Pei Jing crossed fifteen yards before the first fire snake could turn. All three closed their jaws on the spot where he had been standing. Flames burst across the empty rock and went out in clouds of steam.
Elder Qian saw him come and sent his sword into a dive. It shrieked as it dropped toward the crown of Pei Jing’s hat.
“Die, brute!”
Pei Jing felt for firm rock and stopped. The Astral Bone Blade came up from his right side. It was a cut his grandfather had taught to apprentices in the Cloudford butchering yard. They called it the Cloud-Clearing Arc. He remembered learning it through the boy’s hands, from before he’d opened his eyes in Cloudford. The boy had been twelve when his grandfather first let him use the good cleaver, after he could make the cut without pulling the edge to one side. Every hundred cuts his grandfather checked the blade. If he found a nick, he handed Pei Jing the black whetstone and waited.
The new blade began the swing at three hundred and sixty pounds. Pei Jing heard the flywheel click as it came around. The lodestones slid forward, and the pull rose through nine hundred pounds, then eighteen hundred. At the end of the swing it reached three thousand six hundred. His shoulders took the load. His qi stayed steady under it.
