In the Same Boat
The orders Hui-yeom had dispatched from Beijing through the Sama Clan reached the Sichuan Dang Family without mishap.
In Beijing, the messenger pigeons the Sama Clan released were immediately snagged by the surveillance net. Agents of the Eastern Depot captured several birds on the spot and examined the contents of their letters.
In this era, when one released messenger pigeons it was standard practice to send several—or even several dozen—at once, so that if a few were taken by predators or other accidents before they reached their destination, the rest might still arrive. A handful of missing birds therefore gave the Sama Clan no way of knowing the Eastern Depot had been responsible.
Sama Yun had anticipated exactly that as a given. That was why she had meant the pigeons to carry false content, while the true message would travel by crow dispatch.
The agent reported the decrypted cipher to his superior.
"It was a pigeon letter instructing the Sichuan Dang Family to expand facilities for the production of 'that,' and concerning the cultivation of relationships with certain parties met in Beijing. It was encrypted, but decryption posed no great difficulty."
"'That' being gunpowder, I take it?"
"From context, almost certainly—though anyone ignorant of the private talks would never understand. Even if another power obtained the letter, they would have no idea what sort of production facilities they were being told to enlarge."
"And the messenger hawks?"
"No messenger hawk has left the Sama Clan's own mews. We have watchers on anyone who comes and goes from the mews, in case they release a bird from elsewhere."
"Good. Keep watching."
"As you command."
The Admiral Eunuch who received the report gave a slight nod.
If there were something they truly meant to hide, they would have sent a hawk… Still, even what came by pigeon is enough. Facility expansion, the terms of a 'secret pact' that never names the other party—that alone accomplishes what we need. But is this really all of it?
In the hellish arena of Beijing politics, where the clumsy did not survive, the seat of the Eastern Depot's master was not a post just anyone could hold. The Admiral Eunuch coldly weighed every possibility and reached his conclusion at once.
"This is by no means everything. Investigate every person the Sichuan Dang people make contact with. Especially those three hundred escort warriors they brought—either one of them goes in person, or they send a message by human hand. We need to secure that content."
"Is it all right if we do not watch the Sama Clan as closely?"
"Maintain the watch, but concentrate the main surveillance on the Sichuan Dang Family."
"As you command."
By his common sense, that was only natural. If there were true secrets that went beyond the pigeon letters, they would be the sort that must never be exposed to anyone else—and almost certainly some sly scheme for leaving themselves room to maneuver out from under the imperial eye. Even a rabbit, a mere beast, digs three exits when it digs a burrow for its life. How much less would a man stake everything on a promise from the Emperor alone?
To entrust such a grave matter to someone else's hands rather than to family? In Beijing politics, where betrayal was daily bread and the fool was the one who got fooled, the Admiral Eunuch—who lived every day in that deep darkness—could only conclude that no such imbecile existed.
Especially not given the character of the man he had investigated, this Hui-yeom.
That boy trusts no one. He only ever uses people he has bound and tangled by one method or another.
So the notion that Hui-yeom had truly trusted Sama Yun and handed her orders meant to deceive the Emperor never once entered the Admiral Eunuch's dreams.
And so, while every watching eye fixed itself on the Dang Family people—
Somewhere in Beijing, a funeral director prepared a departed body for burial and slipped a paper envelope of funeral orisons and spirit money into the coffin.
"Sob… sob… Aigoo… aigoo…"
"Once you go, when will you ever come back…"
Along the road that bore the dead, many people carried the bier, wailing, and made for Mount Beimang. When they reached the burial grounds, everyone but the chief mourner turned back.
"Then, as is custom, I shall burn the clothes the departed will wear on the road to the underworld, and the spirit money for the journey."
At the gravekeeper's words, the mourner nodded with bloodshot eyes.
"Here—for your wine. See that Mother's road is not too hard. Burn them well."
"Yes."
"Aigoo, Mother… why did you have to go so soon… if only you had lived five more years… aigoo…"
The mourner collapsed before his mother's grave and wept. The gravekeeper took the envelope of spirit money and headed for the cremation ground built behind his hut—the place where the bodies of those too poor for a proper grave were burned to ash.
He found the tiny kirin crest drawn on the envelope, drew out the spirit money, and saw, interleaved among the notes, things that looked like talismans written in characters no ordinary man could read. To any eye they were prayers for the departed's rebirth in paradise—but…
"……"
The gravekeeper gathered those talismans separately, rolled them tight, sealed them in a small bamboo tube painted black, and dripped wax over the mouth. Then—
"Tsk-tsk-tsk. Wheeeet—!"
He clicked his tongue and whistled. One of the crows thronging Mount Beimang flapped down before him. He checked the number on the band around its neck, hung the black-painted bamboo tube from the band, and—from a distance, against the crow's own color—no one would ever have noticed the bird wore a collar at all.
"Wheeet!"
Flap-flap!!
He pressed a strip of dried meat into the crow's beak and whistled again. The bird rose into the sky.
Among the countless crows that filled Mount Beimang, if one more left the mountain and flew west, the Eastern Depot's gaze never reached that far.
Thus the Sama Clan's crow dispatch left Beijing.
While Hui-yeom left Beijing and made his way by land through Hebei, the crow dispatch reached the Sama Clan's mews. From there Sama Yun's letter was fastened to a priority messenger hawk and sent flying toward the Sama Clan itself.
The intelligence officer who received the priority hawk saw a cipher he could not decrypt and went straight to the Family Head's office.
"My lord, a special dispatch from Beijing."
"A special dispatch?"
A cipher that matched none of the ordinary decryption tables from one through nineteen was, by definition, a message under the twentieth table—authorized for only the tiniest handful of the Family Head's direct line. In other words, a special dispatch.
The Family Head took it at once and began to read.
"Hah!"
He let out a breath of pure astonishment.
"Does he trust our house this far? Or has he been utterly bewitched by Yun's charms? Either way, the man is a piece of work. That kind of nerve…"
He stroked his chin with a troubled look. The trouble did not last long.
"If he were the sort of fool who, dazzled by a beauty, would hand over secrets that decide a clan's life or death, he could never have raised the Dang Family as far as he has. This… one may as well call it a forced ride on the same boat."
If they meant to cut the Dang Family loose, this was the last chance. Past this point, the Sama Clan and the Dang Family would truly become a community of fate.
Expected gains? And the risks?
In an instant Sama Sang, Family Head of the Sama Clan, ran every hazard through his mind. His conclusion was clear.
"I ought to pay a call on the Dang Family Head. Come to think of it, Father has already been—yet I, who am to be the other father-in-law, have never even paid my respects…"
A house that had, in less than a decade, developed Sichuan and Yunnan to such a degree. A house that bored through mountains with the unknown power of gunpowder and raised vast structures by techniques never seen before. And a house whose revealed strengths were only the fraction it chose to show—the rest of its power still hidden.
"There is no reason not to stand with them."
If the imperial house ever set its mind to it, it could invent any pretext it liked and end a clan. Sama Sang hardened his resolve to climb aboard the Dang Family's revolution—and it was a choice worthy of the name of the Sima of Heavenly Calculation.
And so Sama Sang went in person to his in-laws' house, the Sichuan Dang Family.
After all, was there any safer way to carry a secret than for the man who held it in his head to go and deliver it himself? And he had a perfect public pretext—a visit to his fellow father-in-law. Even if imperial surveillance stretched that far, they might suspect, but they would find nothing to seize on.
On the road to Sichuan, Sama Sang saw with his own eyes the development he had known only from reports, and the sight only hardened the resolve he had already made to stand with the Sichuan Dang Family.
Then, after the welcome banquet, alone over wine with Dang Un-sang, Family Head of the Sichuan Dang, he at last laid out the true purpose of his visit.
When Dang Un-sang heard Sama Sang's account and received the blueprints Hui-yeom had entrusted to him, his face crumpled.
"Even from a thousand li away that boy dumps work on me like this… ha…"
"Pardon?"
"Nothing. Only the grumble of a man who has a son too capable for his own good—and for mine."
"Haha. You must feel secure, then, my fellow father-in-law."
"Secure, yes… and yet somehow I feel my back is about to break. The boy works even his own father like a hired hand."
Once the dam of dialect broke, Dang Un-sang launched into a long, grumbling string of boasts about his son. Sama Sang listened in good spirit at first; by the end he was thoroughly worn out.
When I get home I shall have to take the children in hand. My son-in-law serves his house like this, and my own lot are still far from enough.
Neither Dang Hui-yeom nor Dang Un-sang had any way of knowing that a bolt of lightning had just fallen on the perfectly ordinary sons of the Sama Clan.
But there was someone who would face the bolt that fell on his own head more squarely than anyone else.
"Elder Bak Chang-eon has collapsed!"
"Th-the Cheongshimhwaaan…"
Ah. Um. Well. That is.
Elder Bak Chang-eon—hang in there.
After Elder Bak Chang-eon fainted following his interview with Dang Un-sang, and after Construction Department Head Gwak Do, who had been briefed in full, climbed the rear mountain, faced the northern sky from which Hui-yeom would be coming, and roared at full voice as if he meant to perfect his vocal art—"YAAA!!! You XXX!!! Are you even human, or are you the Overwork King of Work Hell itself!!!"—and after that whole series of incidents had run its course, the Dang Family's engineers and craftsmen, grumbling and muttering as always, began to move.
"A tunnel job?"
"Shh!"
Truth be told, tunnel work was nothing new. In the Central Plains, as far back as the Han centuries ago, siege warfare had used tunnels to collapse enemy walls or to slip out of a city unseen. The Dang Family's construction people had cut coal and iron galleries and done the inner works that made such shafts safe; they were old hands at the trade.
What made their heads ache was something else.
"We do the work—but it has to leave no sign at all outside?"
"And materials coming in, not to mention what we do with the dirt and stone we dig out?"
"Heavens above."
"And these vertical ventilation shafts—what even—?"
"A balanced ventilator? Never seen one of those."
"Young Master being Young Master again."
An underground project they had never attempted, loaded with every constraint imaginable—and that was not all.
"Camouflage chojeon?"
"Expand the saltpeter fields to ten times their present area?"
"And where, exactly, does the manure for that come from…?"
"The stench? The locals will not stand for it."
"Ah—so instead of dumping it straight through the sewage works, we divert everything that used to go out on the manure poles and send it here?"
"And while we're at it, build the saltpeter fields in the mountains a decent distance from Sichuan Province, and lay rail to them?"
"Fair enough. If we put fields of that size near the city, the smell alone would start a murder. You can't haul manure poles that far, so the trains it is."
"We do the underground work and this? With what people?"
"Shh!"
When things reached that pitch, Bak Chang-eon could hold back no longer and submitted his opinion to Dang Un-sang.
"The Elders' Council insists that the Huiyeon Scholarship Foundation's operating policy must be changed."
"I am of the same mind."
People. There were simply too few people. Laborers could be hired with a notice across Sichuan soil; what they chronically lacked were the junior, mid-level, and senior managers to run them.
"First, the present curriculum wastes too much. We must compress it to accelerated training strictly in the field each student will serve."
The course Hui-yeom had designed had, in its early stages, included a broad grounding in the humanities and general learning. The Elders' Council and the Family Head's office, eyes spinning from the manpower shortage, cut that without mercy.
"From the day of admission—architecture, smithing, research, finance, administration, and military affairs! Fix only the subjects we need and make them master those alone!"
Thus a plan was drawn up to fill the ranks with personnel who, if a little unfinished, could still be poured into the field at speed. Even so, usable hands would not fall from the sky today—
And here Dang Un-sang committed one more act of tyranny.
"Where in life is there perfection! Experience is the finest teacher of all! From this day forward, every last one of you will learn while you work!"
Until then only the practical classes nearing graduation had been posted to sites as part of their training. Now every student who had been taught to any useful degree was thrown into the field as junior-manager trainees—and cheap labor. And this extreme prescription produced an unexpected dividend: once people who were, on the books, still "students" could be mobilized for "construction," it became far easier to fool outside eyes.
So, while the Sichuan Dang Family strained to solve the homework Hui-yeom had flung at them—
Dang Unhwa was having a fit.
"WHYYYYY!! Why can't we use themmmmm!! I worked so hard—so hard—to make these artistic children, and now I have to shove them in a dusty warehouse and leave them thereeeee!!"
He rolled on the floor with a noise like a civil-defense siren until, with a look of pure disgust, Dang Un-sang held out a set of blueprints. Unhwa sat up like a meerkat.
"…Dabal-shinggi-jeon? Does this one blow up?"
A new love had found him.