The frost and mist of the early morning did not drift upward into the sky—they chose instead to settle low upon the ground.
On the great drill ground, not a whisper of the usual training clamor could be heard.
No war drums, no horns.
Tie Lanshan, draped in a heavy coat, sat upright upon a commander's platform raised a full ten feet above the flat earth. Upon the low table before him, the general's seal that governed all military authority in the northern frontier lay secure beneath a paperweight, not one inch out of place.
The Old Marshal wore no heavy armor today. Before the sky had even begun to lighten, under the pretext of "rectifying internal discipline and inspecting the garrison's military regulations," he had cast down a single order arrow.
With that unimpeachable excuse, the four main divisions of garrison soldiers—along with cooks, servants, and camp followers—were all herded onto the bare, sandy ground beyond the outer city wall.
It was called an inspection of military discipline, but in truth it was a cage. All the various battalion officers had been shuffled and interwoven, each man suddenly standing beside colleagues he had never commanded, and no one could move so much as a step from his formation.
The method was ruthless and clean. With this single stroke, the four tens of thousands of mouths within the pass—and eighty thousand ears—were severed completely from the rumors circulating through the streets and alleys.
The soldiers did not remove their armor; the horses did not leave their saddles.
Even if the world outside were to erupt with the roar of battle, these forty thousand troops would hear not a sound without the order from their commander.
And if Chen Changfeng had spent the past five years planting agents within the army itself, they were now locked within an iron cage that had not a single crack—this "discipline rectification" that was truly seamless—and no so much as a scrap of paper or a single word could pass through.
...
While the drill ground was welded shut with iron locks, the armored soldiers of the Commander-in-Chief's personal guard—the left battalion—had already stripped off their gleaming polished armor.
They donned the plain cloth tunics of common folk and split into twenty columns, moving like dark currents through hidden channels, silently seeping into the labyrinthine streets and alleys of Zhenbei Pass.
This was the blade that had always guarded the marshal's tent, the sharpest weapon in Tie Lanshan's hand, accustomed to charging through seas of soldiers and horses.
But today, they each carried registry ledgers, going to inspect the rubble piles and dry well edges of ordinary homes, performing the base duties that should have fallen to provincial clerks: checking door-plates and household registers, searching for smuggled salt and miscellaneous contraband.
...
In the southern part of the city, down a narrow, dead-end alley.
An icy wind blew through, rolling a few gray, withered leaves into a dry well at the corner.
A common soldier named Xiao Liuzi hunched his neck, his hands clasped together.
Xiao Liuzi was currently using his sheathed sword, poking and prodding through the frozen earth and dead grass around the well platform.
"Truly enough to set your teeth on edge," he muttered.
Xiao Liuzi spat to the side and could not help but complain: "Here we are, following the Marshal outside the pass killing barbarians—that's a bold trade where you see the red of your blade and earn your future with valor."
"But now? The fine brothers of the Marshal's personal guard are being sent to clear gutters and sweep latrines."
"Digging through people's backyards, turning over water vats, counting ashes in a blacksmith's forge."
"If word of this reaches the brothers of other battalions on the city walls, how are we ever supposed to hold our heads up again?"
The squad leader, Zhou Quan, walked behind them.
Hearing this, Zhou Quan stopped in his tracks. Without a single word, he brought his palm flat against the protective leather collar at the back of Xiao Liuzi's neck—a resounding slap.
The impact sent Xiao Liuzi staggering to his knees, pain shooting through him as he gasped for air, but he forced the cry back down his throat.
Zhou Quan stepped forward, his face hard as forged iron:
"Marshal Tie carries strategies in his chest enough to pacify all four seas and the nine provinces."
"And a foot soldier like you, fit only to carry a spear and hoist a shield, dares to measure his designs?"
Zhou Quan grabbed Xiao Liuzi by the collar and hoisted him bodily off the ground.
"A personal guard is a dog under the marshal's banner! When the Marshal says bite, you swallow it whole—bone, sinew, and all!"
Zhou Quan's words came low and tight, pressed directly into Xiao Liuzi's face. "If he tells you to dig through a latrine, you chew the dirt beneath the filth and taste whether it's salty!
"Open your eyes wide. Stare at every brick newly turned, mark every patch of damp soil where moss has yet to grow.
"If some courtyard is left unsearched by even a foot, and a rebel slips through—and this fine fortress of ours becomes nothing but a grave mound for the barbarians—
Then every head on this squad lines up, one after another, to be stuffed into the horse troughs and chewed up as fodder! Do you understand?"
Xiao Liuzi broke out in a cold sweat, nodding hastily. He didn't even have time to wipe the dirt from his neck before bending down again, knife in hand, to dig at the soil.
The orders ran from one end of the street to the other. The guards of the left battalion held their breath, following the ledger door by door, turning over every home they could.
Wherever they found white, freshly scraped earth exposed beside a foundation wall, or where the edge of a long-dried well gave off the stench of oozing sludge, they marked it with a charcoal stroke.
All the common folk of the outer city were ordered to keep their doors shut. Not even a stray dog dared trot through the streets.
At the end of a dead-end lane, two soldiers used iron crowbars to pry open a wooden door sealed by a copper lock.
Inside, the courtyard was choked with weeds, the water vat dry and cracked.
Several men entered with blades drawn, examining the gaps between the bricks inch by inch.
Wherever a brick felt loose, they drove their sword tips downward, piercing the earth until they struck solid stone foundation before stopping.
No one spoke a single word through the whole process. Only the harsh scrapes and screeches of iron against stone punctuated the silence.
The entire outer city—under a net so fine even the wind could not pass through—was raked from end to end, inch by inch, by the left battalion soldiers like a fine-toothed comb.
At the other end of the great search, the most elite squad of veteran soldiers, men who had followed Tie Lanshan for over a decade, did not pause in the common lanes.
These old soldiers, all long since wearing the ragged clothes of market laborers, followed the direction where the city's feng shui leaked and stank the most—the one place living men were most reluctant to go—straight toward the mule-and-horse market in the southwestern corner of the pass.
...
The mule market hugged the base of the old city wall, broken by an earthquake a century ago.
This place never saw the sun. The stench of animal dung and sour, rotting hay simmered together into a caustic, choking miasma.
The enclosure walls were piled from rubble and packed clay, battered by the years into ruinous disrepair.
There were no stone slabs here; the paths were nothing but yellow earth churned to mud by countless hooves and cart wheels.
The morning market had not yet reached its business peak, but the sharp greed of money-making was already rising in the air.
Along several crude wooden fences, fluctuating clusters of buyers and sellers had begun to gather.
Among them were men claiming to be southern border military households selling private-trade horses, and others—half-Chinese, half-barbarian traders—with high-bridged noses and slightly curling hair.
They haggled in a dozen accents, red-faced and snarling in the biting wind over a difference of just a few strings of copper coins.
An aged Hequ horse with worn-down teeth was tethered hard to a wooden stake.
The creature was gaunt, ribs jutting against its matted hide. The joints of its rear legs bore raw, flesh-deep wounds, and its coat had crusted into hard, grimy clumps.
A sharp scout who had been hand-picked by Marshal Tie for his personal service had now blended completely into this filthy corner of the world.
He wore a greasy, gleaming sheepskin coat, carried a shrunken leather saddlebag, and his face was smeared with two dark patches of wind-rubbed highland red.
The scout spoke in a hoarse, half-fluent Liangzhou dialect, circling the Hequ horse twice as he waved his fingers in the air, performing the crude palm-reading tricks that only the most second-rate horse-buyers would ever use.
"You beast—your teeth are ground down flat, and those legs have horrible old wounds!" the scout grumbled, spittle flying as he jabbed a finger at the horse's back with an air of disgust.
"With a rack of bones like that, you'd be too scrawny even for the butcher's block of the meat trade."
"That's a mighty big cut you're asking for. You planning on eating him raw?"
A filthy, dust-caked straw curtain was pushed aside by a hand as withered and gnarled as tree bark.
The shopkeeper, Hunchback Zhang, shuffled slowly across the threshold, carrying an air of a man already halfway to the grave.
His tattered cotton wadded jacket hung off him like rags on a skeleton. Unbothered, he said,
"Ah, good customer, a deal's only fair if both sides are willing."
Hunchback Zhang coughed twice.
"Sure, this animal here ain't much to look at."
"But when it comes to raw hauling strength for bricks and packs, and the steady footing beneath him—you won't find another like him in the whole mule-and-horse market."
He pointed down the row of stalls.
"If you think he's too dear, go buy one of them slick-coated saddle horses over yonder."
"I guarantee that horse won't make it ten li through the sand before he's flat on his belly, wheezing his last."
To sell the act, the undercover agent fished a few chipped copper coins from his waist pouch and jangled them under Hunchback Zhang's nose, lowering his voice conspiratorially.
"Shopkeeper Zhang, let's not play games. I'm headed west—roads are rough out there, and I need animals that can take a beating."
"This horse of yours might carry a bolt of cloth, but load him down with something heavy, and he'll snap his spine like a twig."
The agent squinted, dripping with disdain. "You said he can haul bricks?"
"I'm out in the middle of nowhere—you think I'm buying a horse to build a house?"
At the word "bricks," Hunchback Zhang's sagging eyelids lifted a sliver, a flicker of something darting through his eyes before vanishing just as quickly.
He gave a dry chuckle, baring a mouthful of yellow teeth:
"Well now! You's just funnin' me, customer. That was talk, plain and simple."
"What I mean is, this horse has a big frame, solid underneath."
"You load him up with a cartload of iron goods or rock salt, he'll set it all across the sand sea smooth as you please."
The agent waved a hand in feigned impatience.
"Enough, enough. Knock off two strings of cash, and I'll take him off your hands, though it pains me."
Hunchback Zhang shook his head vigorously, stepping back half a pace and leaning against the doorframe.
"Two strings?"
"Then best you try another shop, customer. My little business can't take that kind of bleeding."
As the two haggled, a rarely seen old soldier from Tie Lanshan's personal guard's left battalion—Yang Cang—ambled up from the other end of the dirt road, a few brothers in tow.
Casually brushing dust from his clothes, he walked up to the Ferghana horse.
Ignoring the spat between the agent and Hunchback Zhang, he grabbed a wad of dry straw into his palm, crouched low.
Yang Cang tapped firmly along the horse's shinbone, feeling the density of the bone beneath the skin.
"Sturdy frame, no doubt about it."
His tone easy, he ran his hand back along the horse's flank, his fingers gliding seemingly at random under the belly line.
