Midnight in Sector Nine was not dark. It was a murky, underwater twilight cast by the dying violet hum of the Precursor energy channel.
The air in Drift 9-B had cooled slightly to fifty-two degrees. But the humidity remained at total saturation. Warm stone water dripped continuously from the stone-hard hardwood ceiling, pattering into the drainage gutters with the steady, relentless rhythm of a counting clock.
Lin Tao sat cross-legged on a dry slab of black dark rock, twenty paces inside the drift mouth.
His right palm was unwrapped. The charred blister tissue had begun to slough away under the soothing action of Tie Shan’s mountain moss sap. He showed raw, pink skin beneath. In his lap rested his four-inch land-mapper’s metal pen, its iron spine cleaned of soot and freshly polished with a piece of dry leather.
Beside him, Tie Shan stood in the shadows of an ancient timber wooden props arch. He stared up into the high darkness of the air-flow shaft.
“Tie Shan,” Lin Tao whispered. “What are you watching?”
The young giant pointed upward with his iron pry-bar.
“The wind changed,” Tie Shan rumbled, his deep voice barely carrying over the dripping water. “The drafts from the high quarry always blow down. Tonight, the air is pulling up. Sucking like a mouth.”
Lin Tao closed his right eye, scanning the upright shaft through his left.
The tracking data overlay revealed a disturbing sky phenomenon. The air pressure in Sector Nine had dropped by eight percent over the past three hours. Deep within the bedrock, the Precursor earth-shaking steadying fin lines were flickering in rapid, chaotic pulses.
“The fault line is slipping,” Lin Tao noted inwardly. “The mountain’s crushing weight is transferring to the lower pillars.”
Suddenly, Tie Shan’s nostrils flared.
He didn’t make a sound. He simply tapped the floor three times with the knuckle of his left forefinger—a silent, physical alert.
“Oil,” Tie Shan whispered, so low the sound was barely heard above the dripping water. “Snake-oil animal fat on leather boots.”
Lin Tao turned his gaze down the haulage tunnel.
Through his left eye, the complete darkness of the drift was rendered in high-contrast glowing green:
Three figures were creeping down the iron rails of the drift.
They weren’t sect guards. They wore tight-fitting tunics of boiled water-buffalo hide, blackened with charcoal to blend into the shadows. Their boots were wrapped in greasy wool rags to muffle their footfalls in the water.
In their hands, they held eight-inch thrusting daggers of cold-forged iron, the blades coated in a sticky, green-black resin that smelled faintly of crushed bitter almonds.
Viper-gall toxin, Lin Tao’s memory cataloged. A neurotoxin harvested from underground pit vipers. A single scratch to the bloodstream would cause complete deep-belly total numbness within forty seconds.
Overseer Hu had hired skilled contract killers. Rogue students who lived in the lawless shantytowns outside the sect boundary. They took contracts to eliminate inconvenient witnesses.
To prepare for the hunt, Lin Tao had driven four scrap iron nails into the soft shale floor at five-pace intervals along the drift entrance. Each nail was connected by a strand of fine spider-silk cord to a small brass buckle resting on his knee.
An entity stepped into the flooded ditch twenty paces away. Each time, the crushing pressure wave in the water plucked the spider-silk thread. It sent a distinct, tactile shaking directly into Lin Tao’s skin. It was a primitive sound ground-shaking array. One that needed zero spiritual energy and left no detectable magical aura in the air.
He felt the first shaking three minutes before the shadow killers arrived. Three distinct pulses, spaced six feet apart, moving at a cautious, tactical stalking pace through the sulfur slurry.
Lin Tao stood up smoothly, keeping his boots inside the unrendered shadow of the dark rock wall.
“Three men,” Lin Tao murmured to Tie Shan. “Armed with poisoned steel. They’re moving along the north drainage ditch where the water is shallow.”
Tie Shan slowly rose to his full height, his massive frame uncoiling like a waking tiger.
“I take the lead,” Tie Shan rumbled, his muscles bunching across his broad shoulders. “You watch the dark.”
“Don’t engage them in the center of the drift,” Lin Tao instructed quietly. “The ceiling wooden props there’s rotten. A violent struggle will bring down three tons of slate. Force them onto the western shale ledge.”
Tie Shan nodded once, gripping his pry-bar with two hands.
The lead assassin rounded the bend of the drift, stepping carefully over a rusted iron rail.
He was a lean, scarred man of forty, with cold, dead eyes and a jagged scar across his throat. He paused, raising his hand to halt the two men behind him, his nose twitching as he caught the faint smell of bear-animal fat salve in the humid air.
He looked directly into the dark nook where Lin Tao sat.
The assassin smiled—a thin, cruel slit in his dirty face—and raised his poisoned dagger into a low, underhand thrusting guard.
“Found the sheep,” the assassin whispered to his partners. “Take the boy alive for Hu. Kill the mute.”
The three killers belonged to the Black-Ditch Brotherhood. A ruthless trade ring of discarded former students who lived in the lawless ravines beyond the Azure Cloud Sect’s outer boundary wall. For fifteen years, they had operated as the unofficial disposal service for the logistics elders, specializing in the quiet elimination of inconvenient whistleblowers, recalcitrant slave leaders, and compromised merchants.
They moved with practiced, skilled synergy. The lead killer tested the water depth with the curved tip of his boot, ensuring that no sudden splash betrayed their presence. Meanwhile, the two men behind him kept their eyes locked on the ceiling timbers, watching for falling shale. They had performed twenty such murders in the lower drifts. To their minds, this was routine butchery of an unarmed slave and a mute laborer.
The three killers lunged forward through the steaming water.