The scent of blood on the wind brought out the scavengers before noon.
They were three hundred paces below the Cold Crag Shelf. They crossed a narrow granite bench that skirted the western gorge. To their left rose the sheer dark rock wall of the mountain, glazed in brittle rime. To their right plunged a three-hundred-foot drop into the jagged rock garden of Wolf-Jaw Deep gap.
Cheng Shan halted, his bearded hatchets already sliding from their rawhide loops with a dry hiss of seasoned elk tendon.
“Rear flank,” the scout said in a flat voice. “Downwind.”
Pei Jing turned his head without shifting his footing.
Seventy paces back along the narrow shelf, five frost-crag wolves emerged from the stunted alpine scrub. Two more appeared on a rocky terrace six feet above them, cutting off the return path down the mountain. They were massive, long-legged hunting beasts with coarse, salt-and-pepper pelts, their ribs showing through their flanks like the staves of broken barrels. Frost rimed their black whiskers. Their yellow eyes burned with the wild, unreasoning malice of starvation.
“Seven,” Cheng Shan murmured, his weight settling into his knees. “Alpha is the grey brute on the upper terrace with the notched right ear. Winter snow came twenty days early. They’ve been pushed out of the high valleys by the cat. They’re too hungry to care about human weapons.”
