The morning light broke through the autumn clouds like cold grease smeared across iron.
Instead of the Grand Hall of Supreme Harmony, Emperor Yan held his private convocation in the Pavilion of Cultivated Virtue. The room was heated by four copper fire bowls burning fragrant fruitwood charcoal. It filled the air with a sweet, cloying warmth that clashed with the bitter draft seeping through the floorboards. On the red sandalwood desk lay an open royal edict, weighted down by a pair of jade paperweights carved into sleeping dragons.
Emperor Yan sat alone behind the desk.
He had removed his heavy ritual crown. His thin grey hair was bound by a simple golden pin. He showed the sunken hollows of his temples and the dark, bruised circles beneath his eyes. He looked less like a total monarch than an exhausted merchant whose warehouse had burned to the ground with the season’s cargo still inside.
Pei Jing entered the pavilion without being announced.
He hadn’t worn his iron-plated armor. He was dressed in a worn mountain tunic of dark homespun hemp, cross-laced at the chest with leather thongs. His trousers were tied tightly at the ankles with strips of rawhide. His boar-skin boots bore the dried mud of the palace courtyards. Across his back, resting in a weather-beaten oilskin sheath, hung his single-edged hard dark metal cleaver-saber. In his left hand, wrapped in red silk, he carried the golden tiger-head seal of the Grand Marshall.
