The climb up the western chimney of the Dragon-Spine Ravine took eighteen minutes.
In the moonless dark, the upright fissure of black dark rock was coated in a dangerous crust of hoarfrost. Pei Jing climbed without ropes, his fingers sinking into hairline rock seams. His jade-iron skeletal lattice bore his weight effortlessly. Where an ordinary climber’s forearms would pump full of muscle burn within fifty feet, Pei Jing’s crimson-gold blood supplied nonstop oxygen. That kept his flexor muscles fully supple.
Behind him, Cheng Shan scrambled up the rope line Pei Jing anchored at the hundred-foot shelf, his breath coming in shallow, controlled gasps.
At the rim of the gorge, six thousand feet above sea level, the sub-zero wind tore across the exposed granite plateau.
Pei Jing flattened his body into a shallow drift of powdery snow thirty paces downwind of the rim trail. He wore his charcoal-grey woolen tunic, dusted with white powder to match the surrounding snowfield.
Ten paces ahead, behind a cluster of wind-carved rock spines, two dark silhouettes were crouching.
They were Blood Wolf scouts. Both men were swathed in coarse sheepskin coats lined with wolf fur, their faces masked by grease-stained woolen scarves. Across their shoulders hung short recurve bows. At their hips were curved steppe sabers and brass hunting horns wrapped in strips of red felt.
