A single animal fat candle sputtered on the stone ledge. He cast a trembling amber halo against the weeping limestone wall.
Pei Jing sat on the cold slate slab with his legs crossed in the lotus stance. Before him lay a clean square of oiled canvas, upon which he had neatly arrayed the full physical extent of his personal treasury.
To a casual observer, the display would have seemed pitiful. To Pei Jing, it was a precise statement of working assets and liabilities, and the figures refused to lie.
In the center of the canvas rested ten whole, uncut low-grade spirit stones. Each crystal was two inches in length, six-sided in section. Then he possessed the faint, cold soft glow of tightly packed river ice. To their left lay a small mound of broken quartz fragments. Ninety-five spirit shards, their jagged facets reflecting the candlelight in sharp pinpricks of dull cyan.
Beside the currency rested his tools: The box-shaped Black Mountain Whetstone, soaked in well-water. The small brass beam balance with its nested bone grain weights. The hardened steel scratch-awl. And his twenty-inch hard dark metal-iron cleaver, its dark spine resting flat against the oiled cloth.
Pei Jing picked up the brass balance. With his thumb and forefinger, he suspended the silk cord of the pivot point. He watched the small copper pans swing until the indicator needle lined up with the center notch.
