On the fifty-ninth day of his winter retreat, Pei Jing didn’t go down into the plunge basin at dawn.
Instead, he stood at the upper rim of the Dragon-Spine Ravine, cinching the rawhide straps of his traveling pack with clean, steady care.
The load on his back was audited with total exactness:
Item one: The Cloud-Splitter Cleaver in its greased hemp wrap, twenty-two pounds of cold-cooled hard dark metal steel. Item two: Two cast-iron spare bracers, twelve replacement flying needles. A coil of braided rawhide rope, eighteen pounds. Item three: Forty-one pounds of dried panther jerky, two bladders of rendered bear animal fat, and his iron cooking pot. Item four: The Black Mountain Whetstone, four pounds of dense fiery dark rock.
Total external payload: eighty-five pounds. Added to his own body mass of one hundred and ninety pounds, the total mobile mass driven across the mountain was two hundred and seventy-five pounds.
Beside him, Cheng Shan leaned on his horn bow, his wolf cowl pulled low against a stinging north wind.
“Forty miles,” the scout muttered. He stared out over the jagged maze of ridges, frozen gullies, and upright scree passes that stretched between the Dragon-Spine Cascade and the southern border spurs. “Across waist-deep powder drifts, forty-five-degree ice chutes, and shale fields that slide under your boots. A trained royal courier on a fresh mountain gelding needs two days to ride that loop. The horse is blown by the end. You’re doing it on foot, carrying an ironmonger’s shop on…
