The fifteen-and-a-half-pound Calamity Cleaver cleared its pig-skin sword sheath with a low, metal hiss.
The blade was forty inches of cold, dense iron, capped with a black glass-black cutting edge that absorbed the gray mountain light like a bottomless slit in the fabric of the world.
Twenty paces ahead, the emerald venom-fog parted.
The three surviving inner elders of the Hundred Blossom Sect advanced across the courtyard, their boots crushing the bronze shards of the shattered mirror underfoot.
They didn’t walk like human men.
On the left flank stood the Third Elder, known throughout the northern ravines as Elder Corpse-Silk.
His forearms had been amputated at the elbows and replaced with the engorged, pulsating silk-glands of a thousand-year-old underground burrowing arachnid.
Clusters of semi-clear, eight-jointed spider legs protruded from his forearms, twitching as they spun gossamer-thin strands of diamond-hard necro-silk between his clawed fingers.
