The ledger of the fourteenth slack tide was the strangest document ever inscribed in the history of royal warfare.
In the quiet, cavernous archive of the Great Scroll hall, Qiao Ming sat cross-legged upon the polished dark rock floor, his bare soles cold against the stone. Across his lap lay a wide slate tablet bound in cured seal-hide. With steady, rhythmic strokes of his soapstone pencil, he recorded the tallies brought to him by the refugee runners:
Captured void-steel broadswords: four thousand one hundred and twenty. Air-powered mining drills disabled: forty. Clockwork void-striders dismantled: forty-six. high-sky war-chariots secured in lotus basins: thirty-three. Scrap bronze, copper tubing, and void-iron plates salvaged: sixty-four tons. Mortals or fighters slain within the safe hall: zero.
Yan Zhiqiu leaned against the massive table, a bowl of hot kelp-broth in one hand and her notched hook-blade resting across her shoulder. Her wind-burned face, pale with days of sleepless vigilance, was lit up by the warm yellow glow of three animal fat lamps.
“Zero dead,” she whispered, shaking her head slowly as she stared at the slate. “In the outer heavens, when a grand sect attacked an enemy stronghold, seventy thousand students would bleed into the dirt before the outer moat was crossed. Zhu Heling brought his finest shock-legions, his personal guards, his heavy drills, and his flying chariots. And we defeated them with forty feet of river mud, an eight-degree slope of wet algae, and a flock of storm petrels.”
