The retreat of the steppe horde didn’t look like a military pullback. It was a heat-powered collapse.
Across the four miles of no-man’s-land and the open snowfields beyond, ten thousand men and seven thousand shaggy tundra horses broke into frantic flight. Shaman-King Helan Sha’s ivory looking-glass had shattered upon the floorboards of his command carriage. The shaman-king didn’t stop to gather his ritual mammoth-bone staves or his silk-wrapped spirit magic charms. He cut the harness traces of his lead stallion with an iron dagger and fled northward, escorted by forty terror-stricken bodyguards.
Behind them, the barbarian vanguard abandoned everything that held mass.
Iron cooking pots, bundles of sheepskin blankets, spare horse-tack, and barrels of salted horse fat were tossed into the drifts to lighten the pack-sledges. Two hundred wooden supply carts, bogged down in the deep ruts of the thawing tundra, were left standing with their draft oxen still tied to the yokes.
From the sally ports of Fort Ironpass, the heavy oak gates swung outward with a grinding metal groan.
General Yue Ding sat astride his black steppe charger in the central courtyard. His left shoulder and arm were wrapped in blood-stiffened linen splints, bound tightly to his ribs by Pei Jing’s bronze wire stitches. But his right hand held a five-foot steel lance. His single grey eye blazed with cold frontier ferocity.
