The heavy double doors of the Hall of Literary Glory gave way with a splintering shriek under Lu Chen’s left boot.
Heavy with three-inch bands of cold-hammered bronze, the ancient cedar leaves ripped outward from their iron pintles, collapsing into the vast inside with a thunderous crash that sent clouds of aged lacquer dust puffing into the gloom.
Lu Chen crossed the high marble threshold without breaking stride.
Across his right shoulder rested the thirty-five-pound Dragon-Severing Blood Cleaver. Its star-steel spine, newly forged from the First Emperor’s dragon-scale cache, hummed with a low, high-pressure shaking. Along its sharpened cutting edge, the nonstop six-hundred-degree heat edge glowed like a thin wire of orange-white dawn. It cast amber ripples across the damp stone floor.
At his baseline ninety-degree body heat, the air within thirty paces of his boots warped in shimmering heat waves.
The cold, stale chill of the eastern palace complex evaporated against his skin, replaced instantly by the dry, baking draft of a brick kiln.
Inside the hall, the smell was choking.
It wasn’t the dry fragrance of inksticks and pine soot that belonged in the royal academy.
