The Upper Cloud Terrace stood four thousand feet above the valley floor. Frost clung to the branches of the junipers. The pines that shaded the garden far below gave way to bare ledges and low junipers up here. Through gaps in the rock, Pei Jing could see brown winter fields, gray rivers, and thin trails of woodsmoke rising from villages across Azure Province.
He stepped out through the marble gate onto a round plaza two hundred paces across. Its green jade tiles fitted together in six-sided patterns. Around the edge stood eighty-one bronze cranes with their beaks closed on iron chains. These were the dome’s bracing chains. With the dome gone they hung slack and knocked against the tiles. The lines that gave the peaks lift still ran through the rock, and the outer tethers held Third Peak at its new angle.
On the trails below, students and outer deacons were leaving the mountain in both directions. Some tore off their silk robes so the villagers would take them for travelers. Others carried sacks filled with silver, half-empty medicine bottles, and spirit gravel they had taken from the stores.
Two young deacons rounded the corner of the Script Pavilion with their arms full of jade slips. They saw Pei Jing across the plaza and dropped everything. Green fragments scattered over the frost. The two men backed away on their elbows until they could get to their feet. Then they jumped the rail and scrambled down into the junipers.
