Blood froze into a brittle, black glaze on the blade of the Cloud-Splitter within sixty seconds of being wiped clean.
Night fell over the northern valley like a choking shroud of iron and frost. Outside the earthen castle walls of Stone Mill Village, the heat dropped to sixteen degrees below zero. The sub-zero wind wailed through the scorched pine trunks. It carried fine, biting ice crystals that pinged against the iron cooking pots like lead pellets.
Around the outer edge of the village threshing floor, five hundred men of the 5th Shock Battalion were bivouacked inside the cleared stone silos and surviving barn foundations.
Sentries rotated every ninety minutes, their boots wrapped in thick rags, their broadaxes resting on their shoulders. The captured twenty cartloads of winter rye had been secured behind an improvised barricade of spiked logs, while forty hardy northern steppe ponies were penned in the sheltered lee of the flour mill. Their breath rose in thick, warm clouds.
Beside a roaring campfire of seasoned birch logs, Pei Jing sat on an overturned grain tub.
Across his crossed shins lay the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The weapon’s twenty-jin hard dark metal steel blade bore the marks of the afternoon’s butchery: dried blood crust clinging to the hammer dimples and tiny burrs along the cutting edge where the steel had split through horse bone and iron stirrup rings.
