My name is Hualian — Painted-Face. A green mark on my left cheek, like soot. Hence the name.
I'm the least remarkable monkey in the pens. Too weak to haul stone, too slow to cut walls — the little yao can't be bothered to whip me. But I have one gift no one in the pens can match: I find dark passages.
As a cub on Flower-Fruit Mountain I was a born burrower. Dark and close don't scare me — only dead ends do. By my third day in this den I'd found one: the third stone from the left in the pens' back wall is loose. Behind it, a passage just wide enough for one monkey. No draft, black beyond black.
A draftless passage is the scariest kind. A draft means a way out. Where does a draftless one go?
I've crawled it. Halfway in, it forks: one branch climbs — cold air, comes out behind the forge; one branch descends — warm air. The warm one, I never dared finish.
The walls of the descending branch are covered in scratch marks. Not claw marks. Scratches — even, evenly spaced, as if something has been scratching the walls of that passage, over and over, for years.
I backed out and put the stone back.
If you're coming to get us out, I'll guide you: the upper branch exits behind the forge, with the guards' backs turned. The lower one—
Wait until you have numbers and torches. Then I'll go too.
The scratching sounds once every seven days.