Iron shrieked as the gate splintered inward.
Rain poured through the breached entrance, lighting up the jagged teeth of broken oak. Three senior students from the Iron Fist School surged through the gap, their iron-banded cudgels raised high.
Old Meng didn’t retreat.
The fifty-eight-year-old watchman planted his good right leg into the mud, twisted his hips. Then he whipped his hickory heavy club upward in a vicious slanted sweep.
CRACK!
The iron-banded tip caught the first student directly under the kneecap. Bone shattered with the wet crunch of a trampled melon.
The student screamed, his leg folding backward as he collapsed into the mud.
Before the second student could react, Old Meng reversed his driving force. He drove the blunt handle knob of the hickory staff straight into the man’s throat.
Joint padding buckled. The second attacker choked on his own tongue and dropped like an empty hemp sack.
“Still breathing,” Old Meng wheezed between his teeth. “Back off!”
He was an old frontier soldier of the Great Yong army. He knew nothing of flashy martial forms. Every strike he had ever learned was designed to butcher nomadic horsemen in narrow mountain passes.
Yet thirty men were not nomadic horsemen scattered across a ridge. They were a pack of wolves.
“Surround the old bastard!” a student shrieked from the rear. “Break his other knee!”
Four iron rods lashed out at the same time from the rain.
Old Meng blocked the first two with the heavy shaft of his heavy club, the impacts sending jarring blast waves into his arthritic wrists. But his left knee, locked in its stiff leather brace, couldn’t pivot fast enough.
A third rod smashed into his left shoulder, tearing the shoulder muscle and dislocating the collarbone.
A fourth iron bar struck his good right shin from behind.
Old Meng grunted, his vision flashing white. He dropped to one knee in the freezing mud. But his calloused hands refused to release the hickory wood. He swung upward from the hip, clipping another student across the jaw in a spray of loose teeth.
“Enough playing with the corpse-watcher,” a booming voice thundered.
The students scrambled backward into the downpour.
Master Tie Shan strode into the courtyard. His massive frame seemed to swallow the light of the torches. Rain hissed against his bare, bronze-skinned shoulders, evaporating into thin curls of vapor.
He didn’t draw a weapon. His bare right hand—broad as an iron skillet, swollen with thirty years of red iron-sand training—hung at his side.
Old Meng struggled to stand. He pushed his hickory heavy club into the gravel, his chest heaving, dark blood trickling from the edge of his leather eye patch.
“County property,” Old Meng rasped, spitting red onto the mud. “You hang.”
Tie Shan sneered.
Without a word of warning, Tie Shan’s right foot launched forward in a brutal, straight-line stomp.
CRACK!
The iron-banded hickory heavy club, seasoned in river mud and oil for fifteen years, snapped cleanly in two beneath Tie Shan’s iron-soled boot.
In the same fluid motion, Tie Shan’s right palm drove forward.
Iron Sand Palm: Mountain-Splitting Impact.
The blow took Old Meng full in the chest.
There was a sickening sound—like a heavy stone dropped onto a basket of dry twigs. Four of Old Meng’s ribs caved inward.
The force lifted the fifty-eight-year-old watchman off his feet. He threw him ten feet backward across the courtyard.
SPLASH.
Old Meng hit the flooded flat stone slabs. It skidded through the muck until his back slammed against the dead-house threshold.
He lay there in the rain, his breath coming in shallow, bubbling wheezes. A pool of dark bright red blood spread from under his collar. It mixed with the rainwater and the sulfur wine leaking from his broken gourd.
His dented brass night gong lay five feet away, half-buried in the mud, silent.
A student stepped forward, his face twisted in a vicious grin, raising a four-pronged iron butcher hook above Old Meng’s exposed throat.
“Master, let me pin his gullet to the stone!”
“Wait,” Tie Shan commanded. He stepped through the rain until he stood three paces from the threshold. “Let the boy inside hear him choke. If he doesn’t bring the mirror shards out in three breaths, gut the old cripple like a carp.”
Inside the dead-house hall, the air was dead and cold.
Doctor Bai stood behind the cedar autopsy table. His trembling fingers grabbed a serrated bone saw. His face was gray as wet parchment.
“Lu Chen...” Doctor Bai whispered toward the rear vault stairs. “They’ve killed Old Meng. Run through the sewer grate. You can’t fight thirty men.”
From the dark mouth of the cold vault stairs, there was no sound of running boots.
There was only a low, rhythmic hum. It was like the drone of a blast fire waking beneath an iron foundry.
Then came the footsteps.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Slow. Heavy. Rhythmic.
Every time a boot struck the damp wooden floorboards, the moisture in the pine wood hissed and vanished into white steam.
The heavy double doors of the dead-house swung wide.
A wall of choking, white-hot air rolled out of the dark hall, blasting into the freezing courtyard rain.
The falling water droplets within five paces of the doorway didn’t hit the ground. They struck an invisible heat shield, flash-boiling with a wild hiss-hiss that filled the air with dense white fog.
Through the mist stepped Lu Chen.
He stood six feet and one inch tall, his frame lean and roped with dense sinew like braided hemp cable.
His stained oilcloth apron was strapped tightly across his chest. In his right hand, he held the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver. The dark iron spine was humming with leftover tension.
Across his bare neck, shoulders, and left forearm, the charcoal-black melted rock waste-veins were no longer dark.
They were glowing.
Beneath the semi-clear surface of his hardened skin, the hardened backup spirit veins burned with the deep scarlet of live charcoal pulled from a smelting forge.
White steam misted steadily from the pores of his knuckles and the collar of his shirt. It drifted into the rainy dusk.
The amber box dissolved into the corners of his vision.
Lu Chen’s eyes—flat, dark, and utterly devoid of fear—swept across the rain-swept courtyard.
He saw the thirty students fanned out in double ranks. He saw the iron cudgels and the smoking pitch torches.
Then his gaze dropped to the mud at his boots.
He saw Old Meng lying broken against the stone step, blood bubbling through the old watchman’s gray whiskers.
He saw the two halves of the splintered hickory heavy club floating in the dirty puddle.
Lu Chen knelt down on one knee.
He placed two fingers against Old Meng’s main neck blood vessel.
Pulse: one hundred and forty beats per minute. Irregular. Backward chest movement indicates flail chest. Right lung punctured by fourth rib.
Lu Chen leaned closer.
“Breathe shallow,” Lu Chen said quietly. “Doctor Bai is inside with needles.”
Old Meng’s single eye cracked open, cloudy and bloodshot. His trembling, calloused fingers reached out, weakly grabbing the hem of Lu Chen’s grease-stained apron.
“Tie Shan...” Old Meng rasped, blood spraying from his lips with every syllable. “Iron Sand... Thirty men... Don’t die...”
“I won’t,” Lu Chen replied softly.
He reached down, picked up the splintered upper half of Old Meng’s hickory heavy club, and laid it gently across the old man’s uninjured shoulder.
Then Lu Chen stood up.
As he rose to his full height, the heat in the courtyard seemed to jump another two degrees. The mud beneath his boots dried and cracked into gray dust.
Tie Shan watched the dead-house laborer, his eyes narrowing into slits.
A mortal martial artist didn’t radiate steam from his pores. A mortal laborer didn’t carry veins that glowed like forge coals.
For the first time in thirty years, an uneasy itch of primal danger prickled across Tie Shan’s scalp.
Tie Shan suppressed the feeling instantly, his face hardening into a sneer of arrogant contempt.
“You’re the dead-house dog who broke my three students,” Tie Shan said. His deep voice carried over the hissing rain. “You have guts, boy. I’ll give you that.”
Tie Shan pointed a thick, calloused finger at the canvas bundle visible through the open doorway.
“Drop the cleaver,” Tie Shan commanded. “Hand over the five bronze mirror shards you brought from West Street. Then kneel in the mud and let my senior student snap both your elbows.”
Tie Shan smiled, showing his stained teeth.
“Do that, and I’ll let Doctor Bai drag this old cripple inside to die in a bed instead of a ditch.”
The thirty students laughed nervously, brandishing their iron rods to blade collar their courage against the oppressive heat rolling off the boy.
Lu Chen ignored the students.
He looked directly at Tie Shan’s massive chest, his mind measuring the distance: Eight paces. Ground condition: slick clay and gravel. Target balance point: heavy, stable, heavy by iron sand conditioning.
Lu Chen lifted the notched ox-bone cleaver with his right hand, resting the twelve-pound iron spine against his shoulder.
Steam coiled around the dark iron edge like living serpents.
“You broke his stick,” Lu Chen said, his voice flat, quiet, and deadly.
Tie Shan frowned. “What did you say?”
Lu Chen took half a pace forward into the rain.
“You pay in marrow.”