The sound of rushing water beneath two feet of river ice mirrored the roaring pulse in Pei Jing’s neck-vein veins as his compounding training reached its median mark.
The expeditionary vanguard had advanced twenty miles north of Stone Mill Village. It walked into the deep canyon of the Red River gorge. On both sides of the frozen riverbed, sheer walls of black dark rock rose three hundred feet into the leaden sky, their icy ledges crowned with twisted mountain pines. The wind in the canyon was channeled into an unending, freezing vortex that stripped the heat from human flesh in minutes, whistling through the narrow fissures like screaming iron whistles.
Along the riverbank, the regular royal regiments were suffering total non-combat attrition.
Despite their heavy woolen cloaks and fur-lined boots, four hundred country conscripts had collapsed from frostbite over the last forty-eight hours. Men marched with blackened, dead toes. Their shivering fingers dropped their iron spears into the snow, while military surgeons hacked off gangrenous feet with bone-saws in drafty roadside tents. The supply train was breaking down. Forty pack mules had slipped on the icy river ledges. He plunged to their deaths into the frozen crevices below, their shattered carcasses abandoned to the wolves.
