For the first five hundred paces, Pei Jing fell with pieces of the battlefield. Plates of armor spun past him. Dust got under the brim of his hat and stuck to his goggles. A slab came down flat above him. He kicked off it and let it go past.
There was no room to fly. A sword would only hold him in place while the boulders came down on top of him. He tucked his knees in and kept moving with the fall.
Eight hundred paces below the surface, the break narrowed to a shaft fifteen paces across. The fires above were a distant red line. Then he passed an overhang and lost that light as well.
He fell another two hundred and fifty paces before he saw a crack deep enough to take his weight. Pei Jing drew the climbing anchor from his harness and sent it into a crack. Sparks showed him the wall for an instant. The reusable spirit line had two hundred paces to run. It slid through the brake at his waist with a high whine. Heat came through the casing against his hip. He took the weight in stages until the line stopped running, then swung in and landed on a shelf two paces wide.
