At the mouth of the Devil’s Throat, Pei Jing held a strip of silk up to the wind. It streamed north toward the Dragon Den. Cold air was coming off the slopes behind him and passing low over the warm marsh. The pressure in his little glass gauge had dropped for the last two hours. A storm was gathering over Thunder Cliff.
He set an iron bowl on a slab. From the sealed crock he took the cloth he’d saved from the ravine. Three days had given the blood a sweet, heavy smell. The viper musk would tell the dragon a rival had come to its feeding waters. He added trimmings from the Dragon-Whisker Grass. They still carried the scent of the scale they’d grown on.
The fire caught. Oily yellow smoke curled out of the bowl and spilled over the stone lip. It went along the water like a bank of fog.
The den lay a little more than three miles away in a straight line. The wind had to take the smell through dense stands of mangroves. Pei Jing checked his water clock.
“Forty minutes, if it follows the channels.”
He sat upwind on a dry boulder and drew the Cloud-Splitter across his thighs. He wet the Black Mountain Whetstone with a linen cloth and started at the heel of the blade. The steady scrape carried through the hiss of the marsh. With each pass he sent a little qi through the muscles that had spent three days…
