The evening spreading of rations in the lower quarry was an exercise in calculated, institutional degradation.
The miners lined up in a single, shivering file along the damp stone wall of the spreading pavilion, each holding a cracked wooden bowl. At the front of the pavilion sat Overseer Hu behind a massive pine frame stand table. He watched a guard ladle out thin, gray millet soup from a fifty-gallon cast-iron cooking pot.
Beside the cooking pot rested a split-bamboo basket containing forty small, round biscuits made from coarse barley flour, ground pea-hulls, and sawdust.
When Lin Tao reached the head of the line, Hu held up his greasy wooden heavy club.
“Halt,” Hu said.
The guard with the wooden ladle paused, thin soup dripping back into the iron pot with a greasy plop.
Hu leaned forward over the pine table, his pig-like eyes fixed on Lin Tao’s pale, dust-caked face. The overseer’s breath smelled of rancid mutton and garlic.
“I walked the lower drift after the shift, boy,” Hu said slowly. He tapped his heavy club against the tabletop. “Ten tons of blue slate snapped down the center line like a split melon. A veteran miner from Sector 2 swears by his mother’s grave that he saw you tap the falling stone with an iron rod.”
Lin Tao kept his gaze fixed on the rough grain of the pine table. “The old miner was blinded by dust, Overseer. When the mountain roof drops, frightened men see ghosts in the fog.”
“Ghosts don’t leave cold-iron puncture marks in the cleavage plane of a metamorphic boulder,” Hu growled. He leaned back, crossing his heavy arms over his boiled-pigskin vest. “You’re an indentured slave with a broken collarbone. By all rights, you should be coughing up your lungs in the drainage ditch. Yet the carts from your drift were twenty pounds over quota at the weighing scales.”
“Tie Shan is an ox,” Lin Tao answered evenly. “He carried the stone.”
Tie Shan stood directly behind Lin Tao. The massive youth had not put on his shirt. The freezing mountain draft chilled his sweat, but he stood fully rigid.
When Hu spoke his name, Tie Shan took half a step forward.
The pine frame stand table creaked under the huge shadow cast by the young giant.
“Six words,” Hu mocked, looking up into Tie Shan’s stony, unblinking face. “Speak, animal. Did you carry twenty extra baskets of ore today with your bare hands?”
Tie Shan’s jaw muscles bunched into two hard knots beneath his scarred skin. He didn’t blink.
“I carried. He aimed.”
Three words. Blunt, heavy, and unbending as an iron anvil.
Hu’s face darkened with sudden, poisonous irritation. He hated Tie Shan’s silence. He hated Lin Tao’s calm, unblinking eyes even more. In Hu’s world, slaves were supposed to cry, beg, and kiss his boots for a handful of dry grain.
Hu reached into the split-bamboo basket, picked up one of the coarse barley biscuits. Then he held it between his greasy thumb and forefinger.
He smiled, showing blackened teeth, and dropped the biscuit into the frozen mud beside his boot.
He brought his iron-shod heel down upon the bread, grinding it into the frozen horse manure, shale dust, and coal slurry until it was a black, flattened smear across the stone flag.
“There’s your dinner, clever boy,” Hu sneered. “Lick it off my heel, or spend the night chewing your own tongue. Both of you.”
The miners standing in line behind them looked away in silence. In the Azure Cloud Sect, picking a fight over an insulted ration was the quickest way to end up nailed to the wooden posts outside the punishment hall until the crows picked your eyes out.
Tie Shan’s massive fists tightened at his sides, his knuckles turning white as peeled bone. The veins across his neck surged with dark blood. He shifted his balance, preparing to lunge across the frame stand table and rip Hu’s throat out with his bare fingers.
Lin Tao raised his right hand and touched Tie Shan’s wrist.
The touch was feather-light, but it was deliberate. Tie Shan halted, looking down at Lin Tao with burning eyes.
Lin Tao didn’t look at the ruined bread in the mud. He looked at the front left leg of the heavy pine frame stand table.
Through his left eye, the tracking data unrolled across the timber:
The table leg was riddled with dry rot, weakened by years of standing in damp slurry. It was supporting two hundred pounds of cast-iron cooking pot and boiling soup through a single shear vector.
Lin Tao shifted his weight forward.
His wooden clog tapped the cracked flat stone slab two inches from the table leg, transferring a tiny, rhythmic shaking through the stone.
Crack.
The rotted pine leg snapped cleanly along the tiny fissure.
The heavy frame stand table pitched wildly to the left. The fifty-gallon cast-iron cooking pot tilted off its balance point, cascading two gallons of boiling, greasy millet broth directly across Overseer Hu’s lap and leather boots.
Hu shrieked like a scalded hog, leaping backward off his wooden stool, wildly slapping at his steaming thighs and howling in agony as the scalding broth soaked through his trousers. The guards shouted in confusion, dropping their ladles as the leftover soup flooded across the pavilion floor.
In the blinding spray of steam and chaos, Lin Tao reached out with his uninjured right hand.
Before the split-bamboo basket hit the floor, his fingers closed around two clean, warm barley biscuits. He slipped them smoothly into the wide hemp sleeve of his tunic.
He turned toward Tie Shan.
“The wood was rotten,” Lin Tao murmured, his face as calm as deep pond water. “Let’s return to the barracks.”
Tie Shan looked at the dancing, cursing overseer who was rolling in the snow to cool his scorched thighs, then looked down at the sleeve where the clean bread was hidden.
The giant’s scarred jaw relaxed. The faintest ghost of a smile flickered at the corner of his lips.
“Table was bad,” Tie Shan rumbled softly.