Seven sets of dented steel greaves clattered in nervous synchronization down the western smuggling tunnel.
The sound was muffled, accompanied by the heavy, ragged breathing of men carrying too much iron through tight spaces. At the mouth of the basalt archway, Deacon Vane stepped aside with an elegant, mocking flourish of his silk sleeves.
“Step lightly, gentlemen,” Vane whispered, his voice dripping with false courtesy. “You are entering the private sanctum of Master Ash. If you track road-dust onto the woolen carpets, the fee doubles.”
Seven men squeezed through the narrow rock opening, blinking against the warm lantern light of the subterranean oasis.
They were Golden Core Peak cavalry captains from General Dravus’s elite Iron-Blood Column. Their crimson cloaks were torn and crusted with white salt-frost. Their breastplates bore the deep dents of war-hammers, and their bloodshot eyes darted frantically across the tranquil underground lake.
Word of the midnight stockade raid had shattered the morale of the imperial camp.
Five hundred prisoners had vanished into thin air without triggering a single alarm. Even worse for Dravus’s discipline, rumors of Master Ash’s zero-poison pills had spread through the forward trenches like wildfire.
Commander Wu and the three frontier officers had quietly slipped back to the forward outposts before dawn, showing off their cleansed meridians and whispering tales of a miraculous doctor hidden in the deep ruins. Men who had coughed grey blood for five years suddenly realized there was medicine in the world that didn’t rot their bones.
