Pei Jing left the mountain road where it passed between two limestone ridges. In the gully below, ivy had grown across the mouth of an old iron mine. He parted it with his forearm and stepped inside.
Hundreds of men had once hauled ore out of that opening from dawn to dusk. The smelters at Cloudford’s docks had fed on what they brought down. In later years, Cloud Mist had taken its share of the finished iron for training blades. Now the timber over the entrance had rotted, and the tracks had been pulled up. He found one bent spike where a rail had run.
It smelled of damp stone and old pine inside. He walked past a row of collapsed supports. After sixty paces, one passage led down to the flooded sump. He took the other and squeezed through a narrow crack in the limestone.
The chamber beyond was about twelve paces across. A little air came down through a shaft in one corner. Beneath it stood a bench of bare granite. Pei Jing put his hand on its worn center. He knew the dip in the stone.
When he was young, he’d come here on evenings when he couldn’t get the West Pavilion yard to himself. He’d brought cold millet, a candle stub, and whatever soreness was left over from the previous day. He had been left bleeding in an alley. The Ledger had first appeared when he woke in the West Pavilion. Here, he had learned how…
