The scraping of wooden shovels echoed rhythmically across the frozen stone terrace.
Star-Envoy Varkos leaned heavily against his shovel, his breathing hoarse and painful. His right shoulder was wrapped in crude cotton bandages, soaked with antiseptic spirit salve and hydraulic sealant. His bright yellow sanitation vest flapped loosely against his caved-in armor.
Beside him, former Emperor Ji Wudao tossed another pile of slush into the wooden drainage trough.
“Bend your knees, Envoy Varkos,” Ji Wudao murmured without looking up. “If you shovel with your lower back, you will regret it by midday. Sweeper Sima ignored my advice last week. He spent three days sleeping on a wooden bench with vinegar poultices.”
Varkos glared at him with his single swollen eye, his mechanical jaw trembling with rage. “I am a high-ranking Star-Envoy of the Blood-Tax Star Chamber! I have conquered forty inhabited worlds! I do not take shoveling advice from a deposed mortal monarch!”
“You shovel the snow, or you do not get hot turnip soup,” former Minister Sima Quan grunted, tossing a frozen chunk of ice past Varkos’s boots. “Old Uncle Liu does not tolerate ideological arguments on the sanitation detail. Now clear that gutter. The artisans are arriving.”
Former Minister Qian Wansan hastily pulled a tub of axle grease from his sanitation cart, offering it toward Varkos’s sparking shoulder. “Here, friend. Slap some grease onto those exposed gears. If the cold freezes your hydraulic fluid, the supervisors will deduct two copper work credits from your daily meal voucher.”
