The forward encampment of the Ashen Bone Ghost Sect was not laid out like any military camp known to the royal generals.
There were no rows of canvas tents, no picket lines of tethered horses, no cookfires roasting grain or salt pork. No watchmen calling out the night watches. Instead, the two-league basin was divided into sixteen massive square pens enclosed by low palisades of stone-hard pine trunks.
Inside each pen stood hundreds of armored corpses, arranged in rigid, motionless rows of thirty by ten. They stood shoulder to shoulder in total silence, their iron cleavers rested across their breastplates, their milky white eyes fixed upon the blank darkness ahead. Three thousand bodies, yet the only sound in the entire valley was the relentless, whistling moan of the freezing northern wind blowing through their hollow ribs.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan lay prone atop a twenty-foot limestone outcrop overlooking the western edge of the basin.
Between them and the corpse pens stood the sect’s command nodes. Three mobile towers built entirely from hardened giant beast bones.
The towers were terrifying triumphs of rotting stonework. Standing forty-five paces tall, each structure was built around the arched spinal columns of huge ancient sea serpents that had been excavated from the northern shale. The linked ribs formed spiral staircases and firing platforms, bound together by heavy bands of hammered star-iron and caulked with pitch-black potion-made pitch.
