The descent of Elder Qian’s deathsworn strike team through the private upkeep shaft was swift, silent. Then he steeped in skilled slaughter.
Unlike Lin Tao and Tie Shan, who had navigated the broken rungs and unrendered shape of the main spiral stair, Qian’s men used an ancient, counterweighted brass cage that dropped through a secret air-flow chimney pipe bored directly behind the elder’s private villa. Within seven minutes, the twelve masked killers and their furious master had reached the upper narrow high walkway sixty feet above the flooded floor of Valve Station Delta.
The shadows along the iron narrow high walkway sixty feet above the flooded chamber were pitch-black. He smelled of old grease and cold star-iron. Elder Qian’s twelve retainers were killers who had earned their reputation in the border blood-pits of the northern provinces. Men who had slaughtered whole merchant caravans for a bag of spirit stones and cut the limbs of rebellious mining laborers without a flicker of emotion. They knelt along the rusted railing with clockwork stillness, their iron skull masks catching the dim blue glow from the water below.
The air in the high shadows was thick with the sweet, intoxicating perfume of boiled away sky dew.
