High gray walls loomed through the morning fog, ringing the Song Family Compound like the castle walls of a river castle.
Two white mourning lanterns hung from the hardwood roof edges, their oiled paper damp and fluttering in the biting frost. At the main gate, six private guards stood in boiled-leather cuirasses, their hands resting nervously on the pommels of their broadswords.
Beside the gatehouse, three men in tiger-hide vests crouched around a small charcoal fire bowl. As Lu Chen and Doctor Bai approached, the guards looked up. Their calloused fists tightened, eyes tracing the twelve-pound cleaver slung beneath Lu Chen’s oilcloth apron.
Lu Chen kept his eyes forward, his stride steady, boot soles crunching on the gravel path.
Inside the outer courtyard, chaos reigned. Female servants were weeping behind screens, while clerk-accountants wildly carried cedar chests of silk receipts and grain ledgers across the flat stone slabs, desperate to salvage records before the yamen seized the estate.
Court guard Qian stood at the foot of the inner pavilion stairs, his plump frame wrapped in a greasy green silk robe that looked two sizes too small.
He was wildly patting sweat from his sagging jowls with a soiled handkerchief, even though the air was cold enough to freeze spittle.
“Doctor Bai! What took you so long?” Court guard Qian shrieked, his voice trembling with high-pitched panic. “The sun is up! The grain convoy from the country depot arrives tomorrow! If the judge hears of an uncanny disturbance in the head merchant’s house, the entire district will be locked inside so the sickness wouldn’t spread!”
Doctor Bai didn’t quicken his pace. He adjusted his bronze-rimmed glasses and puffed a thin cloud of bitterleaf smoke straight into the official’s face.
“Corpses don’t spoil faster in the frost, Qian,” Doctor Bai said, raspy and flat. “Where is Song?”
“Upstairs! In his private study,” Qian whispered, leaning in so close that Lu Chen caught the sour scent of wine and bad teeth. “Listen to me, Bai. You’re the county’s chief physician. A stroke. That’s all the paperwork needs to say. Apoplexy brought on by grief over his drowned girl. Write the certificate, stamp your seal. The judge will grant you three ounces of healing silver.”
Doctor Bai eyed the court guard with cold tiredness. “I haven’t seen the plumbing yet, Qian. I don’t sign what I haven’t cut.”
“You stubborn old quack!” Qian hissed, wringing his handkerchief until his knuckles turned white. “If the Ministry of Rites declares this an Uncanny Quarantine, the northern silk gates will be barricaded with iron bars! The tax grain will rot in the barges! Do you want both of our heads mounted on the drum tower?”
“Step aside, Guard,” Doctor Bai said. “Or carry the saws yourself.”
Doctor Bai gestured to Lu Chen. The two of them mounted the steep timber stairs to the second floor of the pavilion.
The second-floor hall was silent and freezing.
Four yamen guards stood outside the study door, their polearms trembling against the floorboards. The study’s double doors were built of three-inch-thick northern hardwood, heavy with bronze bosses.
The hinges were scarred with deep chisel marks. Two heavy iron slide-bolts hung crookedly from the door post where the guards had forced the door open with crowbars.
“The room was barred from inside,” the lead guard murmured, refusing to look through the open doorway. “We had to pry the pins out of the bronze brackets. No window was unlatched. No roof tiles broken.”
Lu Chen followed Doctor Bai across the threshold.
The study was cavernous, lined with cedar bookshelves and racks of dried calligraphy scrolls. A charcoal fire bowl sat in the corner, its embers cold and gray. Woolen carpets covered the flat stone slabs.
The room was fully dry.
Not a single puddle sat on the floorboards. No tipped water bucket, no washing basin, no damp patches on the walls or ceiling. The air smelled only of stale sandalwood incense and frozen ink.
And yet, sitting at the massive rosewood desk in the center of the room, Merchant Song Dehai looked as if he had spent a week at the bottom of a canal.
The merchant was slumped forward, his heavy torso pinned against the edge of the desk.
His face was buried directly inside a small, pale-celadon fine china tea bowl.
The delicate bowl was no larger than a child’s fist. Inside it rested barely two fingers of cold, brownish jasmine tea.
Around the tea bowl, the polished rosewood was gouged by ten wild fingernail furrows. Song’s hands were clawed, his fingertips torn to raw ribbons, wood splinters driven deep into his bloody nail beds.
“Look at the belly,” Doctor Bai muttered, lowering his pipe.
Lu Chen stepped closer, his boots silent on the wool carpet. He set the wicker autopsy trunk down and leaned over the corpse.
Beneath the lavish purple satin robe, Song’s belly was grotesquely swollen, stretched taut as a drum. It was so distended that the silver buttons along his silk sash had popped off. It scattered across the floor.
A thick, thick, sticky trickle of black river mud was oozing steadily from Song’s left nostril and pooling on an open ledger of silk shipments.
Lu Chen reached out with his right hand. He pressed his fingers against Song’s swollen neck, just below the jawline.
The flesh was icy. Not merely cold from the winter room, but streaming that distinct, numbing Yin-chill that made human marrow ache.
A faint amber flare shone at the corner of Lu Chen’s vision.
The system confirmed what his senses already screamed.
Drowned Bride deep ring. The same malice signed name he had harvested from Lady Yan two weeks ago on the cutting table. But while Lady Yan’s corpse had been animated by the red shoes, this was different.
This was a remote drain tube. A death curse anchored through water.
“Doctor,” Lu Chen said quietly, his voice low and even. “Look at the mouth.”
Doctor Bai pulled on a pair of oiled pigskin gloves, stepped around the desk. Then he took hold of Song’s gray hair.
With a sharp, wet tug, Bai lifted the merchant’s head out of the celadon tea bowl.
Squelch.
A foul rush of stale bog stench exploded into the room, smelling of rotting fish, sour pond weeds, and black ditch-bottom decay.
Song’s face was hideous. His eyes were wide, bulging from their sockets, the white of the eye fully crimson from burst tiny blood vessels. His lips were swollen and blackened, pulled back in a silent, frozen scream.
Bai tilted the head back. Then, a heavy mouthful of thick, slimy river water spilled over the merchant’s chin. It splashed onto the polished desk.
Mingled within the black sludge were several long strands of dark human hair and a faint knot of crimson silk thread.
Court guard Qian, who had crept to the doorway to listen, clutched his stomach and vomited wildly against the hall wainscoting.
“Heavens above!” Qian gagged, wiping his mouth with his filthy handkerchief. “He... He choked on his tea! It’s a throat seizure! Doctor Bai, tell me it’s a seizure!”
Doctor Bai let go of Song’s hair. The corpse’s head fell back with a heavy, wet thud against the rosewood.
“A man’s stomach holds three pints, Guard,” Doctor Bai said. He pulled a bone ruler from his pocket and measuring the tea bowl. “This bowl holds three ounces. There are at least two buckets of canal muck trapped inside that belly. Unless Merchant Song possessed the stomach tract of a river whale, he didn’t drink this from a tea cup.”
“Then who poured it down him?” Qian pleaded, sweating heavily. “The door was locked! The guards were outside!”
“No one poured it,” Lu Chen said.
Qian spun around, glaring at the apprentice. “What did you say, dead-house boy?”
Lu Chen pointed to the scratch marks on the desk. “He didn’t fight someone off. He clawed the wood trying to pull his head out of the bowl.”
Doctor Bai adjusted his glasses, his cynical eyes gleaming with grim fascination. “The lad is right. The fingernails are bent backward. He wasn’t held down by hands. The water in that bowl held him by the lips.”
Court guard Qian stumbled back against the door frame, his flabby face white as animal fat. “The girl... It’s Yan’s ghost! She’s come back for the estate!”
“Ghosts don’t care about deeds, Qian,” Doctor Bai said, opening the wicker autopsy trunk. “Only debts.”
Bai reached into the trunk and withdrew the heavy serrated steel rib-saw and a long, curved autopsy knife.
“Court guard, clear the hallway,” Doctor Bai ordered without looking up. “Send your runners to fetch two more cedar buckets and a barrel of burning lime powder. We’re opening him up right here.”
“Here?” Qian squeaked. “On his master desk?”
“Unless you want to carry eighty pounds of waterlogged dead weight down those steep stairs and risk tearing his gut across your silk robes,” Bai said coldly.
Qian turned green, clamped his hand over his mouth. Then he fled down the hall, his boots pounding wildly down the wooden stairs.
The room fell silent once more, save for the bitter winter wind rattling the oiled paper of the high study windows.
Doctor Bai handed the curved skinning knife to Lu Chen.
“Strip the satin robe, lad,” Bai said, his breath misting in the cold room. “Let’s see what kind of river this old bastard swallowed.”
Lu Chen stepped to the front of the desk and gripped the collar of the purple robe.
His calloused fingers pressed against Song’s bloated chest. Then, the dead ribs gave a sudden, sickening shudder.
Beneath the cold flesh, something thick and fluid sloshed wildly against the chest bone, as though a trapped fish were thrashing inside the dead man’s ribs.
Lu Chen didn’t pull his hand away.
His forty-degree blood surged into his knuckles, his slate-like iron skin hardening beneath the oilcloth apron as he met Doctor Bai’s bloodshot gaze.
“He’s not empty,” Lu Chen said.
“Then cut,” Doctor Bai replied. “Before it crawls out.”