The wind off the northern steppe didn’t merely blow. It stripped. It cut through coarse boiled wool, scoured the animal fat grease from leather harness straps. Then it drove frozen grit into every exposed pore until skin took on the color of bruised turnip.
Pei Jing halted his mount at the crest of the limestone rise. Beneath him, Fort Ironpass lay wedged between two sheer grey cliffs like an iron wedge driven into a frozen skull.
The castle was not a decorative palace of glazed tile and vermilion pillars. It was four hundred paces of rammed earth faced with unmortared black dark rock slabs, five feet thick at the low roof wall and sloping thirty degrees outward to deflect stone shot. Beyond the main curtain wall, the earth had been carved into three nested rings of defensive trenches, cut six to eight feet into the frozen ground and bristling with sharpened willow stakes. Black smoke rose in sluggish, greasy coils from the courtyard fire bowls. He carried the stench of burned horse dung, sulfur, wet wool, and the clear metal coppery tang of old blood frozen into clay.
Behind Pei Jing, five hundred men of the 5th Shock Battalion came to a ragged halt. Their breath billowed in thick white clouds. They condensed instantly into rime on their eyebrows and the collars of their sheepskin tunics. They were conscripts from the southern prefectures. Country martial examinees, dispossessed tenant farmers, and cadet branch sons who lacked the silver to purchase a…
