The silence along the Cloudford riverfront stretched for ten seconds, thick with the smell of river silt and cold autumn dust.
Not a man among the five hundred onlookers breathed.
The cut granite mooring bollard lay split in two. The lower stump standing two feet above the ground, its cut surface flat and shiny as a polished slate mirror. The top four hundred pounds half-sunk in the brown river mud, lap-water washing over the snapped quartz crystals.
Patriarch Zhao Cangshan didn’t move.
His right hand remained open, empty. There, the three-pound hard dark metal iron sphere had slipped from his numbed fingers.
His gaze moved from the split stone to the twenty-two-pound blade in Pei Jing’s hands.
The Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber was resting vertically against the youth’s thigh. The dark gunmetal edge showed no rolling, no micro-fractures, and no chipping. It looked as if it had sliced through a block of unbaked bean curd rather than eight hundred pounds of river granite.
Zhao Cangshan was fifty-eight years old.
