Sub-zero wind screamed through the jagged limestone cleft of Old Crow Mountain like a wounded beast.
Dusk had swallowed the valley, bruising the sky in shades of rotting plum and soot. Along the narrow ridge, ancient royal flat stone slabs cut a five-foot ribbon of cracked gray granite between sheer drops and knee-deep snowdrifts.
Lu Chen paused on the stones, his heavy hemp-wrapped boots biting into the frost.
From his collar and coarse sleeves, thick plumes of white steam billowed into the freezing air. It hissed faintly as they met the sub-zero draft. His internal fire idled at forty-eight degrees, a steady, low-hum streaming through the slate-gray muscle wall of his chest.
Through the howling gale came an alien sound shaking.
The piercing, nasal squeal of a bronze suona horn sliced through the mountain fog. It was sharp, dissonant, and maddeningly off-key, joined two beats later by the dull, metal clang of a brass funeral gong.
Clang.
The sound rattled deep inside the fluid of Lu Chen’s inner ear. That made the enamel of his back teeth thrum with dull ache. It wasn’t music for the living.
In the Great Yong borderlands, that rhythm accompanied only two occasions: weddings and open-pit burials.
When the two merged into the same tune, the mountain folk called it the Bride’s Summons.
Lu Chen kept his hands still. He stood motionless, his dark, unblinking gaze fixed on the swirling gray fog thirty paces ahead.
The mist curled and shredded, parting like greasy silk.
Emerging from the gloom came eight figures, moving in perfect, unnatural all at once.
They were life-sized effigies crafted from bleached funeral paper. Their faces were painted dead white, accented by two perfectly round crimson red stone circles upon their hollow cheeks. Red-inked slits served as their mouths, pulled wide into frozen, thrilled smiles that revealed no teeth.
None of their feet touched the granite flags.
The eight paper bearers floated six inches above the snowdrifts, their lightweight paper hems fluttering stiffly in the freezing draft without disturbing a single snowflake.
Resting across their frail bamboo-strip shoulders were two long carrying poles of polished black wood.
Suspended between them was a massive, ornate bridal sedan chair.
The sedan was carved entirely from weeping water-cedar—the kind reserved only for deep-pit coffins. Its outside was draped in heavy, layered scarlet silk, stitched with gold-thread patterns depicting weeping women and headless cranes. Four brass lanterns hung from the curled roof edges of its roof. It burned with pale green phantom flames that cast no heat and threw no shadows.
The procession moved without the scuff of straw sandals or the creak of flexing timber. Only the dry, insect-like rustle of aged parchment accompanied their advance.
Lu Chen shifted his weight onto his back heel, eyes narrowing as his gaze swept the stone path.
The royal flagged trail was barely five feet wide at this cliffside choke point. The floating scarlet sedan spanned more than four feet across, fully sealing the passage between the upright rock face and the sheer drop into the deep pit.
To allow the procession to pass, any traveler walking this road would have to step aside into the snowdrifts bordering the granite flags.
Lu Chen looked toward the snowbanks at the trail’s edge.
Half-buried beneath the fresh drifts lay four frozen mounds.
Through the crust of windblown frost, Lu Chen picked out the stiffened gray arm of a royal courier, the split wooden sword sheath of an escort guard. The frozen felt caps of two traveling merchants.
Every single one of them had stepped off the stone flags into the soft snow.
Their corpses were entirely drained of blood, skin shriveled like cured pork. And beneath their frost-rimed eyebrows, their lips were peeled back and locked into the exact same wide, painted, paper-doll grin.
The system tracking data flared in dull bronze characters across Lu Chen’s eyes, disappearing as quickly as it had arrived.
A rule-based Uncanny trap.
The Mountain Bride didn’t need to hunt across the vast wilderness. She simply placed her bridal palanquin in the narrowest mountain bottlenecks and waited for mortal fear or basic courtesy to make travelers step off the paved road.
A single step into the deep snow to let the lady pass, and the taboo closed its iron teeth.
The traveler became another frozen groomsman marching forever in her burial train.
“Cheap trick,” Lu Chen murmured into the wind.
His voice was flat, carrying no tremor of panic or awe.
Twenty paces away, the procession suddenly halted.
The clashing suona ceased its shrill lament. The brass gong hung silent in the fog.
An oppressive stillness dropped over the pass, so heavy that the whistle of the mountain wind seemed muffled behind a wall of frozen cotton. The pale green lanterns on the sedan roof edges flared, tinting the surrounding snow in sickly emerald hues.
Then came a dry, rapid sound: kr-r-r-rk.
The heads of all eight paper bearers twisted in same-time exact timing.
Without turning their shoulders, their necks rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees with the dry snapping sound of splitting bamboo. Eight pairs of empty, soot-painted paper eyes locked onto Lu Chen.
Their red-inked slit smiles stretched two inches wider, tearing the paper fibers at the corners of their jaws.
From the wide sleeves of their hemp robes, each bearer drew a seven-inch dagger.
The blades were not forged of steel. They were hand-carved from human femurs, yellowed and jagged, their tips glistening with a thick, sticky, oily layer of dark green corpse venom. The venom was so skin-burning that droplets falling from the bone points hissed as they struck the snow, boring thumb-sized holes into the ice.
The heat in the pass plummeted instantly.
The cold was not mundane winter weather. It was an invasive, rotting chill that sought to seep through the pores, numb the spinal marrow, and snuff out the hot Yang flame burning inside mortal organs.
Frost spread rapidly across the gray granite flags, creeping toward the toes of Lu Chen’s boots like white spiderwebs.
Lu Chen reached into the coarse canvas pouch tied to his hemp sash.
He drew out a thick slab of dried sheep fat, seasoned heavily with coarse gray rock salt. He snapped off a three-inch piece with his thumb and popped it into his mouth.
He chewed slowly, letting the dense, greasy fat coat his tongue and slide down his gullet.
Inside his stomach, the white-hot stomach acids seized upon the packed calories. That turned the dense fat into fresh heat fuel within heartbeats. His blood flow quickened, the charcoal-black melted rock waste veins running up his left forearm warming from dull slate to a faint, smoldering ember.
The encroaching frost hissed to steam three inches before reaching his boot soles.
Lu Chen unhooked the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver from his hip, resting the notched iron spine against his shoulder.
“The path is five feet wide,” Lu Chen said, his measured words cutting through the fog. “You’re in my way.”
The paper bearers answered with a collective, high-pitched hiss that sounded like a pit of agitated vipers.
Their paper sleeves billowed outward.
Without bending their knees or kicking against the earth, all eight paper dolls launched themselves at the same time across the snowdrifts.
They moved with unnatural, weightless gaining speed, skimming inches above the granite flags like jagged red and white leaves caught in a whirlwind. Eight bone daggers, dripping with rotting corpse venom, formed a lethal pincer cage aimed squarely at Lu Chen’s throat, eyes, and main thigh blood vessels.