The third woman was looking at the sky.
She had made a decision about where to be that was not where her body currently was.
The fourth through seventh men were standing around this and calling each other on, the laughter of a group who has found a consensus and is operating within it, the comments growing louder and more specific as the consensus made them bolder.
Cang read all of this.
He raised his right hand.
He snapped his fingers.
The sound was small—smaller than the screaming, smaller than the laughter, smaller than the fire—a single dry percussion in the mountain morning.
Seven columns of ash.
Not gradual. Not violent. Simply the conversion of seven men into their inorganic mineral components, the flesh and bone and cultivation qi all resolving to grey-white powder that fell in the approximate shape of seven men and then stopped being the shape and became what it was—dust, settling into the packed earth with the quiet sound of completion.
The fires went out.
