Dawn brought a white, choking gale that drove ice pellets horizontally across the scree.
Pei Jing tightened the fur straps around his knees. Seventy paces up the slope, the boulder field fanned out like an apron of jagged teeth beneath the Cold Crag Shelf. The blue curtain of ice-slow ice hung suspended from the rock brow, its frozen stalactites groaning under the shifting snowpack.
Beside him, Cheng Shan nocked a needle-point arrow to his horn bow, his breath venting in short, grey plumes through his wolf cowl.
“It hasn’t moved from that ledge since third bell,” the scout muttered. “It knows we’re down here. It watched us butcher those wolves, and it knows we didn’t run.”
“It’s an ambush hunting beast,” Pei Jing said, adjusting his grip on the shark-skin handle of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver. “It doesn’t expend energy on long pursuits when it can force prey into an upright bottleneck. If we advance into the boulder field, we enter its prime kill-circle.”
“Then we draw it down,” Cheng Shan said, raising his bow.
“Hold,” Pei Jing said, studying the dark shape atop the ice curtain. “Observe its stance.”
The panther was not sitting on its haunches. Its belly was pressed flat against the blue ice, massive front paws tucked beneath its chest like tightly packed springs. Its twin tails lay outstretched behind, their silver-tipped bone spurs twitching in a micro-rhythm of three beats per second.
