Across Black Water County, the curfew bell at the Drum Tower tolled the Hour of the Boar.
Nine heavy, iron strikes rolled across the tiled roofs of Black Water County, each boom dull and flat in the freezing mist. Behind high wooden gates, bolt-pins slid into iron brackets and shop shutters crashed down into their sills.
By the ninth stroke, the streets were dead.
Inside the Seventh Ward Watch Station, Lu Chen tightened the boiled leather straps of his oilcloth apron. Beneath the canvas, two bricks of salt-cured sheep fat rested securely against his ribs, padded by his own streaming heat.
He picked up the heavy ox-bone cleaver from the bench. Twelve pounds of notched iron and dense marrow-bone balanced perfectly in his slate-gray palm.
Across the hearth, Old Meng adjusted the rawhide strap of his boiled leather eye patch. The veteran watchman smelled of sulfur wine, charred pitch, and wet dog fur, his breath coming in dry, rattling rasps.
“Salt pouch full?” Old Meng asked, not looking up as he inspected the striker for his brass gong.
“Three pounds coarse rock salt,” Lu Chen said. “One pound wet lime plaster.”
Old Meng grunted, sliding an iron-banded hickory heavy club through the hemp loop at his belt. “Lime bites flesh. Salt bites frost.”
He lifted his horn lantern, blowing softly on the animal fat wick until a dull yellow flame guttered behind the scraped horn panels.
“Stay close to the lantern,” Old Meng ordered, his gravelly voice dropping low. “The southern marsh don’t forgive stray boots.”
Lu Chen nodded once. He reached into his left sleeve. He tapped the cold, four-inch metal tube of his iron bone awl against his forearm.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked. The reality anchor was firm.
They stepped out through the watchhouse gate into the pitch-black street.
The curfew air hit like a sodden, frozen blanket. Without daylight, the cold in Black Water County had teeth, gnawing through rough wool coats and biting straight into marrow.
Yet Lu Chen felt no chill.
His blood heat hummed at a constant forty point two degrees. The freezing air curled against his collar and cuffs. That turned to faint, invisible steam before it could touch his skin.
Old Meng led the way down the narrow alleyway, his heavy boot and crippled knee creating an uneven, dragging rhythm on the frozen mud.
Thump-drag. Thump-drag.
Every fifty paces, Old Meng raised the dented striker and struck the brass patrol gong once.
CLANG.
“Curfew holds!” Old Meng shouted into the fog, his raspy voice carrying down the shuttered apartments. “Seal your latches and cover your mirrors!”
The warning faded into the quiet gloom. Behind the paper-screen windows of the low timber hovels, faint grease lamps were snuffed out one by one.
Commoners lay shivering under horsehair quilts, holding their breath until the watchman’s footsteps passed.
“Listen to the lane, boy,” Old Meng muttered. He kept his lantern low to light up the frozen wagon ruts. “Ghouls make no noise on wood. They smell like spoiled ditch grease.”
“I’m watching,” Lu Chen said.
“Watch the rooflines,” Old Meng added, spitting a wad of bitterleaf onto a frozen puddle. “Things hang from roof edges. Never look into dry wells.”
Lu Chen kept his gaze level. His senses took in the heat-powered contour of the alley.
Mortal houses leaked faint, dirty warmth through their chinked mud walls. But from the south. There, the canal cut through the county wooden wall, a huge current of dead, heavy cold was creeping inland.
They reached the Southern Water Gate ten minutes later.
The gate was a rotting timber arch built over the canal water gate. The iron drop-gate had rusted open twenty years ago, choked with silt, driftwood, and tangled river reeds.
Beyond the gate lay the Willow Marsh.
It was an endless, lonely expanse of black water, half-sunken barges, and weeping willows whose bare branches hung like tangled hair in the mist.
This was the lower lock where Merchant Song’s cargo fleet discharged freight. It was also the spot where Lady Yan’s body had been dragged from the mud thirty-six hours before.
The air out here was far colder than within the town walls. Frost crusted the dead reeds. The shallow pools of standing water had frozen into solid sheets of black ice.
Old Meng stopped at the water’s edge, his lone eye scanning the mist.
“Song lost three boatmen here last week,” Old Meng whispered, his breath clouding thick. “Drowned in three feet of water. Lungs burst with silt.”
“The tea barges still run,” Lu Chen observed quietly.
“Silver talks louder than ghosts,” Old Meng spat. “Court guard Qian takes ten coins per barge. He don’t care who drowns.”
Lu Chen stepped forward, his boots crunching through the brittle reed crust.
As he moved deeper into the marsh, the air around him began to warp.
In the sub-zero chill, Lu Chen’s body was a strange flaw. His Ox-Demon Iron Skin was dense as river stone. But his inside blood fire roared with the energy of digested animal fat and purified malice.
To the mundane eye, only thin tendrils of vapor leaked from his shoulders into the gloom.
To the cold horrors sleeping beneath the ice, he was a roaring bonfire in a world of frozen ash.
The hair on the back of Lu Chen’s neck stood on end.
It wasn’t fear, but the sharp physical prickle of an extreme heat differential. The air forty paces ahead had dropped past negative ten degrees, cold enough to freeze water vapor instantly into airborne frost-needles.
The surface of the black canal water stirred.
There was no wind, yet the yellow reeds parted with a brittle, crystal-clear rustle.
Old Meng froze. His hand snapped to the iron band of his heavy club. His horn lantern shook as he raised it toward the willows.
“Boy,” Old Meng hissed, his voice barely a breath. “Stop walking.”
Lu Chen halted, his boots sinking an inch into the half-frozen silt.
“What do you smell, Uncle Meng?” Lu Chen asked.
“Old ice,” the veteran watchman muttered, his scarred eye socket twitching beneath the patch. “Smells like a tomb unsealed in deep winter.”
The horn lantern’s animal fat flame sputtered, shrinking from bright orange to a pale, sickly blue.
Out among the weeping willows, the white river mist began to curdle. It rolled across the black ice in thick, slow waves. It pooled into dense white hollows between the gnarled tree trunks.
Then the lights appeared.
Faint, ghost-blue embers, burning without smoke or heat.
They hovered three feet above the frozen water, flickering like dying candle stubs. One, then two, then four, emerging silently from the hanging willow vines.
They weren’t fire. They were frost-wisps—leftovers of dead souls frozen in the winter locks, starving for mortal warmth.
As the wisps caught Lu Chen’s heat wake, their pale blue flames flared with hungry, jagged spikes.
They drifted forward in total silence, skimming across the black ice. Their frozen malice drew a straight line toward Lu Chen’s chest.
Old Meng raised his striker, his knuckles white against the brass handle.
“Frost-wisps,” Old Meng whispered, teeth clicking in the sudden sub-zero plunge. “They smell your blood, boy—don’t swing steel or it snaps.”
Lu Chen held his ground.
He slowly loosened his grip on the hemp wraps of his notched cleaver. He felt the heat coursing through the slate-gray skin of his fingers.
His blood heat held steady at forty point two degrees, the heat inside his ribs humming like an iron kettle on hot coals.
The white frost-mist rolled over his boots, crackling as it met his heat.
In the dark of the willow marsh, the cold horrors closed in, and Lu Chen braced his stance for impact.