Yellow smog hung thick over West Street, reeking of burnt sulfur, damp straw, and sour vinegar.
Lu Chen emerged from the drainage alleyway, the hem of his leather tunic steaming in the cold night air. His boots made a dull clatter on the uneven cobblestones.
“Stand where you’re!” a voice cracked with shrill panic.
At the wooden barricade, three county court guards leveled six-foot iron-tipped spears. Their hands shook so wildly the spearheads rattled against their wooden shafts like dried bamboo in a gale. All three men wore greasy green service coats plastered to their chests with cold sweat.
Lu Chen kept his hands steady. He unhooked the square pine dead-house badge from his belt and held it out at waist level.
“Seventh Ward dead-house,” Lu Chen said. “Tracking canal silt.”
The lead court guard leaned forward, his bloodshot eyes darting between the badge and the heavy twelve-pound cleaver resting on Lu Chen’s shoulder. The guard swallowed dryly.
“Don’t go near that gate, boy,” the court guard rasped, lowering his spear an inch. “Judge’s orders. West Street is dead ground.”
A heavy hickory heavy club cracked against the stone floor behind the barricade.
Thump. Clack.
From the shadow of a sentry shed, an old man limped into the torchlight. He wore a patched felt coat smelling of wet dog and rancid liquor. A boiled leather patch sealed his right eye socket. At the same time, his left eye—clouded with yellow waterfalls—gleamed under bushy, gray brows.
Old Meng spat a mouthful of amber sulfur wine into the fire bowl.
The coals hissed with blue flame.
“Lower the spears, fools,” Old Meng growled, his voice like two millstones grinding coarse gravel. “He’s human. Ghouls don’t steam.”
The court guards stepped back, murmuring curses. Then they unlatched a narrow gap in the timber barricade.
Lu Chen stepped through. He stopped beside the old watchman.
“You smell like mud,” Old Meng said.
“Canal lock,” Lu Chen replied. “Twelve ghouls. All dead.”
Old Meng grunted, his single eye sweeping over the dried mud and scorch marks on Lu Chen’s boots. “Waste of animal fat. The real rot is up there.”
He pointed his hickory heavy club toward the center of the district.
The main street of the weavers’ quarter stretched into the rotten-egg haze. It was flanked by two-story timber workshops and dye warehouses. Not a single paper lantern was lit. Every wooden shutter was barred from the outside with iron spikes, and long strips of yellow paper magic charms fluttered from the roof edges like soiled burial streamers.
Most of the paper had already turned pitch-black, soaked in greasy moisture that dripped from the roof tiles.
“The Grand Loom Hall,” Lu Chen said.
“Aye,” Old Meng said. “Court guard Qian locked the outer edge at noon.”
“An apprentice looked through the transoms this morning,” the old man muttered. “Went blind in both eyes before he hit the ground.”
“How many dead?”
“Seven,” Old Meng said. “Master Chen and his six best hands.”
Lu Chen walked down the center of the avenue, his boots crunching over discarded spools of gray hemp and broken dye vats. Old Meng limped beside him. His hickory heavy club struck the stone with a rhythmic beat that kept the encroaching fog at bay.
On the cobblestones between them, the scarlet thread ran nonstop and unbroken.
It had bypassed the outer barricades, crossed the drainage gutter. Now climbed the three granite steps leading to the double cedar doors of the Grand Weaver Guildhall.
The doors were sealed shut with a massive iron crossbar. Above the top door beam hung a carved gold-trimmed plaque reading Tribute Silk of the Southern Cloud.
Lu Chen stepped onto the porch.
The wood under his boots was slick with a strange, oily resin. He crouched, scraping a sliver of the residue with the tip of his thumb.
It wasn’t tree sap. It was congealed animal grease mixed with fine strands of crushed human hair.
Lu Chen pulled his iron bone awl from his sleeve and drove the square point half an inch into the callous of his left palm. The hot, sharp burst of nearby agony cleared the sulfur smog from his nasal passages.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
“Don’t open the door,” Old Meng warned, stopping at the base of the stone steps. His knuckles were white around his heavy club. “The air inside isn’t meant for lungs.”
Lu Chen left the iron crossbar untouched. He moved three paces to the left. There, a fancy rosewood lattice window had been partially covered by a rotting bamboo blind.
He used the flat spine of his cleaver to nudge the blind aside by two inches.
He pressed his right eye to the diamond-shaped sky-slit.
Inside, the guildhall was fifty paces deep, framed by massive pillars of whole-trunk hardwood. everyone could feel the drifting gray lint and the choking odor of stale rose oil and dry skin.
Seven wooden tribute looms sat arranged in two neat rows.
And directly above the center aisle, six feet off the polished pine floorboards, hung the weavers.
Seven men.
They wore spotless white linen smocks and dark cotton trousers, their feet bare and pale. None of them had a hemp rope looped around his neck. There were no leather straps, no iron hooks, no butcher chains.
They were suspended entirely by masses of glistening, raven-black hair.
The hair poured straight down from the ceiling beams in thick, twisted cables, like the aerial roots of a thousand-year-old banyan tree. The black tendrils pierced straight through the crowns of the weavers’ skulls, burrowed through their ears. Then he erupted from under their jawlines. It wrapped tightly around their throats in choking knots.
All seven corpses hung in total stillness.
Their eyes were wide open. White, dried corneas, devoid of moisture, stared straight up into the pitch-black shadows among the crossbeams.
A dull amber window flared in Lu Chen’s vision:
Lu Chen’s breathing slowed. His heart kept a steady, heavy pulse.
He observed the corpses’ hands.
Their fingers were set in precise, delicate grips, as if holding invisible brass shuttles and silk needles. Long strands of bright red silk—the same silk that had choked Merchant Song and tethered the mud ghouls in the canal—traveled from their dead fingers down to the wooden benches of the looms below.
The thread he had tracked from the canal lock entered the hall under the doorstep and ended directly in the open palm of the lead corpse: Master Weaver Chen.
“They aren’t dead from strangulation,” Lu Chen murmured.
“What did you say?” Old Meng asked from the foot of the porch, his good eye darting nervously across the roof edges.
“Their throats aren’t crushed,” Lu Chen said, keeping his eye against the lattice. “Their necks are stretched. The hair pulled them upward while their feet were still planted on the foot pedals.”
Old Meng shivered, pulling his greasy felt coat tighter around his throat. He raised his brass night-patrol gong and tapped the rim with his striker—a soft, muted clink that sounded like a warning to the dead.
“Court guard Qian wants to burn the hall,” Old Meng muttered. “Said he’d set the whole street on fire at dawn if the silk isn’t cleared.”
“Burning won’t kill it,” Lu Chen said.
“Aye,” Old Meng agreed darkly. “Fire just makes them scream and run into the other wards. An oddity doesn’t burn with pine wood.”
Suddenly, the air inside the guildhall stirred.
There was no draft. The paper seals on the transoms remained glued to their frames. Yet, through the diamond sky-slit, Lu Chen saw the hanging corpses begin to turn.
Slowly. In perfect synchrony.
All seven bodies revolved ninety degrees in mid-air. Their bare heels turned together through the empty air like the arms of a water clock.
Then, deep within the shadows of the hall, a wooden treadle depressed with a loud, hollow crack.
Thump.
An iron shuttle flew across the empty frame of the grand center loom with a harsh metal scrape.
Clack.
The rhythm was steady, clockwork, and horrifyingly purposeful.
Thump-clack. Thump-clack.
From high above the floorboards, nestled somewhere among the unseen rafters where the black hair took root, came the faint, breathy sound of a woman humming a northern bridal ballad.
At that note, the seven suspended corpses tilted their heads toward the lattice all at once.