The face-off began at the boundary top door beam of Entry hall 028.
A band of eighty rogue fighters from the Shattered Cloud Sect—men who had survived the retreat of the elder barges by clinging to the keel-lines of the refugee hulks—stood clustered before the archway. They wore coats of iron ring-mail, their belts bristling with heavy iron cleavers, serrated spikes, and heavy iron-shod climbing staves. At their front stood a scarred rogue captain named Meng, whose hand rested ominously upon the handle knob of a five-foot serrated iron broadsword.
Facing them was Yan Zhiqiu, armed only with her soapstone pencil and her slate of thin mountain shale. Beside her, two unarmed scroll-keepers held large wicker baskets woven from river osiers, already half-filled with kitchen knives and wood-splitting wedges surrendered by the mortal families.
‘No iron passes this top door beam,’ Yan Zhiqiu said, her voice steady and fully empty of tremor. ‘Unbuckle your mail, captain. Lay your sword and your belt spikes into the osier baskets. If you wish to sleep beneath the cut stone vaults, your hands must be free of iron.’
Meng laughed, a harsh, grating sound that rattled against the marble pilasters. ‘You ask fighters who fought through the outer drift to disarm themselves like offering cattle? In the outer trenches, an unarmed man is meat for the deep scavengers. We keep our steel, girl. Or we walk across your threshold and take what quarter we choose.’
