stalks down without snapping the stems, forming a natural, camouflaged tunnel through the brush. He crawled through the opening on hands and knees. It slid beneath an overhanging limestone shelf into a six-foot hollow.
