The Seventh Smelting Ward looked like the site of a heavy-duty boiler explosion that had been afterward struck by lightning.
A gaping forty-foot hole yawned in the ceiling, through which the gray drizzle of the morning fell onto a crater littered with shattered dark rock, scorched iron armor, and twenty tons of crushed rock.
In the center of the mud, Grand Inquisitor Chu Jue lay curled in the fetal position. He shivered wildly, his plum-colored silk robes soaked in soot and his ruined dantian whistling with a thin, reedy leak of dead Qi.
Elder Wu DeZheng stood at the edge of the crater. He grabbed his horsehair judge’s hat in one hand and the carrier pigeon in the other, his mouth hanging open so wide his tongue rested on his lower lip.
“You... You broke a Judge,” Wu whimpered, his eyes darting wildly from Chu Jue’s bleeding stubs to Lin Ke’s soot-streaked, bare chest. “You broke a third-rank judge of the Ministry of Punishments. The Imperial Grand Dragon Fleet will be here before the third watch. They will flay us. They will turn this entire mountain into a salt marsh.”
“Not if the incident never happened,” Lin Ke said.
He knelt beside the crippled Judge, calmly peeling a stitched leather pouch from Chu Jue’s waist.
