Stale ditch water, sulfur, and frozen butcher scraps. The mist outside the watch station smelled of everything except rain.
Lu Chen paused on the threshold. Beneath his boots, the pooled blood of the twenty corpse-grafts had already begun to skin over with thin, gray ice.
Behind him, Old Meng struggled to his feet, using his hickory heavy club as a crutch. The old watchman’s knuckles were white where he gripped the wood.
“Lu Chen,” Old Meng rasped, his voice raw. “Listen to me, lad. The curfew mist isn’t weather. It’s the shroud. Past midnight, the district belongs to the Specters. If you step out without a brass lantern, the frost eats your marrow before you reach the canal bridge.”
“I have no brass lantern,” Lu Chen said.
“Then you stay behind the salt line until sunrise,” Doctor Bai said from behind his desk. The coroner was packing gray sulfur paste into an earthen jar, his hands steady despite the blood splattered across his leather sleeves. “Old Qian released those things to kill us. That means the outer gates are bolted, the precinct constables are paid off. The district walls are bristling with crossbows. You walk out there alone, you’re just fresh meat walking into a larder.”
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve.
He drew the four-inch iron bone awl, set the blunt tip against the callous of his left thumb. Then he drove it inward until he felt the cold iron scrape the outer bone of the fingertip bone.
Pain spiked through his hand, clean and bright.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
“They broke our door,” Lu Chen said, sliding the awl back into his sleeve. “If I wait for dawn, they will bring a fire.”
He looked back at the old watchman. “Bar the inner door. I’ll be back before fourth watch.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lu Chen stepped through the ruined doorway and into the street.
The curfew mist swallowed him in three paces.
Black Water County at midnight was a tomb. The Great Yong Dynasty had long abandoned the provinces to local tyrants and crawling nightmares. The common folk knew it. Every shopfront along Seventh Street was boarded shut with heavy elm planks. Strips of yellow warding paper, stained brown by damp weather and grease, fluttered from the roof edges like molting feathers.
The surrounding heat hovered four degrees below freezing, but it wasn’t natural winter cold. It was the leech-like chill of Yin-qi pooling in the low alleys.
Lu Chen’s boots crunched against the frost-rimed cobblestones.
He walked at a steady, steady, unrushed pace: seventy paces per minute. His breathing was low, rhythmic, drawing the icy air deep into his lungs.
Within his chest, the five pounds of rendered beef animal fat he had downed minutes earlier were burning with furious, unbending smooth speed. His blood heat sat steady at fifty-four degrees.
He crossed the deserted intersection of Carpenter’s Lane. Then, the mist ahead thickened into gray, churning eddies.
From the roof edges of an abandoned dye shop, three pale shapes detached themselves from the darkness.
They were Frost-Wisps—the residue of vagrants who had frozen to death during the Great Famine two winters past. They possessed no solid bones or meat, appearing only as hollow, semi-clear faces trailing tattered shrouds of frost.
They smelled the living warmth streaming from Lu Chen’s chest.
With high-pitched, soundless shrieks that rattled the ice on the roof tiles, the wisps swooped downward. Their vaporous claws reached out, aiming straight for the main neck blood vessel at the base of his neck, desperate to drain tube his mortal Yang-life-force.
Lu Chen didn’t raise his cleaver.
He didn’t alter his stride.
He simply exhaled.
Sssss.
A plume of white-hot steam billowed from his mouth and nostrils. The heat aura streaming from his bare throat and temples collided with the incoming spectral frost.
The leading wisp touched the field of intense heat surrounding his collar. Then, its icy shroud evaporated. The creature emitted a wet, hissing screech as its vaporous face warped, bubbled. Then he crumbled into greasy gray smoke that blew away on the wind.
The other two wisps recoiled wildly, their milky features twisting in primal horror. They scattered back toward the rafters, dissolving into the damp roof edges like melted lard.
Lu Chen continued walking.
Mortal martial artists feared the curfew mist. That was because their blood ran at thirty-seven degrees, fragile and easily cooled by the Uncanny. To a fighter whose blood ran near boiling, the minor horrors of the lower wards were nothing more than damp cobwebs across a doorway.
Ten minutes later, the rotting timber shanties of Seventh Ward fell behind him.
The street widened. The cracked dirt and rotting wood gave way to smooth blue flat stone slabs, scrubbed clean of horse dung and alley refuse.
Ahead loomed the high stone wall of the Northern Quarter—the private safe hall of County Judge Zhao and Assistant Bailiff Qian.
Here, red silk lanterns hung beneath roof edges of black glazed baked-clay tiles. Their wicks burned scented sesame oil mixed with powdered red stone to ward off low-grade phantoms. Iron-studded palisades blocked the wide avenue leading to the Judge’s compound, heavy with sharpened oak stakes and sandbags.
Six county constables stood behind the barricade. They weren’t ragged watchmen like Old Meng. They wore boiled-leather brigandine coats heavy with steel plates, iron caps, and carried heavy military recurve crossbows.
“Halt!” a harsh voice barked from the platform behind the stakes.
A sergeant with a jagged scar across his lip leaned over the timber wall, raising an iron lantern. “Who walks past curfew? State your name and show your night pass, or we turn you into a pincushion!”
Lu Chen held his pace. His boots clicked against the blue flat stone slabs, sixty paces out, fifty paces out.
“It’s him!” another guard yelled, his voice cracking with sudden panic. “Look at the apron! It’s the dead-house boy from Seventh Ward! The one who killed Master Tie Shan!”
“The ghoul pack failed?” the sergeant gasped, backing away from the rail. “Shoot! Shoot the bastard down!”
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Three heavy steel-tipped crossbow bolts erupted from the wooden wall, hissing through the rain-slick air.
At thirty paces, an iron-tipped bolt from an eighty-pound military crossbow carried enough force to punch clean through an oak shield and shatter the breastbone behind it.
Instead of diving for cover, Lu Chen raised his left forearm in front of his face, angled outward at thirty degrees to deflect the flight path.
Clang!
The first bolt struck his left forearm. The iron point struck the dark, black glass-veined skin, produced a shower of orange sparks. Then he snapped at the socket like a dry pine needle. The shaft bounced harmlessly into the gutter.
The second bolt glanced off his right shoulder, tearing a clean strip through his canvas apron before skittering off into the dark. The third flew wide, embedding itself in the plaster of a tea house wall.
The constables stared in stone-hard disbelief.
“His skin...” one of the men whimpered, his hands shaking so wildly he dropped his cocking lever. “He didn’t flinch. He’s made of iron!”
Lu Chen sped up.
He covered the leftover twenty paces in two long, thundering bounds. The flat stone slabs beneath his boots cracked under the explosive torque generated by his thigh muscles.
He hit the heavy wooden wall shoulder-first.
Boom!
The heavy oak stakes snapped off at the iron bolts. The sandbags burst, spraying coarse river grit into the air. The entire defensive barricade collapsed inward like a wicker fence kicked by a warhorse.
Two constables were hurled backward, their armor caving in as they crashed into the stone roadway.
The sergeant scrambled backward on his elbows. He drew a three-foot iron saber with wild, sweating hands. “Stay back! You’re committing treason! The Judge will have your entire nine clans flayed alive!”
Lu Chen stepped over the splintered timber.
He reached down with his left hand, caught the sergeant’s saber by the bare blade, and squeezed.
The steel screamed under the sideways push. With a sharp snap, the three-foot blade broke in two.
Lu Chen stepped forward, driving the heel of his boot into the sergeant’s shoulder. Bone fractured cleanly. The man went limp, rolling into the mud with a strangled wheeze.
The leftover three constables threw down their crossbows, turned tail. Then they fled screaming down the avenue into the darkness.
Lu Chen let them run. Running soldiers were not his target.
He wiped a smear of mud from his trousers, shifted his grip on the notched twelve-pound cleaver. Then he walked toward the end of the grand boulevard.
There, towering over the district like a castle, stood the grand estate of the County Judge.
Its outer edge was surrounded by twenty-foot gray granite walls topped with broken glass and iron caltrops. Facing the street was a massive vermilion gate, twelve feet high and six inches thick, heavy with level iron bands and heavy brass dragon studs.
Above the gate hung two massive crimson lanterns, lighting up the carved wooden plaque that read: Pure Virtue and Heavenly Law.
From behind the closed gates, the faint sound of stringed zithers and drunken laughter drifted over the wall. It mixed with the rich, heavy smell of roasting meat and spiced wine.
Lu Chen came to a stop two paces before the vermilion gates.
He rolled his shoulders. The charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his neck pulsed. It glowed faintly red in the darkness as the Molten Tiger Vajra Body coiled within his tendons like a tightly packed steel spring.
“Heavenly Law,” Lu Chen said softly.
He drew his right leg back. He locked his knee, his eyes fixing on the iron crossbeam behind the wood.