Five hundred unsafe men stood shivering in the ankle-deep freezing mud of the East Parade Ground, chained by their wrists with heavy iron links and wearing tattered convict tunics stamped with the black character for Death.
The parade ground was a huge, walled gravel expanse beneath the shadow of the Cangzhou Citadel’s eastern castle walls.
Torches on twenty-foot wooden poles sputtered against the blizzard. He cast a flickering orange glare across five thousand regular infantrymen who stood formed into rigid, armored squares. Heavy cavalry units sat on armored northern stallions, their lances tipped with three-sided pennants of royal black.
Yet the five hundred men in the center pen belonged to no honorable military brigade.
They were the penal vanguard. Convicted horse thieves from the northern post roads, salt smugglers who had slit the throats of excise officers, runaway border guard post guards awaiting the headsman’s ax, and disgraced brawlers rounded up from the city’s underground gambling dens. Their faces were scarred, their hair matted with lice. Their breath smelled of raw garlic and cheap vinegar wine.
Guarding the outer edge of the convict pen were two hundred royal heavy crossbowmen, their weapons loaded with broad-head quarrels, fingers resting on the bronze triggers.
