The space between the forward trench line and the northern bluffs was known to the border guards as the Dead Mile.
It was an expanse of frozen peat, fractured shale, and wind-scoured drifts littered with the rusted iron heads of spent crossbow bolts, horse rib cages picked clean by tundra crows. The blackened scars of old pitch fires. Under the twenty-eight-below chill, the crust of snow was hard enough to support the weight of a running wolf, but dangerous to a man in iron armor.
Pei Jing crossed the Dead Mile in the predawn twilight.
He wore no iron breastplate today. The weight of heavy layered-scale armor created an unbalanced quirky load that degraded forward stride smooth speed by eighteen percent. Over his boiled-leather tunic he wore only his plain charcoal-grey robe, cinched tightly with the shark-skin belt. Across his back hung the Cloud-Splitter. Its hard was dark metal spine cold against his shoulder blade.
His feet moved in the rhythmic, sliding rhythm of his compounded footwork. Each step was a quiet skate across the crust. The snow didn’t crunch, and his boots left depressions less than a quarter-inch deep.
Halfway up the rocky slope of Raven Crag, the slope steepened to forty degrees. The path was a jagged stairs of broken granite slabs, coated in semi-clear black ice.
