Rain washed the blood of the five elders into the cracks in the shelf. The guards had left their pikes and crossbows in the mud. Yan Tianxiong stood alone on the ridge. Soot from the flags marked the bronze plates on his chest.
The rings on his cleaver shrieked. Their pitch had risen so high that the puddles at his boots shook themselves into mist. He held the blade with both hands and looked down at Pei Jing.
“Fifty years of lineage honor,” he said. “All this over a man who cut meat for a living.”
Pei Jing could see the judge’s qi burning behind his eyes. Yan would have to answer for five dead elders if he went back to Cloud Mist. Pei Jing waited to see if the man would lay down his cleaver. Instead, Yan stepped to the lip of the ridge. The rock broke under his boots.
“Die with the lineage!”
He leaped across the ten paces between them. Yellow earth qi flared around all nine rings as he raised the cleaver. Pei Jing knew the name of the cut from the men who had once whispered about Yan at the coast. The Nine-Ring Heaven-Cleaving Sentence. For a moment the blade and the three hundred pounds of armor seemed to hang in the gray sky. Then they fell together.
