Chapter 119: Two Before Dawn
Lin Zhen heard his son out, and the refusal showed in the set of his shoulders before it reached his mouth.
"You want to walk into a second nest of them with the night half spent and a handful of bodies at your back."
"I want to walk into that mine while it’s half empty," Xuan corrected. "You heard the elder. The Second Prince pulled their teeth for something else tonight. By the time the sun’s up they’ll have noticed this mine went dark and started plugging holes everywhere at once. The window is now. Tomorrow it’s a wall."
His father’s jaw worked. Xuan pressed before the no could finish setting.
"And you can’t be the one to go, Father. Your leg held for one mine. It won’t carry you to a second a day’s march off at the pace I need. More than that, someone with real weight has to anchor this place. We bled for that ore. If Blood Fang punches back before Elder Ren’s column arrives, I won’t have us handing it over because we all ran off chasing the next prize. You need to stay, you need to hold what we just took. Elden Ren will be here in two days."
It was the argument the patriarch could not take apart, and they both knew it. Lin Zhen let his breath out slow through his nose, a man bowing to logic he disliked.
"Who do you take?"
"Light and quick. Wei. And him." Xuan tipped his chin at the elder standing meek inside the ring of swords. "He guides us in and earns the road out with his neck. He knows the bones of that second mine better than any map I could scratch."
That was the hard sell. Lin Zhen’s eyes went to Han Ying, dark with the wariness any sane man kept for a thing that had just gutted fifty of its own.
"You’d turn your back on that."
"I’d keep my eyes on it the whole way," Xuan said, which had the rare merit of being more true than his father could ever guess. "He wants out of here breathing. I want a guide who can’t lie to me about the floor plan. We use each other for one night and call it even."
Mira purred at the back of his skull. [ Smooth. You almost convinced me. ]
’Then help me keep him sweet.’
[ He won’t sneeze without my say-so. Go work on the old man’s son. ]
"I’m coming."
Lin Kai’s voice cut the chamber before anyone had asked. He came out of the ring, his mother’s blade wiped and sheathed, and met his brother’s look with the flat steadiness that had grown into his face across the past two days.
"You’ll want a second sword that isn’t about to keel over." His eyes slid sideways. "No offense, Wei."
"Some," Wei muttered.
"Take it however you please." There was no venom under it, only the reflex of a tongue nineteen years honed to a point. Lin Kai turned back to his brother. "I came down here for answers. The ones I want aren’t in this mine. They might be in the next one. So I go where you go."
Xuan held his gaze, dipped his head, and decided on the spot he would take the acid-tongued Lin Kai over the husk that had rotted behind a bolted door any night of the week.
"Then it’s four."
Wei did not look thrilled to be counted. The boy’s knuckles had gone bloodless around his hilt again, his stare ticking between the corpses underfoot and the elder he was now meant to travel beside. Xuan caught his shoulder on the way past.
"Breathe. You walked in here an inner disciple two months off the yard. You walk out with two mines on your name if tonight holds. Stay close, keep your mouth shut, you’ll be fine."
"It’s the holding part that worries me, Young Master."
"Good instinct. Don’t lose it."
That left the small matter of a full day’s road they did not have. Xuan turned to the elder.
Han Ying sank to one knee at a flick of Mira’s will, broad back offered, and to the others it read as nothing stranger than a beaten man doing what he was told to keep his throat. The three of them took their holds, Xuan at one shoulder, Lin Kai at the other, Wei clamped across the elder’s spine wearing the face of someone boarding a thing he fully expected to kill him.
"Hold tight," Xuan said. "And whatever happens, don’t let go."
[ Hang on, boys, and mind your tongues between your teeth. ] Mira, gleeful. [ Let’s find out what five decades of legs can really do. ]
Han Ying rose, packed Qi into his legs until the air shuddered around his feet, and threw them forward.
The won mine, the corpses, the slow drip of cold water, all of it tore away behind them between one breath and the next. The world shrank to a shrieking ribbon of black forest and colder wind, the elder devouring ground at a pace no horse alive could chase, trunks smearing to grey streaks on either side as the western range came rushing up out of the dark to meet them. Wei made a noise the wind shredded before anyone could needle him for it.
Out ahead in the black, a full day’s distance crumpling down into less than an hour, the second mine waited with its fangs pulled and its door swinging loose.
They meant to be through it before the sky turned grey.
Han Ying broke out of the run on a wooded rise above the valley, killing his momentum so abruptly the night slammed shut around them. The three of them came off his back. Xuan and Lin Kai found their footing without trouble.
Wei did not. The boy lurched two steps into the brush, folded at the waist, and gave the forest floor everything his stomach had been hoarding since the first level. He heaved until there was nothing left to give, one hand white on a trunk.
Lin Kai watched with the flat enjoyment of a man savoring someone else’s misery. "And here I worried the elder ran too soft for you."
"Glad I could entertain," Wei rasped, dragging a sleeve across his mouth.
Xuan let them have the breath, since the boy had earned a moment to put his insides back where they lived. But only the one.
He crouched at the lip of the rise. Below, past the black treeline, the second mine hunched against the mountainside, fewer torches crawling along its works than the first had worn, its mouth cracked open and underwatched. Exactly as the elder had promised.
"On your feet, Wei." He pulled his hood low. "We don’t have much time."
