Viper Chen didn’t charge with brute force. He moved with the sinuous, unpredictable agility of a desert serpent stalking prey through dry grass.
The six-foot steel chain hissed through the air. It whipped in wide, whistling figure-eights that generated a hypnotic, whirring sound hum. At the end of the chain, the crescent-shaped steel scythe gleamed with an oily, emerald sheen of packed black viper venom. A lethal neurotoxin distilled from three-headed pit vipers that numbed the heart in less than twenty heartbeats.
“Die, brute!” Chen hissed, snapping his wrist with sudden, explosive violence.
The crescent scythe whipped forward, curving around Tie Shan’s defensive guard with terrifying speed, aimed directly at the main neck blood vessel in the giant’s neck.
Tie Shan raised his twelve-pound iron pry-bar to block. But the flexible chain wrapped twice around the heavy bar, binding the weapons together in an iron knot.
Chen sneered, channeling his late Foundation Establishment Qi through the steel links. It sent a pulse of acid-burning green energy down the chain to scorch Tie Shan’s hands. At the same time, Chen drew a poisoned stiletto from his boot, lunging for Tie Shan’s exposed throat.
Lin Tao didn’t watch from the sidelines.
From his vantage point on the raised ledge, Lin Tao’s left eye had already calculated the spatial flight path of the chain and the load-bearing layout of the defile:
Running along the dark rock wall directly behind Viper Chen was an ancient Precursor sulfur-steam pipe. A four-inch copper channel that carried white-hot fiery vapor from the lower fumaroles to the Upper Pavilion’s drying rooms. The pipe was groaning under eighteen sea-weights of pressure. Its copper joints wept white crystals of dry stone salts.
Lin Tao drew the four-inch land-mapper metal pen from his belt.
He didn’t throw the needle at Chen. He picked up a two-pound granite cobble and hurled it directly at the rusted through copper pipe rim of the steam pipe.
CLANG.
The impact dislodged the rusted iron clamp holding the pipe’s safety pipe rim.
Lin Tao lined up his metal pen with the ungrounded static charge of the copper pipe.
Ting.
The heartbeat grounding pulse tripped the ancient valve gearwork.
HISSSSSSSSS!
A blinding, faster-than-sound jet of four-hundred-degree sulfur steam erupted from the fractured pipe rim. It blasted directly into the small of Viper Chen’s back.
Chen shrieked in mortal agony as the scalding steam flash-boiled through his green reptile leathers, scorching the skin from his spine and searing his right arm to the bone. The intense heat shock caused Chen’s spirit veins to burst wildly. His grip on the chain slipped, and his poisoned stiletto clattered uselessly against the stones.
Tie Shan didn’t hesitate.
With a roar that shook the defile, the giant gave a massive heave of his iron bar. It ripped the bound chain from Chen’s scorched hands. Tie Shan stepped forward, his left hand shooting out to catch Chen by the throat, hoisting the writhing, screaming mercenary six feet into the air.
Chen thrashed wildly, his heels kicking against the dark rock wall, his tongue protruding as Tie Shan’s bronze fingers clamped around his windpipe like a vise. The poisonous scythe lay abandoned in the dirt, its emerald sheen steaming under the morning chill.
“Mercy...” Chen choked out, blood spraying from his burned lips. “I yield... I yield my weapons... I’m only a hired sword...”
Tie Shan looked up at Lin Tao.
“Drop him,” Lin Tao ordered quietly.
Tie Shan opened his hand. Chen fell heavily into the ash, coughing wildly, clutching his scalded neck and weeping in terror.
“Take your chain,” Lin Tao said, looking down at the broken mercenary. “Take your three wagons of counterfeit poison, and leave the volcano bowl before the dawn bell finishes tolling. If I see the banner of the Black-Viper Triad on this mountain again, Tie Shan won’t use an iron bar. He will use your skull to pave the road.”
Chen scrambled backward on his hands and knees. He dragged his scorched arm through the dirt, not daring to look back as he fled down the defile toward the northern gates.
The sixteen guards, seeing their leader and the elite mercenary broken in less than three minutes, threw down their poleaxes and bolted into the morning mist, disappearing into the maze of melted rock waste heaps.
Only Slag Overseer Meng remained in the defile.
The overseer fell to his knees in the cold ash, his bronze war mace clattering to the stones, his face gray with the choking terror of a man whose world had collapsed in an instant.
The silence that dropped upon Pit Seven was total. It was broken only by the steady, rhythmic hiss of the fractured steam pipe venting white sulfur vapor against the dark rock cliff.
The forty scavengers who had watched the entire battle from the mouth of the stone hut slowly stepped forward into the morning light. They held their iron crowbars and stone-splitting sledges in limp fingers. Their eyes were wide with deep, religious awe. In less than ten minutes, two unarmed coolies had dismantled an entire squad of armed pavilion guards and routed an elite Foundation Establishment mercenary without suffering a single scratch.
Old Wu dropped to his knees on the fiery gravel. His hands shook as he touched the hem of Lin Tao’s hemp tunic.
“Immortal Lin...” the old man cried, his voice shaking with fierce devotion. “You have broken the chains of the volcano bowl... The mountain itself fights for you...”
“Stand up, Old Wu,” Lin Tao said, his voice quiet, calm, and grounded. “The mountain doesn’t fight for anyone. The steam was under eighteen sea-weights of pressure. The pipe had a rusted through pipe rim. A child with a stone could have opened the valve.”
Lin Tao turned toward the trembling, kneeling figure of Overseer Meng, his steel metal pen resting lightly in his callused palm.
“Now,” Lin Tao said, “it’s time to audit the overseer’s books.”