Dawn broke over the northern outer edge not with sunlight, but with a sullen smear of bruised slate along the horizon.
The smoke from the collapsed underground gallery still drifted from the listening sap, thin and pale. He smelled of scorched rock and sulfur ash. At the trench lip, four iron fire bowls sputtered against the biting wind, their fuel reduced to dry pine bark and horse dung briquettes.
General Yue Ding stood at the edge of the crater where the tunnel roof had caved in. His black iron mountain-scale armor was frosted with a thin crust of rime, the crimson silk general’s sash over his shoulder stiff as cardboard from the sub-zero chill.
Beside him, two staff officers with ink brushes and sheepskin ledgers inspected the soil subsidence.
“Fourteen feet down,” one of the scribes reported, his teeth chattering behind a wool muffler. “The entire gallery collapsed for sixty paces north. Their digging team was caught beneath three hundred tons of shale. The foundation stones of the Northern Bastion show zero shifted weight.”
Yue Ding nodded once. He turned his weathered, square-jawed face toward Pei Jing, who was examining the edge of an entrenching spade with his thumb.
“Nineteen men,” Yue Ding said in his gravelly deep. “No alarms. No breach. In thirty winters on the border, I’ve seen five fortresses fall to tunnel diggers who broke through the courtyard flat stone slabs at midnight. You stopped them before their miners smelled our mortar.”
