My name is Qiaoshou — Clever-Hands — a smith's wife from Aolai Town. My husband worked ten years for Ou Yezi; I handed tools at that furnace for ten years. What's being forged, I can read from the firelight.
When the little yao swept down, they bagged everyone with a craft. In the forge I run the bellows and feed stock. Triple shifts, day and night. Forging what?
Spearheads? Arrowheads? No.
Every day I feed the same stock: black iron bars, thirty percent heavier than common iron. What comes out is all one thing — rods, six feet long, the head wound in a coiled pattern. Not spears. Not staves. Twenty rods a day, every day, carried off behind the stone door that never opens.
My husband's master Ou Yezi has a saying: before judging a forging, look at whether it can sit still. Weapons are for killing, and killing things carry restlessness in the hand. I touched one of those rods once while feeding it—
Not restless. Heavy. Like a lock.
Listen. They aren't forging weapons. They're forging parts of a lock.
A lock for what? How big is the thing you lock with twenty rods a day for three months?
Last night a flawed rod came back out of the stone door and was dumped on the coal heap. I snapped off a small piece and hid it in my foot-wrappings. When you come to get us out, I'll smuggle it out with me —
Show it to Ou Yezi. One look, and he'll know what these yao are locking up.