Doctor Bai scooped a walnut-sized dollop of bitter pine-resin wax from his brass jar, smeared half beneath his nostrils. Then he flicked the remainder to Lu Chen.
Lu Chen caught the pungent wax and rubbed it across his upper lip. The biting scent of bitter pine-resin and wintergreen cut through the choking reek of stale pond sludge and rotten bile filling the study.
“Hold the basin low, lad,” Doctor Bai said. He pulled a long, curved cutting-open blade from the rolled oilcloth kit. “If the peritoneal cavity is under crushing pressure, it will spray five paces.”
Lu Chen set the cedar bucket directly beneath the edge of the rosewood desk. With his left hand, he gripped the bloated folds of Merchant Song’s silk trousers. That kept the heavy corpse anchored.
His knuckles hummed with heat, his blood streaming warmth through the cold air.
Doctor Bai made the main clean cut.
The curved steel entered the neck-vein notch at the base of Song’s throat and drew downward in a smooth, unhesitating stroke straight to the pubic crest.
Sssss!
The sound was not the tearing of mortal flesh. But the hissing rupture of an overpressurized bladder.
A torrent of foul, black liquid erupted from the belly slit, cascading over the rim of the rosewood desk into Lu Chen’s cedar bucket.
The liquid was not human blood or gastric acid.
It was pitch-black canal water, freezing cold and churning with gray bubbles of swamp gas. Within ten seconds, the cedar bucket was half full, steaming with rotting frost as it touched the floorboards.
“Look at the stomach lining,” Doctor Bai muttered, using brass bone hooks to peel back the yellow fat under the skin. “The stomach isn’t burst. It’s shriveled. The fluid didn’t pool in his belly through digestion.”
“The chest,” Lu Chen said quietly, pointing with a bone probe. “The chest muscle is forced down.”
“Hand me the saw.”
Lu Chen passed the heavy serrated steel rib-saw into Doctor Bai’s gnarled hands.
Crunch. Crunch. Rasp.
The teeth of the saw bit into the chest bone and costal joint padding. White bone dust mixed with black water, turning to gray paste beneath the old coroner’s fingers.
With a final wet snap, Doctor Bai lifted the breastplate away and tossed it into the wicker hamper.
The chest cavity lay open to the cold morning air.
Doctor Bai froze, his bloodshot eyes widening behind his greasy glasses.
Song Dehai’s heart was shrunken, pale as a peeled chestnut, pushed hard against the left spine.
The lungs, however, were huge.
Both lobes were swollen to three times their normal volume, gorged with fluid and stretching the pleural membrane so thin it looked like semi-clear oiled parchment. The surface of the lungs was not the healthy pink of living breath, nor the dull gray of an aging merchant.
They were mottled with dark indigo veins and packed solid with an unmoving mass.
“The windpipe,” Doctor Bai whispered. His hands shook as he reached for a pair of silver studying scissors. “Cut the throat pipe, Lu Chen.”
Lu Chen took the bone-handled scissors. His forty-degree blood kept his fingers rock-steady as he snipped through the rubbery gristle rings of the merchant’s windpipe.
He made a two-inch clean cut along the left main bronchus.
A thick, thick, sticky sludge spilled from the inside of the lung.
It wasn’t water.
It was dense, heavy river silt. Granular black mud that clung to the scissors like wet lime.
Doctor Bai leaned in, his tweezers digging into the opened airway. “What in the seven hells is caught in the bronchi?”
The tweezers pulled back.
Tangled within the thick river mud was a dense nest of shining, blood-red silk threads.
The thread was extraordinarily fine, spun from high-grade southern mulberry silk, dyed in vibrant royal crimson. Despite being sunk in putrid mud, the scarlet dye had not faded in the slightest.
Doctor Bai’s breath hitched in his throat. He used a horn spatula to pull more of the mass from the lung tissue.
Yard after yard of red silk thread emerged from the dissected airway, glistening like wet earthworms pulled from a rainy furrow. The threads had coiled through every bronchus, filling the lung tree and choking the merchant’s air sacs from the inside out.
“This silk,” Doctor Bai rasped, lifting a dripping strand toward the cold window light. “It’s the same dye. The same twist.”
“Lady Yan’s shoes,” Lu Chen said.
“The stitched bridal slippers,” Bai breathed, his cynicism fully stripped away by cold horror. “She was buried with three skeins of red silk tucked into her shroud to sew her wedding dowry in the underworld. How did her silk get into her father’s windpipe?”
Lu Chen reached out his bare right hand and pinched a clump of the black silt from the opened lung.
The moment his skin contacted the cold mud, a sharp jolt of rotting malice surged down his forearm nerve, cold as liquid ice.
Inside his dantian, the Asura Crucible flared white-hot, consuming the creeping frost before it could reach his heart.
The amber script vanished, leaving eighty-five units of raw specter malice pooling in his dantian.
Lu Chen rubbed the silt between his thumb and forefinger.
The texture was wrong.
Doctor Bai poked at the pile of muck on the horn spatula. “The canal behind the merchant’s manor is shallow. The bottom is yellow sand and rotting leaves. This mud is different. It’s heavy. Gritty.”
“It isn’t from the North Canal,” Lu Chen said.
Doctor Bai glanced up sharply. “You know ditch mud?”
“I dredged three miles of ditches for the county before the dead-house took me,” Lu Chen replied calmly. “Yellow mud washes away. This has iron sand.”
Lu Chen brought the pinched mud close to his eye.
The grit contained tiny flakes of crushed black fire melted rock waste and sharp red brick dust. The soil was acidic. It carried the distinct rotten-egg tang of stale bog-iron and drowned hemlock roots.
There was only one place in Black Water County where iron melted rock waste and drowned brick kilns met standing water.
“The South Canal lock,” Lu Chen said.
Doctor Bai stiffened. “The old southern water gate? The one sealed twenty years ago after the flood?”
“Yes,” Lu Chen said. “The brick kilns collapsed into the water there. The silt never moves.”
Doctor Bai stared down at the open chest of Merchant Song, his wrinkled face hardening into a scowl.
“When Song reported his daughter missing two weeks ago, he told Bailiff Qian she slipped into the East River dock while watching the flower barges,” Doctor Bai murmured. His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “The East River has clean gravel. Not a grain of iron melted rock waste for ten miles.”
“He lied,” Lu Chen said.
“He didn’t just lie,” Doctor Bai muttered. He wiped his bloodied hands on a towel soaked in vinegar. “He took her to the South Lock. Or he threw her in.”
Heavy, hurried footsteps echoed outside the study door.
Court guard Qian stumbled back into the room, flanked by two guards holding torches. The court guard had stuffed cloves of garlic into his nostrils to fight the smell, his eyes darting wildly from the bloody desk to Doctor Bai’s instruments.
“Are you finished?” Qian demanded, his voice cracking with desperation. “The judge’s clerk is waiting at the outer gate! What’s the cause of death? Stroke? Sudden palsy of the chest?”
Doctor Bai didn’t look at him. He pointed his razor knife at the cedar bucket overflowing with black swamp sludge.
“He drowned, Guard,” Doctor Bai said flatly. “In four gallons of stale river mud and half a bolt of cursed red embroidery silk.”
Qian turned the color of cold ashes. “Silk? Mud? Where did the mud come from?”
“The abandoned South Canal lock,” Lu Chen said, his voice quiet and level.
At the mention of the South Lock, Bailiff Qian wildly recoiled. His pudgy hands twitched, clutching the green silk over his chest. Right where the dried lung of a drowned specter was secretly grafted beneath his ribs.
“Silence!” Qian shrieked, spit flying from his lips. “The South Lock has been a forbidden zone by royal decree for twenty years! No one goes to the South Lock! It’s a nest of plague and drowned vagrants!”
“Merchant Song went,” Lu Chen said.
“You insolent corpse-scrubber!” Qian snarled, pointing a trembling, ringed finger at Lu Chen’s nose. “You hold your tongue or I’ll have the guard post strip your skin! You write apoplexy on the scroll, Doctor Bai, or neither of you leaves this manor alive!”
Before Doctor Bai could speak, the distinct, sharp ring of a brass gong echoed from the street beyond the outer walls.
Clang!
One long strike. Two short.
Old Meng’s watchman code.
Danger. Guards circling.
Lu Chen wiped the studying scissors on his oilcloth apron. Then he dropped them into the wicker chest. He gathered a small sample of the black iron silt, sealing it inside a hollow bamboo tube before slipping it into his sleeve.
“The autopsy is complete, Doctor,” Lu Chen said calmly. “We should go.”
Doctor Bai picked up his smoking pipe, his cynical face dark with resolve. He looked at Bailiff Qian with utter contempt.
“The dead don’t care about your tax grain, Qian,” Doctor Bai said. He turned toward the door. “And whatever came out of that South Lock... It isn’t done drinking.”
Lu Chen rested his right hand on the horn handle of the twelve-pound cleaver and followed the doctor down the wooden stairs, toward a street where Tie Shan’s guards were circling.
The bamboo tube of black silt pressed cold against his wrist. Before the night was out, he meant to stand in the water it came from.