The iron deadbolt slid home with a solid, leaden thump that shook through Pei Jing’s wrist.
He didn’t right away turn around to inspect his new dwelling. Instead, he stood with his spine pressed flat against the damp hardwood door, listening.
In the dark silence of the lower catacombs, sound was the only reliable warning system. Fifty paces back along the hall, the communal drainage trough trickled with a steady, oily gurgle. Further down Gallery Seven, beyond the sulfur sump, someone was muttering in their sleep. A low, delirious chant interspersed with wet, rasping coughs that spoke of inflamed bronchioles. No footsteps approached the door. No spiritual sense probed the seams of the limestone top door beam.
Pei Jing exhaled slowly through his teeth, allowing his shoulders to drop half an inch.
He reached into his sleeve, struck an iron flint against a piece of charred punk. Then he blew gently until a yellow spark caught. He touched the ember to the wick of a small mutton-animal fat candle he had brought from the mortal border.
A pale, sputtering ring of yellow light pushed back the darkness.
Cave 74 was not a safe hall. It was an extraction cell.
The chamber measured exactly eight feet in length by six feet in width. The ceiling arched overhead at a height of barely six and a half feet, its raw limestone surface rough-hewn and weeping with cold water drops. A steady, rhythmic drop of stone-heavy groundwater fell from a hairline fissure near…
