The tunnel from Central Cloud Crag narrowed to a stone chute no wider than Pei Jing’s shoulders. Black grease coated the rock. He crawled uphill for three hundred paces until the chute ended at a grating high in the wall of a cavern.
He put his eye to the bars. The air coming through smelled of boiled copper, coal tar and old blood.
Three bronze cauldrons stood in the Longevity Workshop below the Fourth Peak. Each was twenty feet wide. Blue-white spirit fire burned under their beast-shaped legs. Thirty young assistants moved around them in leather aprons and thick silk masks. The masks did little for their eyes. Every pair Pei Jing could see was red from the fumes.
Four hundred wicker hampers stood on the platforms beside the center cauldron. They bore the ink seal of the Provincial Tax Outposts. Two assistants untied them and poured dark bricks onto a sorting table.
Pei Jing had expected herbs or ore. The bricks were dried blood. He knew the name on the collection notices in the famine districts. The Great Sovereign’s Purification Tithe. Villages that could hardly feed their children had been made to give blood to the sect.
One of the assistants tipped a load of the bricks into the cauldron. Red froth rose to the rim. Bitter steam spread through the room, and the boy nearest the fire turned his face away.
