North of the gorge, sixty thousand fiends lost the voice that had been guiding them. Cleavers and Spined Gorgers turned on the creatures beside them. Some fought over pieces of broken shell. The others scattered into the salt scrub. Ten minutes after Vor fell, there was no line of troops left on the plain.
The rift was still thirty miles wide. Wind poured up through it, carrying the last clouds into the dark. Purple frost formed along its edges and fell toward the crags. Pei Jing watched a new patch of frost spread on the rocks. If anything else from the void came to feed on Vor, it would have an open road down.
He tied the little sharkskin notebook more firmly at his waist. Then he sprang from the basin to the first shelf on the eastern cliff. His boots struck rock nine times on the climb. Gravel fell away behind him. At the top of the Black Basalt Crags, the wind caught his bare shoulders.
On the summit he found the Boundary Anchor Stone the tablet had marked. A tablet set into the socket named the royal masons and gave the year they had set the stone, six centuries earlier. It recorded the twenty-ton weight and the teams of oxen that had hauled it up the ridge. Channels cut in the stone carried the pull from the earth up to the currents in the air.
