At dusk, the sleet turned into heavy, wet flakes of mountain snow, cloaking the jagged shoulders of Eagle-Beak Ridge in a veil of cold white silence.
Pei Jing and Cheng Shan lay prone upon a flat shelf of grey granite, seven hundred feet above the valley floor on the northern spur. They were wrapped in their reversible wolf pelts, their faces smeared with a paste of charcoal dust and bear animal fat to eliminate skin glare against the snow crust.
Directly below them, sprawling across the flattened rock crown like an iron saddle, sat Blood Wolf Castle.
From this vantage point, Pei Jing’s newly optimized sight senses dissected the compound with the cold, measured calm distance of a royal land-mapper.
The castle occupied a tear-drop-shaped plateau three hundred paces long by one hundred and twenty paces wide. On the southern, eastern, and western faces, the mountain dropped away in sheer, upright precipices of fractured granite that fell five hundred feet into the boulder-strewn gorges below.
Only a single approach existed from the valley: the southern switchback, a steep, winding ramp eight paces wide, choked with rock rubble and guarded by two forward gatehouses.
Pei Jing didn’t waste time looking at the southern approach. A direct frontal assault up an open road against three hundred entrenched defenders was a tactical absurdity.
