The Yun River was swollen by three days of nonstop autumn rain, churning into a violent, mud-brown torrent thirty feet beneath the East Stone Bridge.
The bridge was an ancient civic span built during the reign of the last dynasty, commissioned by a royal salt commissioner to connect the northern iron mines with the southern grain canals. It was sixty yards long and twelve feet wide, resting on four massive cutwater piers of dressed grey granite that had resisted the fury of a hundred spring floods. Along both edges ran waist-high stone low roof walls, carved with stylized water dragons whose granite scales were worn smooth by decades of river mist and iron-shod wagon axles.
Dawn broke over the eastern crags of Cloudford Mountain.
The sky was the color of lead, cold and heavy. It pressed down upon the river valley like a slab of slate. Mist rose from the roaring rapids in thick. It rolled tendrils that smelled of wet moss, decayed reeds, and crushed silt.
At the eastern bridge pillar of the bridge, eighty men had assembled in tight battle formation.
They were the total working core of the Black Tiger Gang.
At their front stood four heavy shield-bearers, veterans of river piracy on the northern waterways. Each man carried an iron-heavy oak mantlet. Four feet high, two feet wide, built from two-inch seasoned white oak planks bound with forged iron bands and backed with double-layered rawhide padding.
Behind the mantlets stood twenty spearmen holding ten-foot river gaffs and ash-wood pikes. Their iron tips shone with grey mutton grease to prevent rust in the damp river air.
Behind the spearmen were fifty hardened cutthroats armed with heavy butcher’s cleavers, iron-banded truncheons, and short throwing axes. Several carried burning pine torches with oiled paper hoods. Their acrid black smoke curled into the morning mist.
And in the center of the eastern bridge pillar stood Iron Claw Hu Biao.
Hu Biao was bareheaded in the freezing wind, his shaved scalp gleaming with bear grease. He wore a heavy sleeveless vest of boiled buffalo rawhide, heavy across the chest with overlapping brass rivets. His massive forearms—corded with the thick, rope-like tendons of a man who had spent thirty years breaking bones—were strapped into his three-pronged hard dark metal tiger claws.
The eight-inch curved steel talons clicked against his brass belt buckle in a steady, metronomic rhythm:
Clack-rasp. Clack-rasp.
Hu Biao looked across the empty sixty-yard span of the stone bridge.
His scouts had reported that the Pei Clan compound remained locked tight from within. No militia had marched. No wagons had fled.
“Where is the boy?” Hu Biao growled, his voice cutting through the roar of the rapids below. “Did he drown himself in the canal after cutting Ma Liu?”
Beside him, Scar-Faced Liu stood with a heavily bandaged chest bone. He held a short iron spear in his left hand, his face pale and sunken.
“He won’t run, Gang Leader,” Liu whispered, his voice trembling faintly. “He’s... He’s not like other men. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t swear. He talks about debts and ledgers. Then he chops through iron like it’s warm bean curd.”
“Shut your dog mouth,” Hu Biao snapped, his cold grey eyes narrowing. “A seventeen-year-old clerk who learned three forms of mountain saber. You let him terrify eighty men because he got lucky in the dark.”
Half a mile up the northern gorge road, perched on a granite outcropping, Master Mo Tie stood with his arms crossed, chewing on a stalk of dried reed. Further back along the river road, behind the silk curtains of a carriage belonging to the Vast Treasure Pavilion, Su Mei’er watched through a bronze lattice screen, her manicured fingers resting nervously on her teacup.
Along the river road, behind shuttered tea-shop windows and barred grain stores, dozens of scared townspeople watched through cracks in the woodwork.
Footsteps sounded from the western approach.
They were slow, measured, and rhythmic, clicking softly against the wet solid mountain stone of the road.
The river mist parted.
A solitary figure walked out of the grey gloom. It stepped onto the western bridge pillar of the East Stone Bridge.
It was Pei Jing.
He wore his coarse grey homespun robe, the sleeves tied securely back to his elbows with sharkskin cords. He exposed his pale, corded forearms. His left bicep was wrapped in clean, salt-crusted linen. His black hair was tied simply behind his head with a strip of leather.
Resting horizontally across his right shoulder was the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The three point two feet of dark, velvet-grey hard dark metal steel drank the dawn light without a single glow. The twin parallel fullers caught the morning mist. The broad, four-inch flared chopping head rested against his collar like a headsman’s block waiting for a neck.
He walked onto the first stone arch. Then, Pei Jing’s attention was fully focused on the physical shape beneath his feet.
The solid mountain stone were wet with river spray, covered in a thin, tiny film of green algae. A careless step with a smooth leather sole would cause a three-inch slide, compromising dynamic balance during a level swing.
Pei Jing wore shoes of woven mountain hemp cord with grooved rawhide treads glued to the soles with pine resin.
The coarse hemp fibers gripped the rough granite with total friction.
He tested the traction with his left heel: zero slippage.
His breathing was deep and slow. He drew the freezing river mist into his lungs, expanding his between-rib compartments. His core heat sat at thirty-seven point two degrees, his stored energy reserves fully primed by the bear animal fat decoction he had burned up an hour earlier.
Hu Biao stared across the sixty yards of stone pavers.
For a moment, the gang leader said nothing. Then, his massive chest heaved. He threw his head back, barking a harsh, roaring laugh that echoed off the granite cliffs of the river gorge.
“The Pei Clan is finished!” Hu Biao roared, raising his right gauntlet high so all eighty of his men could see the gleaming steel talons. “Hongcheng is cowering behind his compound gates like a sick badger, sending his third whelp down to the river to die alone!”
The eighty gang cutthroats erupted into coarse, mocking jeers, hammering their iron truncheons and spear shafts against their wooden shields:
Clang! Clang! Clang!
“Hey, clerk boy!” one of the spearmen shouted. “Did you bring your counting frame? Come count how many pieces we’re going to chop you into!”
Pei Jing didn’t stop walking.
He reached the apex of the center span, thirty paces onto the bridge.
His left thumb brushed the leather pouch at his hip. He confirmed the heavy box-shaped presence of his grandfather’s Black Mountain Whetstone. The dense dark rock was dry and ready for the steel’s eventual accounting.
He lowered the Cloud-Splitter from his shoulder. That let the twenty-two pounds of steel rest vertically before his right knee, the chisel tip hovering three inches above the wet solid mountain stone.
His voice was not loud.
Yet carried by his deep, deep-belly breathing and the sound deep ring of the stone low roof walls, every syllable reached Hu Biao’s ears with terrifying clarity:
“Your account is thirty-nine silver coins overdrawn from property destruction at the South Hill kilns, Hu Biao,” Pei Jing said. “Ten silver coins for medical compensation to our wounded draymen. Four hundred copper coins for uncollected river tariffs.”
Pei Jing’s dark eyes locked onto Hu Biao across the stone bridge.
“For twenty years, you have operated an illegal extortion monopoly along the Yun River, enforcing fraudulent tariffs through living violence. The interest on that debt has piled up beyond your capacity to service.”
He raised the Cloud-Splitter two inches, pointing the flared chisel head directly at Hu Biao’s chest.
“I’m the clerk of Cloudford Town. The account closes this morning.”
The mocking laughter among the eighty cutthroats died down into an uneasy, confused silence.
Men looked at Pei Jing’s stance.
There was no trembling in his wrists. There was no desperate, fanatical fire in his eyes. His face possessed the total, terrifying calm distance of a judge reading a death sentence from a royal scroll.
Hu Biao’s grin vanished.
A vein throbbed on the gang leader’s shaved temple, thick as an earthworm.
“Arrogant little bastard,” Hu Biao snarled, his voice dropping into a murderous rasp.
He swung his right claw forward, pointing at the solitary youth on the bridge span.
“Shields up! Advance in line! Spear his knees and throw his carcass into the rapids! Bring me that black cleaver—I’ll use it to chop Hongcheng’s head off at noon!”
“KILL!”
The front rank of four heavy shield-bearers locked their oak mantlets together. They formed an unbroken eight-foot wall of iron-banded timber that filled two-thirds of the bridge’s width.
Behind the wooden wall, six spearmen lowered their ten-foot pikes, the iron tips projecting over the top of the mantlets like a row of steel fangs.
The heavy column surged forward across the wet solid mountain stone, their iron-shod boots thundering against the stone:
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Behind them, fifty cutthroats crowded onto the bridge, their weapons raised. They pushed the front rank forward in a choking tide of steel and leather.
Pei Jing stood at the apex of the center span, thirty paces away.
The cold river wind whipped the hem of his grey robe against his shins.
In his eye vision, the monospace ledger lit up with crisp, sharp-angled runes:
Pei Jing didn’t retreat a single inch.
He sank three inches into the Python Tendon Stance.
His bare soles gripped the wet granite through his thin cloth shoes. He anchored his balance point directly over the bedrock pier below.
His hands closed around the sharkskin handle of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The crash was five strides away.