The fault beneath the Ancestral Summit ran through black ironstone. Warm salt water dripped into the dark and hissed on the rocks below. The magnetic pull down there could turn a compass needle backward. Pei Jing had stopped taking his out.
On his way to the summit he’d checked the laundry landing. The twelve children were still being fed, and the holding orders hadn’t changed. By the time he sat on a fallen granite pillar over the fault, he’d spent eighty minutes tracing the keystone’s lines. Three hours remained until midnight. In the west wall stood the first of the two master keystones.
Pylon 35 was a single piece of sapphire quartz, twenty feet tall and eight feet across. Red runes drifted inside it like specks in moving water. Violet light came and went in the cracks around it. The whole crystal rang with the steady note that held up Ling Xiao’s private pavilion on the summit.
A cut from the Astral Bone Blade could break the quartz. That would send all the qi it held through the fault at once. Pei Jing left the blade in its sheath.
He drew a clay jug from his pack. He had filled it with quarryman’s spirit wash at the old mine. Now he poured it along the stone where the pylon met the wall. The binding marks faded one after another. Then he put his palm on the quartz. Through the Chaos Spirit Root, he drew the warmth from the lower part…
