Sixty furnaces were burning at Azure Peak, the casting works in the bowl of Mount Cangmang. The crater was five miles wide. People had once come here to meditate above the sulfur vents. Now forty trip hammers beat above those vents, and captains shouted over the noise to ox teams carrying ore.
Four thousand smiths and quarry workers filled the casting floor. Cloudford had sent cold iron. The Western Desolation had sent star ore. Bone from the creatures of the Southern Sea lay in pale heaps by the sheds. Sand skiffs had been put on wheels to bring loads through the passes. The road was never empty for long.
Chief Blacksmith Tie walked beside Pei Jing on a raised platform. Sixty years of work had left white burn marks on both arms. He pointed to the biggest casting bed.
“We’ve never made anything this big,” he said. “An eighty-ton bar can look sound on the outside and still be full of cracks. The first launch would tell us, but by then we’d have lost the whole piece.”
“We’ll build it in layers,” Pei Jing said. “Let the cold iron take the strain. Give the star ore and the demon bone room to settle around it. I’ll listen for gaps before we cool the first one.”
