The abandoned Precursor drainage canal was a vaulted underground highway of smooth, green-veined dark rock.
For three miles, the eighty miners marched in complete silence behind Lin Tao and Tie Shan. They didn’t need torches. Through the high air-flow slits carved into the ceiling arches, the pale gray light of early dawn was beginning to filter down, lighting up the long procession of soot-stained, ragged laborers.
In their hands, the miners carried whatever iron they had scavenged from the collapsed drift. Heavy crowbars, twelve-pound sledges, and iron-tipped chisels.
They moved not with the shuffling, defeated gait of unsafe quarry slaves, but with the steady, menacing rhythm of a ghost battalion returning from the dead.
At the head of the column, Lin Tao walked with measured, deliberate strides.
His body was an inventory of physical trauma. His braced left collar bone was throbbing in sync with his raised pulse, his scorched right palm stung beneath its moss healing wrap. The fresh frostbite along his left forearm bone burned with deep, throbbing cryo-ache. Yet his stance was erect, his cold, observant eyes scanning the stone-built shape of the ancient tunnels.
Beside him, Tie Shan carried the heavy iron pry-bar like a spear. His sharp eyes watched the shadows for any patrol or sentry. Behind them, two sturdy miners dragged the bound assassin, whose groans of terror were muffled by a wad of hemp cloth.
Two miles into the ascent, the canal widened into an expansive underground pool. A dry water tank carved out of red stone.
Tie Shan raised his heavy iron bar, signaling the column to halt.
“Smell that?” Tie Shan rumbled softly.
Lin Tao paused, inhaling the cold draft.
It wasn’t the rotten-egg stench of the deep mining pits. It was the rich, oily scent of refined bear animal fat, bitter pine-resin wood, and the high-hum ozone hum of high-grade spiritual red stone.
Lin Tao stepped through an arched stone portal into the dry water tank.
Inside, stacked from the floor to the vaulted ceiling in neat, orderly rows, were more than two hundred heavy hardwood crates, each stamped with the crimson seal of the Azure Cloud Sect’s Disciplinary Bureau.
Old Man Geng crept forward, his jaw dropping in stunned disbelief. He reached out and pried open the lid of the nearest crate with his chisel.
The crate was packed with hundreds of shimmering, metal bars of refined copper flux. The pure, packed spiritual spark used by the inner sect elders to forge flying swords and core-stabilizing pills. Beside it sat crates of raw silver ore, casks of healing liquor, and sacks of polished spirit stones.
“This is the missing flux...” Old Geng gasped, his voice trembling with outrage. “For five years, Overseer Hu told the elders that our veins were running dry! He cut our grain rations in half, whipped twenty men to death for failing quotas, and told us the mountain was barren!”
The old smith turned to the eighty miners, his eyes blazing with fury.
“He was stealing it! He was hoarding the sect’s flux in this dry water tank, waiting to sell it to outside smugglers!”
A low, deep-throated growl of pure, murderous hatred rippled through the eighty miners.
These were men who had buried their brothers, their sons. Their comrades in unmarked rockslides, all. Meanwhile, Overseer Hu skimmed millions of copper bits from their blood and sweat.
Lin Tao walked to the center of the water tank, his left eye cataloging the cache:
Sixty-four tons of high-grade copper flux. In the legal hierarchy of the Azure Cloud Sect, hoarding even fifty pounds of strategic flux was classified as High Embezzlement, punishable by public flaying and spiritual dissolving.
Hu had built himself an empire of stolen stone beneath the very floorboards of the Disciplinary Hall.
“Pick up the crates,” Lin Tao commanded quietly.
The miners looked at him, startled.
“We don’t leave this evidence in the dark,” Lin Tao said. His voice ringing with was cold, test care. “Tie Shan, take twelve men and hoist the four heaviest crates of refined flux. Old Geng, take Hu’s fraudulent balance scales.”
Lin Tao turned toward the bound assassin, who was being dragged along the stone floor by two burly haulers.
“And bring the assassin,” Lin Tao added. He tapped his green jade ring where Hu’s signed murder contract was safely stored. “When we present our ledger to Elder Song, there will be no room for debate. Every crime will have its physical weight in stone.”
Above their heads, the deep, ringing booming of a bronze bell shook down through the air-flow chimneys.
DONG... DONG... DONG...
It was the morning bell of the Disciplinary Courtyard, tolling for the dawn muster and the public reading of the day’s executions.
Lin Tao looked up the stone stairway leading to the rear vaults of the Disciplinary Hall.
“The court is in session,” Lin Tao said quietly. “Let’s deliver our report.”
The eighty miners moved into formation behind Lin Tao and Tie Shan. He lifted the heavy hardwood crates onto their shoulders with grim, unbending strength. Twelve men carried the four massive crates of refined copper flux, their muscles straining against the load. Old Man Geng walked beside them, cradling Hu’s tampered balance scales against his chest like a headsman’s axe.
Behind them, the bound assassin stumbled in terror, his eyes rolling back in his head as he looked at the eighty grim, soot-blackened men surrounding him. He had been hired to slit the throats of two sleeping quarry slaves in the dark. Now, he was being marched into the high court of the Disciplinary Bureau as living, breathing evidence of a capital conspiracy.
Lin Tao led the column up the wide stone stairs carved into the bedrock.
With every step, the morning light grew brighter through the iron grating above. It cast sharp diamond patterns of shadow across their soot-stained faces. The bronze bell of the Disciplinary Courtyard tolled its final stroke, the sound shaking through the stone steps beneath their feet.
Lin Tao loosened the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen in his belt. He felt the cold metal bite against his callused palm.
The audit was about to begin.