Bleeding the Clay

The tallow lamp rolled into a pool of fermented ox blood, sputtering once before dying in a hiss of black grease.

In the sudden murk, only the phosphorus smeared along the earth-leech's pale, ringed hide cast a faint, sickly luminescence across the collapsed gallery. The beast did not strike with the speed of an adder; it moved with the grinding, hydrostatic inevitability of a mudslide. A ring of translucent horn-plates rasped against the shattered brickwork, shearing through cedar shoring timbers as though they were dry straw.

"Move, woman," Xie Yunshan snarled, his voice a harsh rasp against the wet booming in the tunnel. He lunged backward, the heels of his hide boots churning through the slick muck.

Tan Fenglan did not retreat toward the rubble heap where her junior assistants lay crushed beneath two tons of foundational tile. Backing away meant ceding the southern gallery to the chthonic brood, allowing the creature to bore unimpeded into the granary’s hollow pilings.

"The emergency sluice," Fenglan said, her tone clipped despite the tremor running down her forearm. She kept her bronze sickle angled outward, the hooked tip catching the pale glow of the worm's churning maw. "Ten paces behind you. The counterweight spindle."

"Your empire's rusted junk?" Yunshan spat, dodging sideways as the creature’s snout slammed into the trench wall, spraying clods of red marl. "The ceiling timbers are already bowing. If I touch a lever, fifty yards of dry river terrace will come down on our skulls."

"The arch is keyed bronze, you barbarian. It holds."

The juvenile leech reared, its blind head expanding like an uncoiling bellows. Thick, alkaline mucus dripped from its mouth, sizzling where it touched the pool of fermented ox blood. The creature let out no cry—only a wet, pressurized expulsion of stale air that smelled of copper cisterns and centuries of turned graves. It drove forward, the heavy ridges of its segmented torso scouring the trench floor.

Yunshan scrambled across the collapsed masonry, his bronze pick clattering against a submerged conduit. He reached the recessed alcove where an ancient, verdigris-crusted drop-gate hung suspended in a stone groove. A massive bronze lever projected from the silted housing, locked in place by a corroded shear-pin.

Yunshan threw his full weight against the ironwood handle. The metal screeched, but the pin held fast, welded by eighty years of damp river seepage.

"The pin is seized!" Yunshan shouted over the roar of collapsing loam. "Bring the pick!"

The worm turned toward the sound, its horn-plates expanding in a circular bloom. It lunged at the alcove.

Fenglan did not call for guards who could not hear her beneath eighty cubits of masonry. She sprinted through the knee-deep mire, her felt robes dragging in the blood-slick clay. She bypassed Yunshan, raised her heavy bronze sounding rod with both hands, and jammed its tapered end into the gap behind the seized shear-pin.

"Pull the handle," Fenglan ordered.

"You'll snap the rod—"

"Pull it, digger!"

Yunshan threw his shoulder against the timber lever. Fenglan planted her boots into the brick sill and drove her entire weight downward against the sounding rod, using the bronze shaft as a fulcrum.

The sound of shearing metal cracked like a crossbow discharge. The corroded pin parted in a shower of rust and sparks.

Above them, the counterweight chain screamed through its grease-starved pulley. The bronze-faced slab of the drop-gate dropped like an executioner's blade.

The gate struck the trench floor with a concussive boom that shuddered through the soles of their boots. The descending edge caught the questing snout of the earth-leech, shearing off several horn-plates and pinning the beast's fleshy outer ring beneath four hundred pounds of reinforced bronze and river granite.

A violent spasm racked the creature's exposed flanks. Thick, colorless ichor pumped into the mud, mixing with the dark ox blood pooled along the trench floor. The heavy stone slab shuddered within its channels, bouncing an inch into the air as the beast thrashed on the other side of the partition, but the ancient joinery held.

Silence rushed back into the subterranean drift, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of water and their own ragged breathing.

Yunshan slid down the wall until his buttocks hit the muddy floor. He wiped a smear of pale ichor from his forehead with the back of a calloused hand, his chest heaving under his quilted nomad vest.

"Fine engineering," he muttered between gasps. "Spend ten thousand talents of copper to seal a door, and not three coppers on grease to keep the levers turning."

Fenglan stood over him, leaning heavily against the wall with her bronze sickle lowered but still firmly gripped. Her knuckles were skinned, and red clay coated the embroidered hem of her magistracy robes.

"That gate was cast during the Third Consolidation," she said, her voice steadying. "It was never meant to be tripped by nomadic thieves burrowing like moles beneath the grain bins."

Yunshan gave a short, dry bark of laughter, though his eyes remained fixed on the blade in her hand. "Those grain bins are starving every tribe between here and the Salt Flats, Conservator. We didn't come to steal your bronze. We came for what’s rotting above our heads."

"Nothing rots under my seal," Fenglan replied cold.

"Look at your gate, then." Yunshan pointed with the tip of his bronze pick toward the bottom gap of the bronze slab.

Fenglan stepped closer to the partition, keeping one eye on the sapper.

The juvenile leech was still writhing beneath the slab, but its movements had lost their violent frenzy. Its lamprey snout, pinned flat against the stone sill, was no longer searching for the pool of spilled steer blood that drenched the gallery floor.

Instead, the creature's shredded horn-plates were frantically scraping against a small trickle of yellow grain spilling from a ruptured copper flute in the ceiling above.

The worm was not drinking the blood. It was drawing the raw, unground barley into its gullet with a wet, ravenous suction, ignoring the pacifying slaughter of the high kings entirely.

Fenglan touched the edge of the bronze slab, feeling the rhythmic, desperate grinding of the beast's teeth against the raw grain.

"They were fed ox blood for three hundred years," Fenglan murmured, the chill settling deep into the marrow of her bones. "They do not eat the harvest."

"Well," Yunshan said, pushing himself up from the muck and tapping the pick against his shoulder, "they do now."