The tenth midnight click of the eye stone ledger was not an alarm. It was the silent, permanent dropping of an iron drop-gate into place.
The expeditionary army had reached the southern high plateau overlooking Fort Ironpass, bivouacking behind a line of frozen earthworks ten miles from the smoking frontier valley.
The night was black and devoid of stars, smothered beneath a heavy ceiling of snowclouds that dumped four inches of powder an hour. The wind off the northern steppe was twenty-two degrees below zero, freezing the moisture in human eyeballs and turning spilled horse urine into yellow ice before it touched the ground.
Inside his low canvas bivouac tent, Pei Jing sat naked to the waist on a frozen pack saddle.
Across his crossed shins lay the twenty-jin Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber. Next to the sword sheath, his grandfather’s dark rock whetstone sat nestled on a square of dry deerskin. Its dished center shone faintly in the cold candlelight.
Beside his knee, the blackened bamboo slats of the Blood Surge Meridian Scripture lay unrolled on a clean woolen cloth.
For nine days and nine nights, across one hundred and forty miles of forced winter marching, through blizzard and blood, Pei Jing had never missed a single two-hour practice cycle.
