The afternoon wind tore through the stunted scrub pines along the storm road, rattling the dry shale on the upper bluffs with a sound like scattered gravel.
Taren lay flat on a shelf of weathered limestone thirty feet above the road, his mottled grey cloak blending into the pale stone while he watched the wayside shrine below.
The shrine had been dedicated to an ancient mountain saint whose stone visage had long since eroded into an anonymous block of mossy granite.
A caravan of eight freight wagons had halted in the gravel clearing before the shrine, ostensibly carrying ordinary salt fish and mountain turnip mash toward the western markets.
Taren peered through a brass spyglass, his sharp veteran eyes tracking the teamsters as they unhitched their mules to drink from the roadside spring.
At first glance, it looked like a routine rest stop for common civilian haulers, but the positioning of the guards betrayed an entirely different operational discipline.
