The Iron-Armored Flood Dragon was forty feet long and weighed about eighteen thousand pounds. Its back plates turned ordinary flying swords. In open water it could whip its tail around and come from any direction. Pei Jing wanted it somewhere it could only move forward or back.
Four hours after leaving the scavengers, he reached the granite foothills of Thunder Cliff. The soft peat ended at a ledge worn smooth by runoff. Water the color of iron ran through narrow grooves and vanished into caves.
At the fourth bell, he found the Devil’s Throat. The first walls rose high above the marsh. Farther inside, a lower shelf let him measure the drop to the streambed. Thirty-two feet. He stepped down to a dry ledge about twenty paces in.
The walls pinched together ahead. The part shown on the map was about twelve paces across. A lower bend beyond it pinched down to ten feet and four inches. He measured that gap from wall to wall. Water ran over rounded stones and wet gravel, falling steadily toward the far end.
Pei Jing walked the length of the cut. He scraped some algae off the wall and studied the granite beneath. It was fine-grained and held together across the full height. If the dragon hit this part of the cut, the bank wouldn’t give way under him.
