The clearing was quiet, save for the bitter whistling of the northern wind through the jagged dark rock bluffs.
On the frozen ground lay the crumpled corpse of Deacon Wu, his black silk robes stained with sulfur and freezing mud. Beside him, eleven of his twelve armored body-refiner corpses lay permanently broken. Their spines snapped, their knee joints snapped. Their steel breastplates caved in by Tie Shan’s devastating pry-bar strikes.
Only one corpse remained standing.
It was the twelfth unit of the squad. A towering, six-foot-four warrior wrapped in battered black cavalry plate, its six-foot barbed iron glaive clutched in its left hand.
The corpse had not attacked. Deacon Wu’s heart ceased beating and his nervous system blew out. Then, the twelfth corpse didn’t collapse into a pile of lifeless meat like an ordinary puppet whose strings had been cut.
It simply froze in mid-stride.
Its left foot remained planted on a slab of frozen shale. Its right foot was raised two inches off the ground, poised to take a forward step that never came. Its head was cocked slightly to the left, its milky eyes staring into the dark mist.
Lin Tao approached within three paces, his test left eye wide open.
