The Hall of Supreme Harmony looked like a vast stone slaughterhouse where the livestock had voluntarily placed their necks upon the cedar planks.
Four hundred men knelt with their spines bowed into tight arcs. Their foreheads were pressed against the cold grime of wet slate, spilled charcoal ash, and puddles of rainwater tracked in from the grand avenues. The silence in the cavernous hall was broken only by the ragged, bronchitic wheezing of Emperor Yan and the rhythmic dripping of water from the lead roof edges seventy feet above.
Against this unbroken plane of prostration, Pei Jing stood alone.
He was six feet tall, broad across the shoulders, his charcoal-grey linen robe hanging straight from his collar bones to the tops of his iron-heavy boots. Beside the thick girth of the sixth granite pillar, his dark shape was as unmoving as a land-mapper’s boundary marker driven into swamp shale.
His hands were unclenched, resting naturally at his sides. His right forearm hovered two inches from the horn handle of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber. His left hand remained tucked lightly into the fold of his shark-skin belt. There, the heavy box-shaped slab of the Black Mountain Whetstone hung against his hip. At first light he had worked the dark stone along the twenty-jin blade, sharpening the edge with patient, rhythmic strokes until the steel was cold and true. His breathing was so slow, so deep and quiet, that his chest barely rose by a fraction of an inch every ten seconds.
