From the outside, the summit of Mount Taiyi was an arena of cold, sky madness.
Tie Shan stood fifteen paces from the violet quarantine cube. His twelve-pound iron pry-bar was held low across his right thigh. The wind had returned, but it wasn’t the natural gale of an alpine peak. It was a spark-charged cyclone that screamed across the snapped dark rock plateau. It whipped his shredded woolen tunic against his corded torso like ragged banners of war.
The air smelled of scorched copper and sulfur.
Every breath drew freezing ozone into Tie Shan’s lungs, tasting like crushed tin. Around the outer edge of the plateau, the thirty star-copper bypass bars—driven three and a half feet into the bedrock—were humming with a deep, underground deep ring that made the marrow in his thigh bone bones vibrate.
Tie Shan looked at the cube.
Inside the semi-clear, amethyst facets, Lin Tao knelt motionless. The scholar-clerk appeared flattened, his colors desaturated. His figure looked like an ink drawing trapped within a block of polished quartz. Lin Tao’s right hand was pressed against his woolen sleeve, a spot of dark red blood visible on the gray cloth where he had performed his ritual puncture.
