Five miles south of the ruined gate, a brook ran over slate and quartz. Pei Jing stopped beside it before dawn. Smoke from the Grand Hall drifted off the peaks. From the plain, a man might have taken it for the usual morning mist.
He set his traveling sack on the gravel. He had brushed the soot from his tunic and taken a fresh pair of sandals from the pack. The wind had torn his bamboo hat to pieces on the terrace. For the last hour before sunrise, he sat on a flat stone and wove a new one out of river reeds. The reeds bent easily between his fingers. They smelled of loam and frost. He lined the crown with oiled leaves and set the hat down beside him.
The Black Mountain Whetstone lay across his legs. His grandfather had brought it from Black Mountain long before Pei Jing had a blade of his own. It had no runes or power of its own. At the Frost-Bone Vault it had carried the qi he sent through it, the same way a plain spoon carries heat from a pot. There was only the worn hollow in the middle and the dark grain his thumb could find in the dark.
