The news of the decapitation on the East Stone Bridge moved down the Yun River faster than a mountain flash flood.
Pei Jing walked along the northern river road. Then, the heavy wooden storm shutters of Cloudford Town were pushed open one by one. Shopkeepers, grain porters, wharf coolies, and draymen stood in their doorways. Their faces were pale with disbelief.
They watched the solitary seventeen-year-old youth in the blood-stained grey homespun robe.
Across his back rode the twenty-two-pound Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber, its dark gunmetal surface washed clean by the morning mist. And dangling from his left hand by their oxhide laces were the twin three-pronged hard dark metal tiger claws of Iron Claw Hu Biao.
The curved steel talons caught the dawn light with a dull, hungry gleam, clicking against his thigh with every step:
Clack-rasp. Clack-rasp.
For twenty years, that sound scrape had meant extortion, broken bones, and bodies floating face-down in the river reeds. Now, the claws were carried like dead game birds by the third son of the Pei Clan.
Half a mile ahead, the northern spit of the river jutted into the brown current like the snout of a drowned ox.
