The wind stopped. The echoes went with it. Twelve hundred paces above the crater, a point of white-gold fire hung in a sky that had held three hundred miles of storm.
It was three paces wide. The men in the trenches lay with their faces in the mud. Even through closed eyes they could see its light. Cang Yunzi crouched behind a broken wall of his stranded flagship. On the other side of the basin, Gu Tianjiao had taken shelter among the wrecks of his chariots. Neither could see a path out. If the spear struck the ground, it could melt the basin fifty miles across.
Pei Jing stood eighty paces above the crater. The blade was still fixed in a slab of floating rock behind him. His breathing had slowed until he could count three heartbeats in a minute. Between those beats, he felt the load hanging over him.
He could still picture the eastern ridge where his clan had buried his father. He had buried men who had stood the northern watch beside him. He had lived long enough to hear new tax collectors repeat the same demands in the name of different kings. Most days, what was asked of him was work he knew how to do. It came down to whether he could carry the load.
