The landing of fifty armored war-eagles upon the cleared shale tiered arena below Boundary Pylon Three was an orderly display of royal court power.
Senior Inspector Han—the “Iron Mirror”—dropped from his grand flying palanquin with unrushed, measured strides, his dark robes fluttering in the mountain wind, his iron counting frame already clicking between his long, skeletal fingers. Behind him, fifty trial guards in silver-and-black plate armor took up guard positions around the tiered arena with disciplined, machine-like speed, their axe-spears glinting in the morning sun.
Behind Han hurried Disciplinary Elder Song, wrapped in fresh sable furs. His narrow face was flushed with a mixture of wild anxiety and desperate ambition. For six hours, reports of lightning bombardments and destroyed Flying Crane skiffs had been flooding the trial’s scrying pools. Song had spent the entire flight scared that Lin Tao had provoked a full-scale land-wide war.
Yet the two senior judges stepped onto the shale. Then, the scene that greeted them was fully contrary to their fears.
The forty captured Flying Crane shock-troopers sat neatly bound in five-man ranks, guarded by thirty loyal guard post sentries. Vanguard Commander Yue knelt in the center of the clearing, stripped of weapons. Beside him stood Captain Zhao and Deacon Sun, both clamped in star-iron chains, their heads bowed in abject ruin.
