The descent from the high alpine glaciers to the southern foothills of Mist Peak marked the boundary between deep-rock desolation and mortal brutality.
The height dropped from four thousand feet to two thousand. Then, the howling blizzard subsided into a wet, clinging sleet that blackened the bare branches of the oak groves. The scent of pure, ozone-washed snow gave way to an odor that Pei Jing recognized instantly from his childhood near the river docks. Smoldering wet timber, charred grain, rancid grease. The foul, copper tang of unburied human remains.
Pei Jing paused at the edge of the timberline, twenty paces above the royal trade road.
Between two frost-shattered limestone bluffs, the remains of a royal merchant convoy lay scattered across a hundred paces of muddy cart ruts.
Twelve heavy freight wagons had been overturned and set ablaze. Their seasoned ash-wood axles and sideboards had burned down to warped iron tires and smoking charcoal frames. Sacks of northern coarse salt, cracked barley, and dried beans had been slashed open, trampled into a grey sludge by hundreds of iron-shod horse hooves.
Beside the smoking wagons, twenty-two bodies hung by their ankles from the lower limbs of roadside pines.
They were civilian wagon drivers and hired caravan guards. Their boiled-leather jerkins had been stripped away, their throats slit from ear to ear, their frozen feet dangling three feet above the muddy road. Crows and mountain ravens circled in the slate-grey sky, their harsh, wet croaks echoing between the limestone bluffs as they…
