At dawn, the sky above the Black Basalt Crags looked like wet tallow. Violet lines ran through the clouds. Purple frost clung to the pines and smoked when it touched the dew.
Pei Jing stood in the eastern watchtower of a ruined border station, three miles north of Iron Gate Gorge. He had sent the fastest riders ahead while the people from the bridge were still moving. Now the runners’ tallies lay in his notebook.
Lu’s column had the families from the White River bridge and Cloud-Crest Pass. The others had come in along the northern mine road, the western salt track, and the river road from the southern ferries. Their clerks had sent runners with running estimates from the junctions. Added together, they came to 2,140,000 people, 41,200 heavy wagons, and 18,000 handcarts. They had nineteen thousand oxen, thirty-four thousand mules, eighty-two thousand bushels of millet, and fourteen thousand sacks of wheat. The carts alone carried food for only a few days. If the southern depots still had what their own registers promised, strict rations might stretch to twenty-eight days.
Below him, the lines of wagons made the plain look like a dry riverbed full of moving silt. Dust hung over them. There were no sect flags. Most of the royal officials had fled east before the first families reached the plain. Judge Lu was still on the road with his clerks, trying to get the columns into order.
