The healing bitter tea tasted like willow bark and iron shavings.
Lin Ke sat in an improvised wheeled chair of bolted angle-iron, his legs draped in a coarse wool blanket.
Both of his arms were wrapped from palms to shoulders in stiff, yellowed linen soaked in blood-cooling paste, his bandaged fingers resting motionless against his knees like bundles of dried kindling.
Every breath brought a sharp, dragging stitch across the left side of his ribs. There, the Lichtenberg spark scars still crackled with phantom electric-shock static.
*
Forty miles to the west, the sky had turned into a floating city of polished cedar, bronze plate, and crimson silk.
Seventy royal war galleons sailed in five tiered battle lines, their massive floating fins beating the cold air like dragon wings. Beneath them on the valley floor, twenty thousand heavy cavalry and fifty thousand armored traditional infantry formed a dense, shining grid that stretched from mountain wall to mountain wall.
At the bow of the supreme flagship, hovering five hundred yards off the castle walls of Seven Star Pass, stood Sovereign Yuan Ming.
