Under the rumbling shadow of the Earth-Devourer, the earth ceased to be silent stone.
The frozen ground shook at forty-two cycles per second. It was driven by the churning hardwood caterpillar tracks and the heavy strides of the eight chained northern mammoths. The air beneath the mobile castle was dense with coal smoke, hot animal fat grease, and the musky steam rising from the shaggy bellies of the great beasts.
Above Pei Jing’s head, thirty barbarian crossbowmen on the forward narrow high walkway leaned over the timber railing. He shouted down in harsh steppe gutturals as they pointed their short iron stirrup-bows into the undercarriage.
Pei Jing didn’t glance upward.
He stood in the narrow clearance between the churning tracks, his boots planted in the icy rime.
Beside his left heel, the knotty bamboo walking staff of Sword Saint Lu Tingxuan remained driven three inches into the frozen bedrock. The seasoned yellow cane hummed with high-hum sound data, funneling the machine’s internal clockwork ringing tones directly into Pei Jing’s body-sense field.
His mind audited the target with total careful care.
The Earth-Devourer was eighty feet tall, sixty feet wide. Then he weighed one hundred and eighty tons. Its forward glacis was clad in three-inch hammered bog-iron plates angled at forty-five degrees. But iron was merely an external skin. The true spine of the castle was composed of twelve upright bents of seasoned northern oak, each three feet in width, joined to transverse cross-beams by four-inch forged iron wood slot pins.
