Pei Jing fixed a climbing anchor at the rim of the Void Eye and tested it. The iron rang once. The sound died so quickly that the shaft might have swallowed it.
He took the rope and went over the edge. The chimney dropped eight hundred paces through black basalt streaked with violet star iron. Farther down, the air grew heavy. A pulse of purple light came up from below, and his blade went weightless for two heartbeats. Then it pulled three times as hard. Pei Jing moved one boot deeper into a crack and let his legs take the load.
He’d learned to brace against a changing weight hauling ore in Cloudford. When one wheel of a cart slid off the old tracks, all the weight went where it wanted. A man who tried to hold it by the handle alone went with it.
Six hundred paces down, the chimney widened. Pei Jing came onto a shelf twenty paces across. Thirty yards below it, a ball of violet light hung in the shaft. It was twelve feet wide. Black cracks rippled across it where the earth vein rubbed against the void.
The air smelled of wet iron. Pei Jing laid the Bone Blade across two rocks and took his shirt off. The scar across his back caught the violet light. On his left forearm he could still see the seam where Yan Tianheng’s cleaver had reached the bone at the Disciplinary Hall. New skin had covered both wounds. The…
