Pei Jing moved from body to body around the edge of the black glass platform. He kept his hands steady. A clasp dropped on stone would ring through the hall. A torn seam could spill half a pouch down a drain.
The second body was the woman with the broken peachwood staff. Two pouches lay against her sash. He cut their oiled cords and picked up a bamboo tube containing three cold-iron throwing knives. He balanced one on a finger. The weight sat three inches from the point.
The next body belonged to a young man whose face had burned beyond recognition. One corner of his pouch had melted, but the inner lining still held. Inside were twenty-two low-grade spirit stones and a roll of oiled beast-sinew bowstring.
Then came Blind Scar, an old marsh tracker. Pei Jing found four Grade One wolf-tooth needles in a sheath inside his boot. They were coated with swamp toad venom. He wrapped them separately before putting them in a small pouch of their own. The twelve slots in his wrist guards were already full.
He kept going. At five minutes and twenty-two seconds, he knelt behind the stump of the third dragon pillar. Neither the breach in the roof nor the vault entrance gave a clear view of that spot.
