The sound of three thousand men running across crusted snow was like the tearing of coarse linen.
Iron-tipped boots pounded the frozen ground, shattering the surface rime into grey dust. The steppe shock infantry moved in three wedge formations. Their square wicker shields were held locked before their chests. Behind them, archers launched high-flight path harassing volleys. Iron needle-point arrow arrows arced into the grey morning sky. It hissed like nesting vipers as they plummeted toward Trench Line Four.
“Shields up! Angle forty-five!” Pei Jing’s command cracked through the ditch like a split whip.
Along the stone retaining wall, the front rank of the 5th Shock Battalion raised their heavy pine mantlets. The bodkins slammed into the thick larch planks with dull, splintering thuds. Pei Jing had ordered the shields angled outward. Because of that, seventy percent of the incoming flight driving force glanced off. That left the shafts quivering harmlessly in the frozen wood.
“Seventy paces,” Pei Jing murmured, his right hand resting loose upon the shark-skin handle of the Cloud-Splitter. “Sixty-five.”
The barbarian vanguard was fifty paces from the forward ditch when their lead war-shouts peaked in volume. The men were massive, broad-shouldered nomads from the Black Wolf tribe, clad in double-layered wolf pelts over crude iron ring-mail. Their faces were smeared with soot and sheep grease to ward off frostbite, their yellowed teeth bared in feral snarls.
