The frost that glazed the granite face of the upper cirque was no thicker than a fingernail. But at an incline of seventy degrees, it turned every rock shelf into grease.
Pei Jing wedged the side of his right boot into a three-finger cleft in the grey stone. His toes gripped through the oiled deer hide, the sole flexing to conform to the uneven crystal-clear bite of the flaky rock. Below his heels, the scree tiered arena dropped four hundred feet into drifting banks of slate-grey fog. A misstep here wouldn’t result in a controlled slide. The mountain would break a man against three successive drop-offs before his carcass settled in the talus.
Twenty paces to his left, Cheng Shan drove an iron piton into a frost heave. The scout worked with economical, measured taps of a flat-faced camp hammer. It muttered a rhythmic count under his breath. He had lashed a spare iron trade-axe to his belt to replace the hickory-hafted hatchet splintered during the dawn skirmish. Even so, his movements favored his bruised left shoulder.
“The beast climbed this face on three legs,” Cheng Shan said, his breath pluming white and freezing instantly in his sparse beard. He pointed with the tip of his hammer at a jagged smear of black coagulum frozen hard against the granite. “See that? Drag marks from the left hind foot. The tendon in its flank is torn three inches deep. If it tries to jump across the deep gap to the southern…
