Chapter 105: Conversation With The Patriarch

Lin Xuan walked the corridors of the inner pavilion with the three rolls under his left arm and Marrow Dragon at his hip. He had not taken the blade off since the reforge and he was not going to take it off this morning either. His father deserved to see what his son had been carrying.

He went over what he was going to say one more time as the corridor turned. The maps would speak for themselves. The other thing, the elder, needed words. He had drafted those words on the road home and again at his desk before the inkstone was ground. They sat ready in the front of his mouth, where they could come out without anything else slipping past them.

He stopped at the door of the low study. Two knocks.

"Come."

He opened the door. Lin Zhen was at his low desk, leg out on a cushion, a ledger open in front of him. He glanced up, the half-distracted glance of a man inside numbers, and stopped on his son. The brush in his hand lowered without his telling it to.

"Xuan."

"Father."

"You’re early."

"I came in before the gate-keeper had the dawn fire built. I have things to show you first."

His father set the brush down, swept the ledger aside with the back of his forearm, and turned the cushion a quarter so the desk was clear between them. The bad leg made the motion slower than Lin Zhen had ever liked, but he did not let it show in his face. He gestured to the cushion opposite.

"Show me."

Xuan knelt. He laid the first roll on the desk and slid the cord off it, weighted the corners with two pieces of jade his father pushed across the wood without looking, and unrolled the first map.

Lin Zhen lowered his eyes. He read it the way a literate man reads a verse, line by line, weight on each stroke. The bold strokes of the main galleries. The thin dotted lines of the ventilation shafts. The small black circles where the guards stood, with their arrows of rotation. Ore-cart paths. The boundary of the western palisade.

"This is the level of a cartographer’s report."

"Vantage and good timing. The mist held longer than I expected."

Xuan laid out the second map. His father’s eyes paused on the heavy stroke of the spirit ore vein along the eastern wall and stayed there. Lin Zhen brought one finger to a hover above the line and did not touch the paper.

"The vein is still producing."

"It is. That is most of why the regional silver has been moving the way it has."

He laid out the third. Lin Zhen looked at it longer than the first two combined. The galleries of the third level. The chamber at the southern end with a small cross above it. The corridor that fed into it. The thin blue line of the buried water source. The forge with the question mark.

"This is the level no record of ours has ever shown."

"I found a window during the scout. I slipped in deeper than the perimeter, mapped what I could see, and slipped back out before anyone counted shadows. The lines are exact."

His father raised his eyes to him, and held them. Lin Zhen’s face did the small soft work it did when he was pleased, a relaxing of the lines around his eyes that Xuan had spent half his life learning to read.

"This is of enormous use to us. Whatever shape the operation takes, we will not walk into it blind. Good work, Xuan."

"There is another piece."

"Go on."

Xuan took a breath and let it out at the speed he had practiced.

"The Blood Fang have placed an elder in the mine since Cao Yan’s death. Han Ying. Foundation Establishment, a step above what Cao Yan was at his peak. He is not there as a reinforcement for an assault on us. He is there as a supervisor. They know they lost a man in our valley and they want eyes that can see in the dark watching the operation until they are sure the disruption is not going to repeat itself. Two guards talking under his window confirmed it."

Lin Zhen nodded once. He had already turned the information over.

"A watchman, not a strike piece. That is a different thing than I was bracing for."

"It is. It does not change what we need to do. It changes how we approach the deepest level."

"I want him out of the question by the time we are in those galleries."

"I have been thinking about it. I will have a way."

His father looked at him for two breaths. Xuan could feel him wanting to ask the obvious follow-up, and could see him decide not to. The same way he had not pressed about the maps. The trust Xuan had built one operation at a time held its weight on the table between them.

"I will be going on the operation personally, Xuan."

That stopped Xuan where he was. "Father. Are you sure you can be away from the sect for that long?"

"Elder Ren is here. We have closed the last of the rats inside our own walls, so there is no internal weather I cannot leave for two weeks. Your mothers are also here. I would say to you that you could spend more time with them while we have the days. The household has had enough quiet at the second and third tables. You could close some of that distance."

"I will. We have the time before we move."

"Good."

Xuan rolled the corners of the third map flat under his palm and looked at his father. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"There is one more thing, before I take this off your desk. I want to bring Wei Tianming on the operation."

Lin Zhen’s chin came up slightly.

"He is new. He has talent. I have watched him on the yard and he carries his promotion better than the last three before him. But you are planning a stealth approach. He has never run inside a stealth operation."

"That is why I want him on it. I want to see what he does when the pressure has nowhere to go. I would rather see it now, in an operation where I am four steps behind every guard he passes, than find out the first time in a fight where I cannot."

His father considered that.

"You are testing him."

"I am putting him in the operation where I can still pull him back if it goes wrong. Better than waiting until the operation where I cannot."

"There is a difference between the two, but the difference favours you. Bring him. Keep him on the periphery in the first phase and rotate him deeper as he proves out."

"That was the plan."

Lin Zhen nodded. He laid his hand over the three maps with the palm hovering above the paper, as if he were afraid the strokes would lift off if he was not careful.

"Two weeks, Xuan. Use them well."

Xuan inclined his head, stood, and walked out without saying anything else.