The wind atop the Black Stone Bluff blew cold and clean. He smelled of alpine snow, crushed granite, and frozen pine needles.
Standing five hundred feet above the river valley, Pei Jing looked down upon Cloudford Town.
In the fading amber light of late autumn, the town looked like a child’s toy built from timber blocks and grey slate tiles. To the west, the smoking chimneys of the South Hill smelting kilns poured white plumes into the clear sky, four newly built coal wagons rumbling unhindered along the widened mountain access road.
To the east, the Yun River wound through the valley like a brown silk ribbon.
Along the riverfront wharves, three heavy cargo barges were moored against the cypress wooden support posts, their decks piled high with crates of refined South Hill pig-iron billets stamped with the Pei vermilion mark. On the central wharf, where thirty hours earlier an eight-hundred-pound granite bollard had been split in twain, twenty Pei Clan guards in studded leather stood watch, collecting transit tolls from passing merchant skiffs.
The river was open.
The extortion of the Black Tiger Gang had been liquidated.
The thirty-year monopoly of Patriarch Zhao Cangshan was broken.
