Senior Disciplinary Elder Song didn’t look at the blood pooling on the shattered granite flat stone slabs. He looked at the ledgers.
The elderly bureaucrat stood on the raised terrace of the quarry, his purple silk robes carefully gathered in his left hand to prevent the greasy coal slurry from staining his stitched hems. In his right hand, he held a slender brass-tipped accounting rod. It he tapped against the oak timber of the balance tripod with sharp, nervous irritation.
Behind him, two junior scribes knelt in the freezing mud, their fingers blue with cold, wildly unrolling long scrolls of yellow linen parchment and dipping reed pens into jars of black soot-ink. Every time the wind howled down the canyon, the parchment flapped wildly, threatening to smear the columns of numbers.
“Ten pounds of cast lead,” Elder Song murmured, his thin lips barely moving as his hawk-like eyes stared down at the slug Tie Shan had pulled from the pivot point. “A fraudulent balance weight wedged into an officially approved Sect balance. Overseer Hu, you blundering, illiterate swine.”
Hu lay on a wicker stretcher ten paces away, his out-of-joint elbow wrapped in coarse hemp sacking that was already soaked through with dark bright red blood. He groaned through clenched teeth, his face the color of wet animal fat, cold sweat glistening on his forehead.
“Elder... Song...” Hu wheezed, bloody spit dribbling from his chin onto his chest. “The slave... He used a demonic art... He shattered the stone with a hex...”
“Silence, fool!” Song snapped, not even turning his head toward the wounded man. “Do you think I’m blind to your ledgers? You have been skimming five tons of copper flux every single moon to pay your gambling debts at the River-Fork Pavilion! If the Grand Elders audit this quarry and discover a sixty-ton deficit in the smelting accounts, my own pension pay will be frozen for twenty years!”
Song turned his cold, calculating gaze upon Lin Tao and Tie Shan.
Lin Tao stood with his head slightly inclined, his stance respectful and humble. His left arm was held tightly inside his tunic where the land-mapper’s metal pen kept his fractured collar bone locked still.
Lin Tao recognized the office type instantly.
In every massive enterprise, whether an ancient training sect or a modern multinational bank, there existed middle managers who cared nothing for justice, smooth speed, or cruelty. Their entire existence was dedicated to avoiding personal debt and safeguarding their retirement benefits.
Song didn’t care that Hu had beaten slaves. He cared that Hu had created an undeniable physical ancient object of fraud that could destroy Song’s standing with the Grand Elders.
“You,” Song said, pointing his brass accounting rod at Lin Tao’s chest. “You’re the slave who pointed out the lead slug.”
“The scale was binding on the pivot, Elder,” Lin Tao replied. He kept his voice quiet, deferential, and devoid of any hint of triumph. “When the beam sticks, the ore can’t balance. A true balance serves the prosperity of the Sect.”
Elder Song stroked his wispy gray goatee, his sharp eyes narrowing into two razor-thin slits as he studied Lin Tao’s face.
“You have a remarkably steady pulse and an uncomfortably sharp eye for an indentured ditch-rat,” Song said slowly. His voice dropped into a dangerous whisper. “A slave who sees too much in the dark usually finds himself buried in it. If I leave you in the central trench, the other overseers will slit your throat before midnight to protect their own ledgers. Then I’ll have another murder investigation to explain to the Ministry of Discipline.”
Song turned his back on Lin Tao and addressed his head scribe.
“Record the decree,” Song ordered coldly. “Overseer Hu is stripped of rank for criminal fault and remanded to the lower sick room. The slave Lin Tao and the mute hauler Tie Shan are reassigned to the Sub-Trench of Sector Nine. Effective right away.”
A sharp, scared gasp rippled through the forty miners standing along the haulage ramp.
Sector Nine was the suicide drift. A deep, underground fissure half a mile beneath the mountain where boiling ground water poured through cracked bedrock, explosive methane gas pooled in stale pockets, and everyone could feel the choking sulfur fumes of the earth-fire veins. No laborer assigned to Sector Nine had ever survived longer than three months.
“Sector Nine is flooded with black water, Elder,” the head scribe whispered, his quill hovering over the parchment. “Three shifts died there last winter from fire rot.”
“Then their deaths will be recorded as natural damp-fever,” Song snapped without looking up. “A neat ledger has no room for complaints.”
Tie Shan’s massive jaw clamped shut, his fists balling into two hard knots of iron at his sides.
Lin Tao raised his right hand, lightly touching Tie Shan’s forearm.
“We accept the assignment, Elder,” Lin Tao said smoothly. “We’ll haul the deep stone.”
Song smiled—a thin, cold smirk of huge relief.
By sending them to Sector Nine, the bureaucrat had solved his hard choice without an execution. The miners would die of gas or fever within thirty days, the lead slug would be quietly melted down, and Song’s retirement ledger would remain clean.
Two armored guards stepped forward. Their heavy axe-spears pointed toward the iron elevator overhead frame at the rear of the quarry.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked down the wooden ramp, flanked by the guards.
The elevator cage was a rusted iron box suspended by grease-caked steel cables that groaned continuously in the mountain wind. The worker, a one-eyed veteran with no tongue, pulled the release lever.
The iron cage dropped into the upright shaft with a stomach-churning jolt.
The daylight pulled back into a tiny blue square above their heads. Then, the damp cold of the quarry gave way to a choking, rotten-egg heat. Water dripped down the black shaft walls, steaming as it touched the rock. Down, down they dropped. They passed the dark openings of abandoned drifts. They plunged half a mile into the burning heart of the earth.
The cage finally slammed onto the iron landing mesh of Sector Nine. Then, the heat hit them like an open fire door.
“Move out,” the guard muttered through a wet cloth tied across his nose. “Shift ends at midnight. If you’re still alive to see it.”