A warhorse lay dying in the snow outside the courtyard gate, bloody foam bubbling from its nostrils as three royal heralds surrounded the entrance with drawn cross-guards.
The midnight blizzard had coated the beast’s dark brown coat in a crust of frozen rime. The animal’s ribs heaved erratically, its hindquarters trembling from extreme neuromuscular tiredness. Its iron shoes had been worn down to paper-thin slivers, one hoof split to the bone from galloping sixty miles over frozen river boulders.
Beside the dying mount stood three riders wrapped in black boiled-leather coats, their iron helmets dusted with snow.
In the lead was a royal courier lieutenant, his face black with frostbite across both cheekbones, his left forearm wrapped in blood-soaked burlap where a barbarian barbed arrow had sliced through his sleeve. In his right hand, he held a heavy iron metal tube sealed with the three-headed eagle crest of the Great Yan Royal Ministry of War.
Behind the courtyard gate, Cheng Shan drew the heavy oak drop-bars with a dull, hollow groan of iron and wood.
The oak gates swung inward.
The courier lieutenant stepped into the snowy courtyard, his boots crunching heavily in the white drifts. He stopped five paces from Pei Jing. His bloodshot eyes took in the coarse hemp tunic, the sharkskin belt. The twenty-jin hard dark metal cleaver strapped across the young man’s spine.
