The smell of burning winter rye and roasted flesh drifted two miles downwind before the forward scout horns sounded the alarm.
Stone Mill Village was an agricultural settlement situated in the funnel mouth of the Pine Needle Ravine. It was built around twenty massive granite flour silos that stored sixty thousand bushels of country grain. Pei Jing led the 5th Shock Battalion around the shoulder of the gorge. Then, the village had already ceased to exist as a civilian community.
Thick, greasy black smoke billowed from the collapsed straw roof roofs.
In the center of the village threshing floor, thirty barbarian horsemen wearing boiled horsehide vests and wolf-fur caps were busy loading stolen grain sacks onto forty pack ponies. Around the outer edge of the square lay sixty civilian corpses—village elders who had been tied to millstones and had their throats slit, and farm wives hacked down in the snowdrifts as they fled toward the frozen creek.
A dozen surviving village children were chained together by their necks with braided rawhide thongs, huddled in the freezing mud like scared sheep while two mounted raiders prodded them with iron-tipped lances.
The raiders were not clumsy brigands.
They were steppe skirmishers from the Blood Wolf horde. Bowstrings wrapped in oiled sheep gut to prevent moisture slackening, curved iron scythe-sabers hanging from their wooden saddles, their ponies’ hooves wrapped in leather boots to muffle footfalls in snow.
