They ca down off the rise in a loose file, threading the black treeline toward the valley floor where the second mine hunched against the mountain’s flank. Xuan held them slow and low until the torchlight at the entrance sharpened into detail: a single main mouth, no galleried sprawl like the first, just a throat of timber and stone boring straight down into the rock. Two guards loafed at the portal, spears propped, one of them digging at sothing under a nail. Fewer fires, fewer bodies, the thin watch the elder had promised down to the man.
Wei had his color back, more or less. Lin Kai crouched at Xuan’s shoulder, reading the ground with the flat patience that had grown into him over two days, saying nothing yet.
Xuan put it to the elder. "Talk through it."
Han Ying answered low, worn down to the grain. "There’s maybe fifteen left down there, and not one worth your ti. The good ones marched out three days back. What’s left is guarding the door because nobody trusted them with a knife." A weary tilt of the chin toward the shaft. "One tunnel, straight down, no side galleries to pick through. Easy to sweep. Easy to bottle, too, if you let them turn it into a wall. So you don’t let them."
Lin Kai’s voice ca flat and unimpressed. "So we’re really staking our necks on a man who slaughtered more than two dozen of his own so hours ago and turned on the rest like it cost him nothing."
"You’re welco to stay up here and guard the trees," Xuan said, and let it hang a beat before he relented. "We’re not staking anything on his word, Kai. We’re staking it on him having more reason to hate the people down there than any of us do. Stay alert if it helps you sleep. I’m not asking you to trust him. I’m asking you to walk in behind ."
Lin Kai grunted, which from him passed for agreent.
Behind his eyes, Xuan ran the numbers with Mira while his gaze held the portal.
’First mine, we crawled a vent and did them in their beds, because the place was stuffed and one shout buries us. This one’s the reverse. Fifteen tired n, nobody heavy left standing, and a clock over our heads.’
[ Speed, not whispers. ] Mira finished it for him, thoroughly pleased. [ Why pick a lock when you can knock as the landlord? Big frightening elder strolls up, the door swings open for its own master, four blades walk in on his heels. It’s almost rude how easy this is. ]
’The Second Prince’s people are working sowhere close. We’re in, done, and holding this before anyone out there thinks to look our way.’
[ So let’s not dawdle. ]
That was the plan, blunt as a dropped hamr. No vents, no holding his breath in a chimney with a dead man’s soot grinding between his teeth. Han Ying walks up as the elder who owns the place, and the watch does what tired n always do at the sight of their commander coming ho. They go soft. And the heartbeat they go soft, the night caves in on them.
He laid it out in two sentences. The elder opens it and goes in heavy. He, Lin Kai, and Wei co through on his back and gut whatever breathes, fast, so nothing on two legs makes it up that tunnel to scream.
"You good?" he asked Wei.
The boy swallowed hard. "I’d feel better if I hadn’t just left my supper in a bush, but yes."
"You’ll be fine. Stay close to and keep moving forward. Forward’s the whole trick to it."
They slid down to the rim of the torchlight, three shadows folding into the brush a stone’s throw off the gate. Xuan eased Marrow Dragon free, the bronze line under the ridge swallowing what little light there was. Lin Kai bared his mother’s blade beside him. Wei’s breath went thin and quick.
Then Han Ying stepped out of the trees into the wash of the torches, alone, spear riding his shoulders like a farr ambling back from the fields.
The nearer guard straightened, squinted, and his whole fra loosened in an instant.
"Elder Han Ying?" A grin cracked the man’s face. "We weren’t looking for you back tonight. Captain swore you’d be babysitting that mine till the week was out."
"Plans changed." Han Ying rolled the spear on his shoulders with a shrug. "Quiet down there. Quiet enough I’d sooner be anywhere with a fire and a cup."
"You and both." The guard snorted and hooked a thumb at the dark behind him. "Three nights of nothing but rats and dripping rock. Bo here’s lost half a month’s pay to at tiles just to kill the hours."
"I have not lost half a month," the second guard said, shoving off the wall. "A week. And only because you palm the good ones, you leathery old crook." He drifted over with both arms half open, the easy warmth of a man greeting soone he’d kept a hundred watches beside. "Good to have you back, Elder. Tell you brought wine and I’ll let the cheating slide."
"No wine." Han Ying turned into the embrace and let himself be gathered up, one arm folding around the younger man’s back, almost tender. "Sothing better, though."
"Yeah? Go on, then."
He never answered the man holding him.
The spear in his other hand drove up under the first guard’s jaw. It punched through the soft of the throat and out the back of his neck, and the one sound the man managed was a thick, drowning gkkh-krk, blood climbing over his own chin as his lungs flooded, fingers scrabbling once at a shaft that had already left him.
Against his shoulder, Bo felt the friendly arm go to iron. "...Elder?"
Han Ying loosed the embrace, peeled him off, and dropped him with a backhand sweep of the sa wet spear before the question had finished leaving his lips.
Two bodies slapped the dirt at the gate. The way in stood open and unwatched, the warm orange throat of the mine breathing up out of the black.
Xuan was already moving, hood low, blade out.
"Now. All of it."
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