Sleet coated the flat stone slabs of Ring Three in a greasy glaze of black ice. It tested each competitor’s tendon balance with every footfall.
The morning heat had plummeted below freezing. A bitter north wind howled down from the mountain passes. It whipped fine, frozen crystals across the sixty-pace fighting platform. The sand in the drainage moats had frozen into rock-hard yellow ridges that offered zero cushioning to any fighter hurled over the outer edge.
Around the ring, five hundred spectators stomped their boots on the wooden decking to keep their toes from going numb.
In the center of the ring stood Zhou Ming, the eldest son and heir of the Cangzhou Willow-Leaf Clan.
Zhou Ming was twenty-two years old, with broad, square shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore a fitted brigandine coat of dark brown boiled bull-hide, heavy with hundreds of overlapping iron studs riveted through the leather. On his feet were specialized northern combat boots fitted with three-pronged steel ice-spikes driven into the thick wooden soles, biting into the frozen glaze with crisp, crunching sounds.
In his hands, he held a five-foot willow-leaf saber.
The weapon was a building masterpiece of the northern martial clans. Thin-bladed, flexible as a bamboo shoot, crafted from folded high-carbon spring steel that had been cooled in winter snow-melt. Zhou Ming shifted his grip. Then, the blade shook with a faint, metal hiss, its curved tip swaying in the icy draft like a willow branch in an autumn gale.
