The repair slips smelled of pitch and river mud. Sixty feet below the market, the drainage canal widened into a basin. Dark water carried the waste of three hundred forges toward the south gates. Iron-banded posts held up the docks.
He followed the stone steps down to the canal. At Slipway Seven, a thirty-foot cargo boat lay on greased rollers. Something in the river had scored deep grooves along the hull. The cast-iron propeller hung over the gravel with a crack by one blade.
A gray-bearded man in an oilskin coat knelt beside the propeller, under the stern. His beard was singed at the ends. He held a brass scribe in one hand and a horn pot of black paste in the other. He was cutting a winding rune into the propeller blade to keep it turning under load. A thin thread of Earth qi followed the point. Every few strokes, the tip caught and skipped.
“Spotted pig iron,” the man growled. “Pockets of slag every two inches. Golden Sun keeps the good metal for its cutters and sells us this. Then they wonder why a propeller blade snaps when a viper hits it.”
“The root of the blade will crack if you feed that rune too much Earth qi,” Pei Jing said. “I’d temper the joint before you draw the return line.”
