Lu Chen stopped three paces before the central archway of the Meridian Gate.
Above his head, the cold-iron drop-gate hung in its stone guide-grooves like a wall of headsman’s spikes.
Each iron bar was four inches thick, forged from dark river ore and heavy by linked level cross-beams.
Beyond the grate stood the main gates of the Forbidden City.
They were three feet of solid, aged hardwood, clad in heavy sheets of cast bronze and studded with rows of five-inch domed rivets.
Behind those doors lay a level locking beam carved from a single trunk of northern mountain oak. It was bound in iron straps.
A hundred mortal men with a bronze battering ram could have hammered against that barrier for three days without cracking a single timber.
Lu Chen didn’t reach for a ram.
