The sound of iron picks biting into sacred marble came through the floor like the gnawing of rats behind a wainscot.
In the narrow passage connecting Entry halls 102 and 103, the air was cold and sharp with the scent of crushed stone. Yan Zhiqiu knelt behind a breastwork thrown together from shattered stone railings, fluted drum-sections, and heavy slabs of green veined stone. In her lap lay the broken slate, its surface gray with dust. With a shard of soft chalk, she was marking the angles of fire covering the hundred-pace hall ahead. Beside her crouched six refugee militia fighters, their knuckles white on the shafts of their hunting spears.
“They are sapping the foundation of the outer gate,” her forward scout whispered, crawling back through a gap in the rubble. The scout was an adolescent boy named Xiao Hu, whose family had been weavers on the silk-platforms of the Azure Heavens before the cold swallowed their world. He was barefoot, his toes stained purple with mud, his chest bound in rough hemp. “They have three air-powered mining drills driven by spirit-coal engines. They are trying to breach the wall above the top door beam.”
“Let them drill the wall,” Yan Zhiqiu said without looking up from her slate. “The top door beam is eight feet of solid granite anchored into the bedrock. If they shake it loose, twenty tons of top door beam will drop like a butcher’s cleaver across their drills. Where is their foot infantry?”
