The vast Cold Wave of December swept south from the North American Great Plains, blowing to winter's end on the Granada River, then continued more than a thousand li farther south, where outside Otter City it turned into a faintly cool autumn wind.
This core city-state of the northern Huastec tribes, this fertile land at the mouth of the Tampico River, had, through five or six long years of raiding and slaughter, become utterly dead, cold, and desolate. Only the Kingdom's merchant caravans carried on trade in this bleak seaside city-state, and they had also become the rare thread of connection between the surrounding warring tribes.
The Dog-kin's raids southward spared neither noble nor lowly, and the life-and-death fighting was savagely cruel. The once-revered northern Huastec God-descendants, priests, and nobles had either become corpses buried in the marshes, skulls collected by the Red Crow tribes, or had been deliberately attacked by the Dog-kin camps of the Qingqiu tribes, dying in murky and inexplicable ways.
Only some sharp and decisive Huastec headmen, or those already near the southern jungle, abandoned their original camps, stockades, and even city-states in time, leading their tribes smoothly southward. They had to move at least three hundred li south through jungle, marsh, and seashore before they could reach the ancient city ruins by the Great River, Pantepec, "the hill where banners flew." After that, the tribes still had to cross the river from this tributary of the Tampico River system, the Pantepec Banner Hill River, and join the southern Huastec Alliance before they could count as having completely escaped the terrifying spearhead of the Wasteland Dog-kin.
By this point, of the three hundred thousand northern Huastec tribes, at least forty thousand had died in the chaos of war, nearly a hundred thousand tribespeople had fled and