After a forty-hour march from Seven-Tower City, fifty thousand grey cloaks moved across the western ridge without a single torch.
Elder Sterling walked at the front of the column, his massive lightning greatsword sheathed across his broad back. Beside him, Mina Vance matched his long strides, her hands tucked loosely into the sleeves of her embroidered blue cloak.
Ahead of them, the red stone jaws of Vermilion Gorge rose into the pale morning sky.
The canyon was a jagged wound in the earth, five hundred paces deep and nearly a mile wide. Through the center churned the Vermilion River, its silt-heavy waters rushing over jagged boulders of blood-veined ironstone.
High on the canyon rims, forty imperial watchtowers jutted into the fog like broken teeth.
Ordinarily, an army approaching the gorge would have triggered fifty warning formations and a hail of venom-tipped ballista bolts. But the watchtowers remained eerily quiet.
Sterling held up the defector’s crimson jade cylinder.
A faint, pulsing rune glowed on the cylinder’s surface. Every time the Free Cauldron column crossed a concealed boundary ward, the jade hummed, transmitting the imperial court’s secret recognition frequency.
