The shaking came up through the soles of Lin Ke’s hemp sandals like a dying generator shaking off its moorings.
It wasn’t a clean, low-hum rumble. It was a jagged, chattering shudder that set the copper fillings in his back teeth humming. Then it turned the cold tea in his tin cup into a pattern of chaotic nested rings.
Through the narrow slit of the watchtower battlement, the horizon was on fire.
*
Twenty thousand sword fighters didn’t advance in a disciplined siege line.
They hovered three hundred feet above the red-clay flats of the Iron Pass, arrayed in loose, overlapping swarms that looked like a swarm of locusts dropping upon an autumn paddy. Every three seconds, a ripple of white-hot light rippled across their front ranks.
Then came the blades.
They weren’t aimed at single defenders. General Ba Lie, commander of the Great Yan Imperial Heavy Phalanx, wasn’t looking for duelists. He was running a brute-force denial-of-service attack against the border array.
