The crack in the sky tore wider with a sound like silk dragged across a sickle. It had stretched about nine miles by the time Pei Jing set his staff into a notch beside his boot. His hands hung loose at his sides. There was room to move in any direction without coming to the edge of the plateau.
Zhao’s gate had closed. The hole it tore in the dome was widening. The gold light gathered behind the ribs he knew from Alpha’s drawing. Then it passed through them. Trapped vapor rushed out of the broken dome ribs. A ring the color of rust formed around the summit. It smelled of vinegar and sulfur.
Pei Jing breathed in once to see how much of it his body could take. The five fires drew the poison out before it reached his blood. He could save his qi for what was coming.
The afternoon before, he had cleared loose gravel from the plateau and checked the old fissures. Where the rock shifted under his heel, he had fixed it with iron wedges. Now he could feel where the stone was solid. He moved the twelve plain cold-iron needles from their case into his right wrist guard. The thread-bound astral needles stayed in the bronze ring. A needle thrown ahead of him could show where the Judge’s field began.
