Far away, a bespectacled man in long robes emerged from the northern tunnels of the Undercity, lantern in hand and a satchel full of tools and paper hanging from his shoulder. The man looked young, boyish even, but for his measured, even-footed steps and the strands of white hair that traced his temple.
The five-meter wall of the Undercity sulked in the distance, diminished in size and grandiosity by the massive cavern it was built within. Incomprehensibly large stalactites loomed over the glowing city, which itself was broken up by towering stalagmite pillars that reached vainly towards the sealed-off sky. The warm light of a thousand stoves and ten thousand lamps painted a dirty orange across the expansive limestone ceiling, promising comfort and respite.
Lin Zheng Yao shivered and sighed, knowing what this stubborn feat of human endeavor would be facing in a matter of months. Tugging at his coat, he continued on his march back home.
As the city gates grew larger and larger in sight, Lin Zheng Yao noticed an oddly humanoid lump on the ground. Cursing while wishing he knew any magic at all, he drew a knife from his waist and approached cautiously. In the darkness, the black lump seemed like any other pile of rock or minerals you would find in the endless mines of Luo Shan, if those piles of rock heaved and wheezed every few seconds.
Lin Zheng Yao gave the mysterious object a light kick and it coughed violently. Satisfied that it wasn’t one of those horrible creatures, but a human, he slowly knelt down and brought his lantern to the stranger’s face. The man’s face was so pale and sickly that it took Lin Zheng Yao a moment to recognize it, even though it was a face that he saw almost daily at work. The eyes were even more sunken-in than usual, the lips were chapped and feverishly red and the cheeks were sallow and withered.
He hesitated for a moment, lamp and knife hovering over the emaciated man’s face. Then, as if he had been shot back to the present with a slingshot, he sheathed his dagger hastily and clumsily tried to get his shoulder under the man’s arm.
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Children giggling, babies crying, cackling fires, the soft sound of fabric brushing against skin; these sounds brought Qing Tian Yi comfort as she thumbed over a page of the diary and turned it over.
She didn’t mind the extra company. It had only been a few of them at first: a young widow too frail to work in the mines and an elderly woman with her two grandchildren. Her husband had been the one to suggest sheltering them in their home after they ended in his charge at the conclusion of his cases. She couldn’t be prouder of him. Now, to fill the two empty rooms and the barren courtyard, she had taken in a few more women and children with the extra money the mayor had given her.
After their meeting, a soldier had turned up at the door and pressed a pouch full of coins into her hands. She had half a mind then to burst into the mayor’s residence and throw the pouch straight in his face. Her husband had gone missing and this was the best he could do? In the end, she kept the money and used it to better ends, furnishing the rooms as best as she can and feeding women who needed help.
Nine was a lot of mouths to feed, but somehow, she managed to find work for all of them; restitching old clothes, clerical work and taking care of children too young to be sent to school until their parents came home from the mines. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it kept all nine of them fed and clothed and that was enough.
Even so, as the young woman sat there, flipping through her husband’s writing between thinking about what to cook for dinner, she felt a burning restlessness aching in her heart. She had not given up hope on her husband, but the rational side of her knew better. It wasn’t grief; she had done that already, every night she laid alone in a bed that was too wide for one person alone. It was something else that threatened to sear its way out of her, that pushed her to put all her attention and energy into taking care of her daughter and all those other women. She no longer had time to feel sorry for herself, but the feeling remained. A feeling that she had to do something. Anything.
A knock came from the door. Tian Yi got up from her chair and opened the door to find the elderly woman standing outside.
“Someone’s looking for you,” she said as she pointed at the gates.
Two soldiers in dull blue uniforms stood outside, swords by their hips.
Tian Yi leaped to her feet, heart pounding in her chest. She knew what they were here for and she didn’t know if she wanted to find out. Picking up a lamp from the kitchen, she followed the two soldiers into the streets. She recognized one of them; he used to work under her husband. The soldier gave her an apologetic look and it made her heart sink. The young woman’s knuckles went white from gripping the lantern. She walked ahead of the soldiers as fast as she could towards the mayor’s residence.
They passed by a pair of guards and ascended the slippery stairs carved into the gargantuan stalagmite two steps at a time. The soldiers had broken into a mild jog to keep up with her. The young woman had believed herself to be composed, believed she could remain composed in the face of any outcome, but now, when faced with the very situation she had dreaded and woke in shivers from, her mind was a mess.
What pained her more than anything else was the fact that she could not imagine his face at all throughout the entire journey to the mayor’s residence. She could not imagine the slight curl of his lips when he came home and saw their daughter every night, she could not imagine the way his fingers would sometimes twitch slightly when he slept, she could not imagine the feeling of his eyelashes brushing against her own. The only thing she could imagine was the absence in her bed and what it would be like for that absence to be present for the rest of her life.
Tian Yi swung the wooden gates open forcefully, panting from the effort of scaling all those steps. Four weary faces turned to look at her.
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The mayor, with his mustache looking more disheveled than ever, spoke first, trying in vain not to betray his exasperation. “Who told her?”
A Chinese man dressed in uniform with a belly as broad as his face and shoulders replied curtly but not without bite, “She should know.”
He had been Song Teng’s deputy and now, in his absence, his successor. Yue Ran, captain of the enforcers.
A man in spectacles and dusty clothes nodded at Tian Yi. He usually looked more put-together than this. They were acquainted from the times he visited their house to discuss business with her husband. Lin Zheng Yao, chief administrator.
Lastly, a man with perfectly center-parted hair sat on a stool in front of a table, solemnly engrossed with some sort of calculation on his abacus. Peng Li Yan, friend of the mayor and head of the Worker’s Association.
Tian Yi took a moment to compose herself, but her voice shook anyway when she asked, “What is it? Is it him? Is he back?”
The mayor shot an accusatory glance at Yue Ran. “You sent for her.”
The captain hesitated for a moment before addressing the woman, “Tian Yi, Nazirudin is back.”
She stayed silent, holding her breath and waiting for what he had to say next.
“He’s injured. Very badly.”
Tian Yi’s stomach sank with each word, as if it was caving into itself until there was nothing but a big empty hole in her. She forced herself to calm her nerves.
“Did he come back alone?” she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything about Song Teng?”
Tian Yi stared into Yue Ran’s unblinking eyes, hoping to see anything that would inspire hope, or at the very least, uncertainty. The only thing she saw reflected in them was guilt.
The captain slowly pulled out a dirt-covered, bloodstained medallion from his pocket. There, engraved in bold penmanship was one single character— “Chia”.
Tian Yi clenched her teeth and took the medallion into her hands, stroking the muddy-red tassel dangling under it as she did so. The tears she expected didn’t come.
“Are we sure?” She looked up.
The captain looked away. “The last thing Nazirudin did before he passed out was apologize—”
The wooden gates slammed open for the second time today. A burly man with dark, hairy skin and a turban on his head came barrelling into the crowded courtyard, his large frame casting a shadow over the rest of them.
“Where’s Nazirudin?” he bellowed in Malay, “I came as soon as my men reported to me.”
His eyes locked on to Tian Yi. The situation at hand revealed itself to him immediately. He grabbed her hands gently and reassured her in as soft a voice as a man as large as him could manage, “How are you doing, Madam Song? Don’t you worry. Nazirudin is back now. We should hear—”
He stopped himself when his dark brown eyes flitted to the medallion Tian Yi was holding. He wrapped one arm around the widow and gave her a tight squeeze.
Tian Yi leaned lightly against his shoulder and returned the hug.
“Now that everyone’s here, we should talk about what to do next,” said the mayor in Mandarin, coughing lightly in the direction of Tian Yi.
Kharak Singh, commander of the city guard, glowered at him. The mayor let out a guilty sigh and said, “You’re welcome to stay if you want, Tian Yi. Just don’t talk about anything you hear here.”
“Sit please, gentlemen,” said the mayor, before he muttered something under his breath and snapped his fingers.
He took a seat on a wooden chair that had sprouted out from the branches of the potted willow. Earthen chairs rose from the ground for everybody else, arranged in two neat columns.
“Xiao Lan, the tea.”
The maid hurried off to fetch the tea set.
“You just missed the doctor, Kharak. Nazirudin will be fine. He has an infection and a fever, but he should be back on his feet in a few weeks’ time. Nothing permanent,” said the mayor.
“However,” he switched to Chinese as he continued, “we do not have a few weeks to spare. What’s the progress on the extermination, Kharak?”
The Sikh let out a sigh of relief and replied solemnly in Malay, “Bad. With Nazirudin out of the picture, we’ve been having trouble dealing with some of the heavy hitters. The Abyss creatures are a lot further out than they should be at this time of the year and we are stretched thin trying to cover all the mines we have right now. Things are especially bad near the southern sector. We’ve had more than fifteen raids on the southern mines just this past week and one of them was practically a stampede. We had to abandon five locations and possibly all of them in the coming months.”
“A new locus? This close to the city?” Lin Zheng Yao gasped.
“Probably, but we will have to wait until Nazirudin is good to go again to confirm it.”
The mayor stayed silent for a good moment before turning to Peng Li Yan. “And how does that affect our projected output for the ores?”
“Let’s just say that the Brits won’t be happy. If we continue to pull back from the mines at the same rate as we have been until the Darktide, we will only have 70% as much product as we had the same time last year. It’s barely enough to meet the stipulated amount, but we won’t have much left over to trade for more food.” The merchant said as he furiously reset his abacus and flicked the beads up and down, as if hoping some stupid mistake on his part had accounted for the horrific numbers.
The mayor turned to his chief administrator, “How’s the food stockpile looking like?”
“We have even fewer sorcerers working on growing crops after mobilizing them to defend the mines. We can’t count on the crops to replenish our supplies. We still have approximately 10,000 tons of food in the warehouses, which should stretch until the Darktide is over if we start rationing now. The meat from the Abyss creatures can be smoked and put into storage as well, but if we can’t trade enough food with the British people come July, we can expect famine,” Lin Zheng Yao said grimly.
“Well, we can expect fewer mouths to feed as well, judging from the ferocity of the Darktide to come,” the round Yue Ran said without a hint of humor in his voice.
“Not if we can do something about it. How are the fortifications coming along?” The question was directed at the captain of the enforcers.
“It’s on pace, but there’s only so much we can do with limited manpower and time. We’ve dug ditches and added a few traps here and there,” said the captain, who sounded very much annoyed. These tasks fell within the purview of the city guard, but they were busy covering the mines.
“Do you think you could spare a dozen men? To reinforce the mines.”
“Are you kidding me? My men barely have enough time to sleep now. The people are getting restless as well, what with all these Abyss creature attacks happening in the mines. The cases of theft and drunken brawls have nearly doubled. Hell! Even the goddamn stress is getting to people. I’ve just had two cases of people dying in their sleep and their families won’t stop going on about stupid ghosts and asking me for exorcisms.”
“Pick six of your strongest fighters and tell them to report to Kharak,” said the mayor, eliciting a reluctant grunt from the captain.
“I will personally pay a visit to the southern sector. We will try to reach the locus and close it off before the Darktide reaches its strongest. At the very least, we should keep the mines operational for as long as possible.”
Lin Zheng Yao raised his hand.
“Sir, if things are this desperate, maybe we should consider—”
The mayor shot him a look and glanced at Tian Yi, a small gesture that did not escape her notice.
“No. We can manage on our own.”
The rest of the higher-ups remained silent. They had expected as much.
“Gentlemen, hard times are upon us. Let us do our best,” said the mayor to an ominously quiet audience.
Everything she had just learned made it feel as if the entire world was slowly coming apart at its seams. Nothing was going right, but Tian Yi felt oddly, deathly calm in the face of it all. The burning, restless sensation inside her burned fiercer than ever. She ran her thumb across the rough and painfully cool metal surface of the medallion.