The yellow parchment inside the leather pouch was not merely an order. It was a formal execution contract written in Overseer Hu’s own crude, aggressive calligraphy.
Lin Tao sat on the dark rock ledge, smoothing the damp parchment against his knee under the dim light of the oil lamp.
Beside him stood Tie Shan. It leaned on his iron pry-bar. His massive chest slowly cooled in the humid underground air. Down in the drainage gutter, the first assassin lay unconscious, bound hand and foot with six feet of spider-silk cord, his shattered wrist swollen to the thickness of a ham.
Lin Tao read the characters inscribed upon the parchment:
“To the Black-Ditch Brotherhood: The slave Lin Tao and the mute beast Tie Shan are to be silenced in Sector Nine before the dawn muster. Sever their right hands and bring them to the lower sick room. Fifty silver bits upon delivery. Stamped with my blood-seal.”
At the bottom of the scroll, pressed firmly into the scarlet beeswax, was the clear, clear impression of Overseer Hu’s personal copper seal.
Lin Tao examined the seal through his left eye.
In the legal high council of the Azure Cloud Sect, an overseer’s personal seal was a total legal binding. Overseers were illiterate in higher scripture. Because of that, their identity seals were cast by the Disciplinary Logistics Bureau with a unique runic hum that couldn’t be forged by common slaves.
Hu had become careless. In his desperate, feverish desire for revenge, he had committed the cardinal sin of corrupt middle management. He had created a permanent, verifiable paper trail of his own capital crime.
“Hu’s seal,” Tie Shan rumbled, his thick finger tracing the outline of the crossed cudgels in the wax. “He signed our death.”
“He signed his own execution,” Lin Tao replied quietly. He folded the parchment and slipping it safely inside his green jade spatial ring. “In the Azure Cloud Sect, murdering an indentured slave is a minor punishment rule-break. But hiring outside hired blades to enter a restricted mining sector during an official audit is treason against the Sect’s security.”
Lin Tao looked toward the bound assassin in the gutter.
Tie Shan walked over, nudging the unconscious killer with his boot. The man groaned, coughing up muddy water, his eyes fluttering open in terror.
“Who hired you?” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice cold as a mountain grave.
“Hu...” the assassin wheezed, his shattered wrist trembling. “He paid twenty silver upfront... Thirty upon delivery... In the sick room cellar...”
“That’s all we need,” Lin Tao said, stepping beside Tie Shan.
“When dawn arrives,” Lin Tao continued, “Elder Song will go down to inspect the flux quotas. We’ll not give him excuses. We’ll give him a scapegoat so complete, so undeniable, that he will have no choice but to purge Hu to protect his own skin.”
Tie Shan nodded, his jaw set like iron.
Before they could speak further, a deep, bone-jarring shaking shivered through the dark rock floor beneath their boots.
It wasn’t the rhythmic, sixty-second thrum of the Precursor earth-shaking stabilizers.
It was an uneven, violent shudder. A low, grinding groan of tearing rock that rang through the bedrock from five miles deep. In the ceiling of the drift, the violet spark discharge along the Precursor glass channel suddenly flickered wildly, the arcs changing from a steady violet into a harsh, pulsating crimson.
The water in the drainage gutters began to bubble, churning with white froth as sulfur gas hissed up through fresh micro-fissures in the floor.
Dust and sharp gravel showered down from the ceiling wooden props.
Across the distant drifts, the screams of miners echoed down the tunnels. The sound of eighty men trapped in the dark as the mountain began to tear its own foundations apart.
Tie Shan dropped into a defensive crouch. His massive hands reached out to brace the nearest stone-hard hardwood prop.
“The mountain,” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice shaking with alarm. “The mountain is waking up.”
Under the Azure Cloud Sect’s Penal Code, Section Twelve, Article Four, the introduction of unlisted armed hired blades into an active flux mining sector carried an automatic penalty of summary decapitation and the seizure of nine ages of old family property.
By putting his personal copper seal to this contract, Overseer Hu had handed them an iron noose. Even Elder Song, with all his office cunning and love of bribery, wouldn’t dare to protect an overseer who had violated Sect security during an active punishment audit.
Deep within the stone beneath their boots, the grinding sound intensified.
A three-foot fissure tore across the dark rock floor of Drift 9-B, venting a hissing geyser of white-hot steam that smelled of boiling copper. Across the mountain, the crushing weight was shifting rapidly toward the central fault line. Twenty miles of granite were bending like a drawn bow.
Lin Tao stood up, his eyes fixed on the pulsating red tracking data in his eye.
The too much mining, the ungrounded spark arcs. The decaying Precursor firmware had reached their critical limit. The fault line running beneath Sector Four and Sector Nine was shearing in half.
Far above their heads, at the boundary between Sector Four and the Upper Sect, the emergency brass bells began to toll. A wild, irregular clanging that signaled a Category One total collapse.
From the air-flow chimneys came the distant, booming thud of heavy iron portcullises dropping into their stone tracks. The overseers above were panic-sealing the lower levels, cutting off the escape routes to protect the Upper Sect’s air supply, trapping eighty miners in the collapsing dark.
Lin Tao raised his left hand. He felt the rapid, rhythmic tremor in his four-inch land-mapper metal pen. The iron needle was shaking with a high-pitched hum, its tip pointing straight toward the main fault line.
The entire mountain was about to collapse.