The first bolt of dry thunder struck at the forty-fourth minute of the hour.
There was no preliminary rumble. No distant, rolling murmur of thunder rolling across mountain valleys to warn travelers to seek shelter. The sky remained a solid, unbroken vault of dark lapis lazuli, cold and devoid of clouds.
Then, with the abrupt violence of a snapped steel cable, the air blew up.
CRACK!
A blinding column of electric-violet soft glow, three feet thick and perfectly tube-shaped, dropped vertically from the zenith. It struck the eastern rim of the plateau, exactly where Lin Tao had chalked the thirteenth node five minutes earlier.
The impact boiled away a waist-high granite outcropping into an expanding sphere of blazing bright white dust. The blast wave swept across the flat anvil of Mount Taiyi. He carried a heat wave of white-hot ozone that singed the wool fibers of Lin Tao’s traveling mantle. The sheer bone-shaking force knocked the breath from his chest, rattling his ribs and sending sharp needles of sympathetic pain through his hardened collar bone.
Lin Tao had already dropped to one knee, his left arm raised to shield his eyes, his boots braced against a transverse granite ridge.
Beside him, Tie Shan stood like an ancient iron castle wall. The giant had lowered his head against the blast, the heavy eight-pound sledgehammer resting upright on the stone between his boots. The bone-shaking excess pressure rippled through his ox-hide tunic. It whipped his crimson tiger sash against his ribs, but…
