Dry birch wood crackled in the charcoal fire bowl of the County Yamen’s inner pavilion, but Assistant Judge Bailiff Qian couldn’t stop shivering.
His heavy green silk robes—stitched with the silver carp insignia of a ninth-rank royal functionary—stuck to the fat between his shoulder blades in cold, rancid sheets of sweat.
With trembling, plump fingers, he dabbed his jowls with an oiled silk handkerchief.
On the polished cedar floor knelt Geng San.
The senior student’s left arm was tied to a splintered bamboo lath, the white fracture bone still weeping dark fluid through soaked linen. He pressed his forehead against the floorboards, leaving a greasy smear of rain and mud.
“Say it again,” Qian whispered, his voice shaking with high-pitched venom. “Say it one more time. If you lie by a single breath, I’ll have the skin flayed from your buttocks before midnight.”
“Excellency... Every word is true!” Geng San sobbed into the timber. “Master Tie Shan struck his chest with full thirty-year Iron Sand Palm! The boy didn’t even sway! His chest burned like a blast fire—Master’s palm melted straight to the bone in one breath! Then... Then the boy stepped forward and punched once.”
Geng San shuddered wildly, vomiting a string of clear bile onto the floor.
“Master’s ribs blew out his back,” Geng San cried. “He died before his boots hit the ditch. The school... The school is broken! The students threw down their weapons and ran!”
Qian stared at the begging on their knees student, his breath hitching in his chest.
Deep beneath Qian’s own ribs, behind his right breastbone, something cold and stringy squirmed. It was the desiccated lung of a drowned specter, grafted into his flesh three years ago by an itinerant apothecary to cure his consumption.
The graft was sensitive to unnatural malevolence. Right now, it was fluttering like a trapped moth against his ribs, sending waves of icy nausea up his throat.
A mortal can’t withstand thirty-year Iron Sand Palm.
A human body can’t reach seventy degrees without frying its own brain.
“A rogue demon,” Qian muttered, his small, piggish eyes darting wildly across the painted silk screens. “It’s not the dead-house boy. The boy died weeks ago in the cold. Whatever is wearing his skin... It’s an Uncanny corpse-horror that crept out of the canal!”
And then the true terror struck him.
The bribe ledger.
Every illicit copper extorted from the meat stalls, every forged tax receipt, every bribe slip bearing Qian’s personal vermilion seal had been carried in Master Tie Shan’s inner pocket. If that parchment fell into the hands of the country censor arriving next month, Qian wouldn’t merely lose his rank.
He would be dragged to the market crossroads, disemboweled with a dull hook, and his entire clan sold into northern salt mines.
“The ledger...” Qian hissed, grabbing Geng San by the collar and hoisting him six inches off the floor. “Where is Master Tie Shan’s purse?”
“The... The corpse-demon took it,” Geng San stammered, his eyes rolling back in terror. “He stripped Master’s vest before we fled!”
Qian hurled the student back onto the floor with a strangled screech.
“Unfit dogs! Mountain of garbage!”
Qian kicked the kneeling man in the ribs. Geng San shrieked in agony as his broken arm struck the base of an iron lantern stand, scrambling backward toward the door on his knees.
Qian spun around to his heavy rosewood writing desk.
With shaking hands, he poured water onto the stone slab, ground a block of vermilion red stone ink. Then he dipped a wolf-hair brush. His handwriting, usually pompous and measured, degenerated into jagged, wild slashes.
He slammed the judge’s heavy brass seal onto the bottom of the rice paper. That left a dripping crimson imprint: EXECUTION ON SIGHT.
“Constable Ma!” Qian bellowed, his voice echoing through the courtyard rafters.
A burly squad captain in iron layered-scale armor hurried into the pavilion, bowing low with his hand on his saber handle. “Excellency!”
“Take forty men,” Qian barked, waving the wet warrant in the air. “Surround the Seventh Ward Mortuary. Burn the roof down with sulfur arrows. Bring me the demon’s head, and bring me the oiled parchment in his coat!”
Constable Ma didn’t take the paper.
The captain’s weather-beaten face turned the color of cold animal fat. He swallowed hard, his eyes dropping toward the floorboards.
“Excellency...” Ma stammered. “The men... The men saw Tie Shan’s corpse in the ditch. The ditch water around his chest was boiling. The men say the dead-house boy caught Tie Shan’s palm with his bare flesh and melted it. Half the guard post threw down their belts and climbed over the city wall. The rest refuse to march into Seventh Ward after nightfall.”
“Mutiny?” Qian’s voice climbed into a frantic shriek. “I’m the Assistant Judge! I command the guard post!”
“The guard post fears the judge’s rod, Excellency,” Ma whispered, his jaw clenched tight. “They fear the Uncanny more. No man will charge an iron demon in the dark for three copper coins a day.”
Qian stood frozen, the crimson warrant shaking in his grasp.
His jaw twitched. A bead of sweat dropped from his chin, splattering on the red ink.
The regular constables were useless. The martial artists were dead. The censors were three weeks away on the northern post road.
If Lu Chen walked into the yamen with that ledger, Qian was dead.
There was only one force left in Black Water County capable of tearing through an iron-skinned horror. A force so vile, so corrupt, that even the country laws forbade its existence under penalty of clan extermination.
Qian reached into his inner sleeve and drew out a heavy, tarnished ring of black iron keys.
“If the living won’t fight,” Qian whispered, his lips peeling back from his yellow teeth in a feral snarl, “the unsafe will.”
Captain Ma’s eyes widened in horror. “Excellency... Not the Water Cells. The sealing magic charms were placed by the Royal Bureau of Astronomy—”
“Silence!” Qian snarled, shoving the captain aside. “Follow me to the dungeon, or I’ll cut off your ears myself!”
They dropped through the rear courtyard into the underground vaults beneath the old county armory.
The air grew damp, heavy, and foul. The stone steps were slick with black moss and the reek of stale bog water, rotting cabbage, and gangrenous flesh. Torches hissed as they burned in the thin, stale air.
At the bottom of the descent lay twenty iron-barred cages embedded directly into the limestone foundation.
Inside the cages, things stirred.
They had once been death-row bandits, river pirates, and disgraced deserters. But three years ago, when the Uncanny plague crept through the province, the last judge had allowed illicit corpse-grafters to buy the unsafe for razor-sharp refinement.
Their skin was gray and leathery, stitched with coarse catgut thread. Their forearms were swollen to twice human thickness, spliced with the sinews of river ghouls and the iron claws of carrion wolves. Around their necks were heavy iron collars carved with suppressive Buddhist scriptures, covered in yellow paper magic charms.
Twenty pairs of milky, clouded eye-covered eyes snapped toward Qian’s torch in the gloom. A chorus of deep-throated, wet snarls rattled the dungeon stones.
Qian stood before the central row of cages. His specter lung fluttered wildly, drinking in the dense aura of corruption.
He pulled a wooden cask of black, thick, sticky wine from the wall bracket—corpse-frenzy broth, brewed from fermented wolfsbane, sulfur, and specter bile.
He poured the black liquid into the drainage trough connecting all twenty cells.
The smell of the broth drove the caged monstrosities into a frenzy. They threw themselves against the iron bars, their claws shrieking against iron, foam bubbling from black lips.
Qian raised the heavy iron key and approached the central locking gearwork.
“Listen to me, you dogs,” Qian hissed, his voice echoing through the damp vault. “In the Seventh Ward Mortuary, there’s a rogue demon disguised as an apprentice. He carries an oiled parchment in his coat.”
The corpse-grafts hissed, their yellowed fangs snapping at the air.
“Go to the Seventh Ward,” Qian roared. He turned the key until the iron gears screamed in protest. “Tear the boy into thirty pieces! Bring me the parchment, and bring me his heart! The entire Seventh Ward is your feeding pen tonight—butcher who you like, gorge on what you like, and you’re free!”
CLANG!
The master locking bar dropped.
Twenty cage doors swung open into the dark.
Yellow magic charms tore away from iron collars, fluttering like dead leaves into the mud. The twenty corpse-grafts dropped onto all fours, their spines popping as mutated muscles swelled, their throats unleashing a long, curdling shriek of starving hunger that shook the dust from the dungeon ceiling.
They bolted up the stone stairs in a blur of gray flesh, iron claws, and rotting sinew.
Qian stood at the base of the stairs. He grabbed his silk robes, laughing into the dark until his voice turned to a wet, hacking cough.
“Tear him apart,” Qian whispered. “Leave not a scrap of bone.”