With an echoing groan of shearing frost, the two-ton iron-banded gates of Weeping Pass swung shut.
The iron drop-bars crashed into their dark rock sockets with an earth-shaking thud.
Outside, the howling sub-zero blizzard of the northern marches was cut in an instant.
Inside, the air didn’t grow warmer. It grew thicker, rot-heavy, and stale.
The stench struck Lu Chen’s nostrils with the force of an iron heavy club. Wet wolf pelts, cold horse dung, gangrenous pus, and cloying rendered animal fat trapped beneath two hundred upright feet of solid frozen ground castle walls.
Ten thousand men lived down here.
They didn’t live in barracks of timber or clay. They burrowed like lice into underground chimney pipes, aqueduct tunnels, and cavernous cellars blasted out of black dark rock bedrock.
Over three hundred years of frontier warfare, the guard post had heavy the stone walls with alternating layers of packed river ice, horse manure, and coarse rock salt.
