Chalk-white limestone dust whistled through the jagged gorge like thrown lime.
Lu Chen pressed his back against the sheer karst wall. He felt the cold stone crust through the rough linen of his laborer shirt.
Twenty paces behind him, An Ni leaned against a pack mule, her knuckles white around the shaft of her iron ball-peen hammer.
Her leather apron was crusted with centipede ichor and dried yellow mud from their climb out of the Red Trench.
“The air is changing,” An Ni murmured, keeping her voice lower than the wind. “Smells like burning bone and green sulfur.”
“Hundred Blossom Bastion,” Lu Chen said. “Three miles up the ridge.”
He looked up at the looming escarpment.
Through the drifting curtain of emerald gorge-foul fog, massive stone castle walls clung to the mountain face like cancerous hornets’ nests.
