Han Jiu stayed flat behind the bushes and waited for them to come back up.
He kept his Qi still. That was harder than it used to be. Ninety-six bulls pushed to get out much harder than forty-eight ever had.
He had told Qingshuang about the seventh stage when he came home at dusk. She was sitting on the bed, cleaning her sword, and she stopped.
"This afternoon, you told me you had twenty pieces of frostmarrow left," she said. "Twenty pieces doesn’t buy a stage."
"It’s a blessing," he said.
She looked at him. He waited for her to ask what that meant.
She didn’t. She went back to cleaning her sword.
"So far, your blessings have only ever helped me," she said. "So keep it. Just make sure nobody else ever sees it."
Now he lay in the frost and watched the hole.
The light came back.
It rose slowly out of the shaft, yellow and swinging. The man with the lamp climbed out first. He put the lamp down on the ground and sat beside it, breathing hard. The other man climbed out after him. There was nothing on his shoulder now.
"I’m not going down there again," the man with the lamp said. "Not for Elder Yun. Not for anybody."
"You won’t have to." The other man brushed the dust off his knees. "We found what he wanted."
"Did you see that cave?" the man with the lamp asked. "All that frost on the walls? Something lived in there."
"Something grew in there. You saw the hole in the rock. Somebody pulled it out by the roots." The other man picked up the first board. "Two seams cut clean, and a cave with nothing left in it. And the moss boy’s rope lying right under the first seam, where anybody with a lamp will see it."
They put the boards back over the shaft. Then the man who had carried the rope took a round of red wax out of his sleeve. He pressed it onto the middle of the boards and held it there with his thumb.
"It’ll be hard by morning," he said. "Come on. Elder Yun said to come straight to him when we’re done. He said he’d be awake."
They picked up the lamp and went down the track. Han Jiu watched the light get smaller, until it went past the frost pools and out of sight.
He counted a slow two hundred. Then he got up.
Two of Yun Hai’s men had seen the seams now, and nothing could change that. But two Yun men saying they had seen something was not the same as nine council elders seeing it for themselves.
The wax was still soft. It came away from the boards in one piece, and he set it down on a flat rock. Then he pulled the boards off and climbed down into the shaft.
At the bottom, he lit the candle stub he had brought with him and walked to the rockfall.
There were fresh boot prints in the dust in front of the gap, and long scrape marks where two men had dragged themselves through on their stomachs. He crawled through after them.
On the other side, he found his rope.
It was lying in a loose heap under the first crack, the one he had emptied on his very first night. Somebody had dropped it there so that it looked forgotten.
’They even carried it down here for me,’ he thought.
He picked it up and crawled back through the gap, dragging the rope behind him.
Four old supports stood under the arch. Two of them were thick pine posts, black with age, jammed in under the biggest stones. The other two were thinner, and one of those had already split down the middle.
He tied the rope around the bottoms of the two thick posts and pulled the knots as tight as they would go. Then he walked backward up the tunnel, letting the rope slide out through his hands, until there was no rope left.
He was about forty feet from the arch. He hoped that was far enough.
He put the candle down behind him. He wrapped the rope twice around his forearms and set his feet. Then he let his Qi move, and six iron bulls rose above his head in the dark tunnel.
He pulled.
The posts didn’t move. They had been holding up that rock for sixty years, and the rock had settled down onto them.
He pulled harder. The rope went hard and straight, and it creaked. His arms shook. Somewhere ahead of him in the dark, something made a low cracking sound.
Then one of the posts came loose.
The rope jerked in his hands, and he nearly fell over backward. Up ahead, a stone the size of a sheep dropped out of the arch and hit the floor. The whole tunnel shook.
He pulled again, and the second post came out.
At first, nothing happened.
Then the arch came down.
The noise was huge. He felt it through the soles of his feet and in his teeth. Rock poured down into the place where the gap had been. A wave of dust and cold air came rushing up the tunnel and hit him in the face, and the candle behind him went out. Small stones rattled down from the ceiling and bounced off his head and shoulders.
He let go of the rope, covered his head with his arms, and backed away toward the shaft.
The shaking stopped.
He stood in the dark and listened. A few last stones were still sliding somewhere ahead of him. Then those stopped too.
The ceiling above him held.
He found the candle by feel and lit it again. Then he walked back down the tunnel.
The arch was gone, and so was the gap. A slope of broken rock filled the tunnel from the floor to the ceiling. Dust was still settling on it.
Behind that rock was everything Yun Hai wanted the council to see.
His rope ran into the pile and disappeared. He pulled on it, and it didn’t move at all. The knots and the two posts were somewhere underneath all that stone.
He cut the rope with his knife, as close to the rock as he could reach. Then he pushed the cut end in between two stones, until no green showed.
If anybody ever dug through all that rock, they would find the rest of his rope. But nobody was going to dig through all that rock.
He coiled up what was left and climbed out.
The sky over the ridge had started to turn grey. He put the boards back and pressed the soft wax into the middle of them. It stuck at once. By the time the sun was up, it would be hard, and it would look exactly the way Yun Hai’s man had left it.
On the way down, he stopped at the frost pools. He tied the coil of rope around a stone as big as his head and dropped it into the deepest pool. It sank straight to the bottom.
Then he washed the dust off his face and hands in the same water.
The kitchen fires were already lit when he got back to the compound. He could hear Auntie Fu’s girls banging the rice tubs. He didn’t cross the courtyard. He went around to the back of the storeroom and climbed in through the window.
Qingshuang was standing beside the door. Her sword was in her hand, and it was out of its scabbard.
She put one finger to her lips. Then she pointed at the door.
"My uncle," she whispered. "He knocked an hour after you left. He asked for you. I told him you were asleep, and I didn’t open the door."
Han Jiu looked down at his clothes. They were grey with rock dust from his collar to his boots.
"He said he’d wait until you woke up," she whispered. "He’s been sitting out there all night."