On the fourth day at Iron Gate Gorge, Pei Jing could no longer tell the time by the sky. A blanket of purple cloud hung over the crags. The fog tasted of copper. Only the change in the wind told him that the sun had risen.
The force Duan had seen gathering after the borer attack reached the gorge at dawn. Pei Jing held the same six paces of gravel for sixteen hours. More than four thousand fiends lay in front of him by the end, counting the shells left from the earlier waves. Their hard shells and broken limbs had formed a bank eighteen feet high. The next wave had to climb the bank to reach him. Its feet slipped on the loose plates of the wave before it.
Pei Jing breathed in for four heartbeats, held for four and let the breath out for four. He had practiced like this with wooden staves on the dirt terraces above Cloudford. In those days he could tell when he was tired by the way the tip of the stave began to drop. He knew the signs well enough to correct them before the weight pulled his shoulder out of line.
