Cold autumn rain hammered the northern crags of the Gu Ning Upper Citadel.
Water poured in gray torrents from the glazed roof edges of patrician estates, washing down the terraced mountain avenues in foaming gutters. The air smelled of wet pine needles, cold granite, and the faint, bitter tang of burning charcoal from distant courtyards.
Lu Chen walked through the downpour with an even, unrushed stride.
He wore the heavy wolf-skin cloak taken from Commander Tie, its coarse gray fur drenched and heavy with water. Yet wherever the rain struck his neck, wrists, or boots, it didn’t linger.
The water hissed against his skin and flashed into thin wisps of white vapor.
Beneath the wet wool of his dead-house undertunic, his blood heat held at a steady sixty degrees. The pot of melted mutton lard he had swallowed at the forge burned in his stomach like liquid hard coal, feeding steady fuel to his viscera.
At his left hip hung the twelve-pound Calamity Cleaver, newly reforged by Blacksmith An Ni with cold-iron balance weights along its notched spine.
At the turn of the mountain road, the Dragon-Tiger Pavilion rose out of the mist like a crouched hunting beast of carved black stone.
