Yang Cang bent his right knee and squatted down on one leg beside the Hequ horse.
He didn't rush to touch the horse's leg. Instead, he first grabbed a handful of dry hay mixed with yellow earth and rubbed it back and forth over the horse's left front knee joint.
The art of judging horses lay in reading the bone structure and examining the frame.
A veteran soldier like him, who had spent half his life in the Northwest Pingqiang Army, could gauge a horse's endurance with his eyes closed.
"Hmph! The frame's well-proportioned, but it's lost too much flesh."
Yang Cang muttered under his breath as his left hand slid down the horse's belly, tapping lightly at its ribs, which produced a somewhat hollow sound.
Under the cover of this motion, his right hand slipped without hesitation down the horse's hoof and into the filthy puddle of mud.
The ground of the horse market had always been the filthiest corner of Zhenbeiguan.
Livestock dung, rotting fodder, and years of loose earth trampled underfoot all mixed together into black, reeking sludge.
But when Yang Cang's fingers probed down and touched the mud at the bottom, his skin felt a sharp, stinging sensation.
Too coarse.
Hidden in this mud were grit and gravel sharp as knives.
He picked up a pinch of mud with two fingers, withdrew his hand, and, shielded by the horse's shadow, rubbed away the black grime on the surface.
Quartz fragments! Mixed with powdered white marble!
Yang Cang didn't raise his eyes, but his mind was already made up.
The surface loess outside the walls of Zhenbeiguan—even if you dug three feet down—was all soft, sandy soil.
This kind of raw, hard rock dust, with its edges still sharp, unrounded by water, could only come from one source—three zhang underground.
Only by fresh-chiseling deep-buried granite layers, grinding the stone to bits, would such debris be brought up.
It had no business appearing on the surface of the horse market.
It could only have been carried up from the deep earth in baskets by thieves, then, under the guise of the horses and mules moving about day in and day out.
They'd poured it into the mud without a trace, where hooves crushed and trampled it, passing it off as ordinary fill dirt.
Hunchback Zhang was leaning lazily against a wooden fence not far away.
The old man wore a tattered cotton coat, pulled a few crumbs of tobacco leaf from the pouch at his waist, and slowly packed them into the copper bowl of his long-stemmed pipe.
The undercover agent was still haggling with him:
"Boss, your price is too steep. Folks like us who make a living on border trade—now that the Helian army is pressing down from the north, nine out of ten trade routes are cut off."
"This Hequ horse of yours can carry some weight, sure, but on my trip west, there isn't even a proper relay station along the way."
"Fifty strings of cash—call it a favor between friends, what do you say?"
Hunchback Zhang tapped out his pipe bowl, spat out a puff of stale breath, and spoke with the oily slickness of a shrewd merchant.
"Sir, don't try to squeeze me with talk like that! Precisely because there's fighting up north and the city gates are sealed tight, fodder prices change every single day."
"Last night, the north wind blew all through the night, and my stable is drafty on all sides. Even the livestock lost a couple of pounds."
"If you're serious about buying, I won't come down a single coin. If you think it's too dear, go looking for those small-time sellers outside the South Gate—you'll get a better deal there."
Every two puffs of his pipe, his peripheral vision would unobtrusively drift over the horse trough and sweep toward the back courtyard of the shop.
This line of work had carved wariness and suspicion deep into his very bones.
Though the horse market opened as usual today, strangers had come, and that vigilance could not be altogether suppressed.
Meanwhile, Yang Cang, through his motions, hung his head and casually wiped the mud from his hands against the rough splinters on the edge of the horse trough.
Then he raised his left hand and flicked off two blades of dried grass clinging to his lapel.
The signal had been given.
Every movement up and down the street changed in an instant.
The peddler carrying two baskets of greens halted his steps and wedged his carrying pole crosswise across the mouth of the alley.
The laborer squatting by the wall chewing on a flatbread tucked half of it into his coat, moved lightly to the street corner, and blocked the escape route.
The fake horse dealers who had been arguing with a Hu merchant over a few coins just moments ago stopped talking all at once, their right hands slipping silently toward the small of their backs.
No scrape of blades leaving scabbards, no thunderous war cries.
Only a tightening iron net that pinned every vital point of Hunchback Zhang's body in place.
The distant clamor of the horse market continued as before, but in this square of ground alone, figures converged, radiating an oppressive military pressure.
The old horse lowered its head to gnaw at the dregs in the stone trough.
Yang Cang's hand, patting the horse's belly, stopped.
Hunchback Zhang's hand, holding his pipe, hung suspended in midair.
"Take him!"
Yang Cang sprang from the ground. His right foot stamped hard against the earth, using the force to launch himself upward.
His five fingers spread wide, shaped like iron hooks, striking straight ahead.
Close-quarters combat, with no warning whatsoever.
The palm-wind howled, and it landed with precision on the collarbone of Hunchback Zhang's left shoulder.
With a crisp, clean crack, the old man's shoulder bone collapsed, and half his body was forcibly driven down against the horse trough beside him.
Hunchback Zhang gasped in pain and let out a muffled groan.
This wizened, skeletal old bastard harbored the fierce brutality of a steppe wolf.
With his left shoulder crippled, he didn't retreat—he pushed forward instead.
His right arm reached toward the small of his back, and from his sleeve slid out a grayish-white iron bone whistle.
This whistle was carved from the leg bone of a desert unicorn sheep, its tone so shrill it could pierce metal and split stone.
Just half a breath blown into it, and the hidden reinforcements outside the city walls, or the thieves still digging in the earth below, would know the operation had failed.
Hunchback Zhang opened his mouth to blow.
A blade's light flashed, cleaving through the autumn chill.
The undercover agent who had been feigning haggling all along flipped aside the hem of his long robe, and the concealed saber leapt from its sheath.
The blade cut upward from below in a slanting arc, its path cold and merciless.
Blood sprayed through the air.
Hunchback Zhang's withered wrist was severed clean at the root, and a shrill scream tore from his throat: "Ah!"
The severed hand, still clutching the iron-bone whistle, flew several feet before landing in a nearby pit of horse manure and mud.
The moment Hunchback Zhang's cry rang out, the iron net that had been laid for so long finally bared its fangs.
Behind the stable, two planted agents who had been crouching low chopping fodder sensed something wrong and reached beneath the haystack for their blades.
But the "peddler" at the alley mouth was already upon them like a tiger descending the mountain. His carrying pole whistled through the air and came down with brutal force—two dull thuds.
Both men's spines snapped clean, and they crumpled to the ground without so much as a grunt.
At the tea stall across from the shop, a hidden lookout pretending to sip tea began to rise and shout.
A "laborer" crouched by the wall slipped up behind him like a phantom. One hand clamped over the man's mouth and nose, the other drove a short blade deep into his lower back from behind, then dragged his limp body silently into the shadowed alley.
In the blink of an eye, seven or eight lookouts and planted accomplices scattered around and within the shop were cut down or pinned into the muck by the closing net of Left Battalion soldiers—none of them even managing a single warning cry.
Two Hu-Han horse traders lingering nearby to watch the spectacle saw the blood splash and felt their legs give way. They collapsed into the filth, sitting there in stunned terror.
"Murder! Murder! The officials are killing people!"
The two scrambled and crawled to escape, snot and tears streaming down their horrified faces.
But the encircling soldiers' long blades were half-drawn from their sheaths, and the flat of the steel struck the traders' faces with cold, deliberate force.
Broken by the killing aura radiating from the bodyguards, the two men forgot the mud beneath them. They dropped their heads to the ground, kowtowing over and over, too terrified to make another sound.
Yang Cang flung aside the half-dead Hunchback Zhang, raised his blade, and kicked open the flimsy wooden door at the back of the courtyard.
Several soldiers of the Left Battalion filed in, moving at a rapid pace, heading straight for the stack of old fodder baskets in the corner.
Their long blades chopped down, smashing the crates to pieces.
The soldiers shoved aside the thick layers of rotting straw and broken bricks, sweeping away the debris that had been used to conceal the site.
A weathered wellhead, covered in dark green moss, was revealed in full.
The brick rim of the well was deeply grooved from years of rope dragging across it.
What should have been a bottomless water well was sealed shut from above with packed yellow mud and dry grass.
But drawing close, one could clearly smell the dampness surging up through the cracks between the bricks.
This was not the stale, sour reek of standing water.
It was the odor of fresh earth buried deep underground, unexplored and free from sunlight.
No matter how well concealed, a tunnel carved day and night beneath the earth cannot hide the trace of the soil that was dug to make it.
Hasty footsteps sounded from the rear street.
Two old craftsmen, carrying chests, were escorted into the courtyard by soldiers.
Setting down their wooden boxes, the craftsmen worked swiftly, pulling out several sections of hardened steel rods, as thick as an arm, with threaded ends on both sides.
Section by section, they screwed the rods together, guiding them downward along the cleared gaps of the well mouth.
For the first three feet, they met with nothing but resistance from thick silt.
Then, suddenly, there was empty space.
The iron rod slid down freely into a deep pit.
The old craftsman's expression shifted. He twisted his wrist, angling the rod horizontally toward the north.
Clang—
Sharp ring of metal striking metal echoed up through the depths, piercing the stone walls and reverberating across the field in the rear of the mule-and-horse market.
The old craftsman's hands shook as he pulled the rod back out and measured its depth with a bamboo ruler.
Then he turned to Yang Cang. Deep wrinkles spread across his face in overwhelming joy, and even his voice quivered with excitement.
"Sir! It goes through!" the old craftsman shouted eagerly. "No water at the bottom! The rock layer cuts northward—a channel has been hollowed out more than ten zhang long! Wide enough for two men to walk side by side!"
This was no ordinary water well dug for daily use.
This was a subterranean passage capable of letting entire armies slip through undetected!
Hunchback Zhang had spent five years pouring his heart into this, hollowing out the ground beneath the mule-and-horse market—and now he was barely a single step short of the moat's bottom beyond the city walls.
Yang Cang loosened his rigid brows.
He turned, pulled a short signal tube from his belt, and tore off the fuse.
A flare shot upward, piercing the frosty morning mist and bursting into a dense cloud of red smoke midair.
Moments later, at the far end of the main street, the ground trembled.
Three thousand elite troops of the Northern Garrison, plated in gleaming armor, poured through the narrow avenues like a flood breaking its banks.
Heavy forces sealed every direction, closing the entire mule-and-horse market into an iron cage.
The deadly scheme that had hung over the Northern Pass for five long years was finally, utterly exposed at last.
