The old quarry lay eighty lengths below the Lowest Mire. A century earlier, masons had cut black stone out of these galleries to build the piers of the Star-Suppressing Great Array. Then they’d run out of good rock, put iron grates over the openings, and left. Water had found its way in through the cracks and collected in pools that smelled of sulfur and old iron.
On Days Twenty-One and Twenty-Two, he put in two hours at the bench each day, testing the temper on sample pieces. After the second session he took three finished needles out to the quarry to try one in the field.
Pei Jing crossed the damp gravel with a lantern in one hand. The bronze shutter let out a thin line of yellow light. The plain, chipped cleaver he used for cover rode in its waxed canvas sheath. Cloud-Splitter was still packed. The three new needles lay in separate silk folds inside his coat.
He stopped beside a broken derrick. The roof of the quarry was forty feet above him. A canal rat hung from a stone pillar twenty paces away, drained dry and wrapped in gray silk.
“It’s feeding here.”
He shut the lantern. His spiritual sense could reach about five hundred paces. Here he kept the sweep within sixty so he could follow small movements among the rocks, and he let his pulse fall to sixteen beats a minute.
