Midnight arrived over the southern outer edge of the Azure Cloud Sect not with moonlight, but with a choking, pitch-black shroud of freezing alpine fog.
The heat on the ridge had dropped to six degrees below freezing. The rocky scree beneath their boots was slick with a thin skin of black ice. The mountain wind whistled through the crags with the mournful, high-pitched scream of a dying beast. Every breath was knife-cold, condensing into thick white plumes that clung to the frost-coated rocks.
High above the pass, Boundary Pylon Three stood like a black glass giant statue against the gloom. Its amber barrier light flickered with increasing violence as the leech-like load from the valley drained its main charge bank banks.
Hidden beneath an overhanging shelf of dark rock thirty paces from the pylon’s foundation trench, Lin Tao and Tie Shan crouched in motionless silence.
Lin Tao had removed his heavy wicker pack, setting it securely between two granite boulders. He wore his dark charcoal linen tunic buttoned tightly to the throat. His land-mapper metal pen was held lightly between his frost-numbed fingers. Beside him, Tie Shan was a bronze statue, his breathing slowed to a rhythmic, barely noticeable draft, his twelve-pound iron pry-bar resting horizontally across his lap, its polished surface wrapped in dark hemp cloth to eliminate metal glare.
