Before dawn the next day, Pei Jing finished two hours of practice with his new core. The bluff had thin, restless qi. He did what he could with it. By the time he left the bluff, yellow fog lay over the Cloudford River. It smelled of silt and dead reeds. He followed a goat path down to the water.
The river he remembered could carry fifty-oar barges loaded with salt and coal. Now it wound through wide beds of gray stones in a channel barely twenty paces across. Here and there a black stump marked the line of the old docks. Pei Jing waded out. The water came no higher than his shins.
Three granite piers still stood where the East Stone Bridge had crossed the river. A piece of the old deck had fallen against the center pier and stayed there. Pei Jing scraped away the moss. The stone beneath it still held a deep diagonal gouge.
He had been sixteen when Iron Claw Hu Biao met him on this bridge. The gang had held the river trade through its depot. Jing had crossed to break that hold. He remembered the serrated claws locking around the Cloud-Splitter. He’d let his shoulder slip out and his wrist fold to break the lock, then put them back into place. He’d got the blade free. One swing had broken Hu Biao’s hold on Cloudford. The granite at his feet remembered the fight better than anyone left in town.
