The wind on the high low roof wall of Fort Karst was bitter enough to freeze the tears upon a man’s eyelashes.
Dawn had not yet broken over the eastern crags. But the eastern horizon was a bruised, slate-grey line bruised with the first pale violet light of morning. Down in the valley, a league below the sheer cliff face, the campfires of the Obsidian Legion dotted the gravel riverbed like dying embers in a hearth of crushed slate.
Between the castle walls and the valley floor lay the Ashen Ravine, still choked with the smoking, ruined bulk of the Giant statue of Khorat.
Nearly three thousand souls had crammed themselves onto the castle walls, the wall-walks, and the timber hoardings of the outer bailey. Women holding swaddled infants, wounded wagon drivers leaning on broken pick-handles, apprentice weavers with frostbitten fingers. The soot-blackened survivors of the guard post stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the stinging gale. Torches sputtered in the iron sconces along the merlons, their orange flames whipped flat by the mountain draft.
At the center of the broad gate-tower platform, Ren Prime stood with his back to the mountain winds.
He wore his frayed woolen coat with its salt-stained hem. His sheepskin apron was tied securely around his narrow waist. His mammoth-bone awl tucked into the leather sheath at his belt. His hands were bare, the violet dark oak-ink ingrained deep beneath his fingernails and into the whorls of his thumbs.
