Xiao Wu’s shriek cut through the smoky air of the common hall like a bone needle through an eyeball.
It wasn’t a war cry. It was the choked, bubbling sound of a man whose mind had split under the weight of something that violated nature.
Chairs overturned with splintering crashes. Wine flagons rolled across the timber floor, spilling dark liquor into the sawdust.
“Blades out!” Caravan Leader Bao bellowed. His nine-ring broadsword cleared its sword sheath with a harsh, metal rasp.
Nine caravan escorts drew their sabres all at once. They formed a defensive ring around Merchant Zhao and his hardwood chests. Behind the counter, Station Master Han snatched his iron-banded heavy club. His one good eye was wide and bloodshot.
Lu Chen was already moving.
No shout. No defensive stance. He rose from his cedar bench in a single, fluid surge of corded muscle, the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver resting balanced in his right hand.
He moved toward the dark rear hallway before the echoes of the scream had died.
The hall was narrow, unlit, and freezing.
Unlike the choking warmth of the common room, the rear hall was exposed to the mountain draft. Freezing air poured through gaps in the wooden roof shingles, laying down a dangerous dusting of fine rime frost across the pine floorboards.
At the far end of the passage, outside the door of the second privy stall, a figure was crumpled against the timber wall.
It was Xiao Wu.
The young sentry had dropped his iron grease-lantern. The lantern had rolled onto its side, its whale-oil flame sputtering through cracked horn panes. It cast long, uneven shadows across the rafters. Xiao Wu was on his knees, clutching his throat, retching wildly into the frozen dirt.
“Xiao Wu!” Station Master Han limped down the hall, his heavy club raised, the escort guards crowding behind him with drawn steel. “What’s it?! Mountain bandits?!”
Xiao Wu couldn’t speak. His arm rose, shaking so wildly the bones in his wrist clicked. He pointed a trembling finger into the open doorway of the privy.
Lu Chen stepped past the retching sentry.
He picked up the overturned lantern, righted it with his boot, and lifted it into the doorway.
The yellow flame flared against the sub-zero draft.
Inside the stall, propped upright against the frosted pine partition, stood a human shape.
It was Merchant Qian Song.
Or rather, it was the body meat of what had once been Qian Song.
He had been fully flayed.
Every square inch of human skin—from the crown of his skull, the shell of his ears, the bridge of his nose, down to his chest, groin, fingers, and toes—had been cleanly peeled away.
Yet there was no pool of gore on the frosted planks.
Not a single drop of blood had been spilled.
The sight was so unnervingly clean it defied mortal trauma. The red, striated muscle bundles glistened in the lantern light like freshly carved beef in a butcher shop. Pearl-white tendons bound the joints. Yellow muscle tissue wrapped the ribs. The delicate joint padding of the larynx was exposed to the freezing air with terrifying care.
Every tiny blood vessel bed and cut arteriole was sealed shut—frozen solid by an unnatural, sub-zero spectral chill. Fine rime frost was already forming along the exposed muscle fibers.
The head was tilted slightly back.
Without lips, the jaw rested in an eternal, skinless grimace. He exposed two rows of neat white teeth. Without eyelids, the milky, jelly-like spheres of his eyes stared directly into the flickering lantern flame.
Behind Lu Chen, the crowded hall went dead silent.
A lantern fell from an escort’s hand, crashing against the floorboards.
“Mother of mercy...” someone whispered, the words trembling into a breathless whimper. “What... What in the nine hells is that?”
Merchant Zhao took one look over Bao’s shoulder, turned around, and vomited wildly against the wall.
“Young Master!”
The two retainers who had accompanied Qian Song shoved through the guards. Their eyes locked onto the flayed figure in the privy. Then, their faces drained of every drop of color.
“Who did this?!” the taller retainer screamed, his voice cracking into hysteria as he drew a pair of hooked hunting daggers. “Who touched our young master?!”
“Stand back,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was quiet, flat, and total. It carried the weight of cold iron dropping onto an anvil.
The taller retainer snarled, turning his blades toward Lu Chen’s throat. But Caravan Leader Bao caught the man’s wrist in an iron grip.
“Don’t touch him, you lunatic,” Bao growled. He stared at the cleaver in Lu Chen’s hand and the steady, unflinching eyes of the dead-house apprentice. “He didn’t do this. He was in the common hall with thirty witnesses when the boy screamed.”
Lu Chen ignored the men behind him.
He stepped directly into the narrow stall, his boots crunching against the frost.
As a third-class dead-house apprentice in Black Water County, Lu Chen had processed three hundred corpses. He had sewn up drowned corpses, stitched together victims of bandit raids, and sawed open plague carriers.
He knew what steel did to human flesh.
Steel hacked. Steel tore. Steel left jagged edges, ragged fat under the skin, and pools of dark-blood clotting.
This was not steel.
Lu Chen leaned closer, bringing the lantern within six inches of the flayed neck.
At the base of the skull, directly over the first neck vertebra, he spotted the point of entry.
A hairline clean cut, thinner than a strand of raw silk, ran from the back-skull ridge straight down the spine to the tailbone. The cut had bypassed every major nerve ending and nerve root without severing a single muscle tendon.
The skin had not been hacked away.
It had been slipped off from the inside, like a tight silk glove peeled from a sweating hand.
Lu Chen reached out with his left hand. He extended the four-inch iron bone awl from his sleeve and touched the tip to the corpse’s exposed chest bone.
A sharp, metal ping shook through the iron shank.
A ring of pale blue frost crystals instantly bloomed across the point of the awl, spreading half an inch up the metal.
The blood heat of the meat was minus fifteen degrees.
In the corners of his outer vision, pale amber runes flared across his eye, with the cold, slithering scrape of spectral malice against his hearing nerves.
The demonic residue in the stall was active.
A faint, seductive whisper—like the rustle of silk skirts and the soft breathing of a young woman—coiled around Lu Chen’s ear, trying to numb his fingers and drag his mind into the snow.
Lu Chen turned the iron awl in his grip, reversed the point. Then he drove the square tip half an inch into the thick callous of his left palm.
A hot, stinging spike of gut-deep pain shot straight up his forearm nerve. It burned through the phantom whisper like a red-hot poker through spider silk.
Fresh, steaming crimson blood welled around the iron shank.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
The whisper died. The reality seam snapped firm.
Lu Chen pulled the awl from his palm, wiped the hot blood across his leather belt. Then it turned around to face the crowded passage.
“Master Lu,” Station Master Han rasped, his face gray beneath his scars. “How did this happen? The front gate is barred with three hardwood timbers. The rear latrine chute drops sixty feet into solid mountain shale. No one could have come through the blizzard and left.”
“No one came through the blizzard,” Lu Chen said.
“Then... Then it was a ghost?” Merchant Zhao stammered from the rear, clutching his chest. “An intangible specter from the Old Crow Gorge?”
“Not a specter,” Lu Chen said.
He pointed the flat of his heavy cleaver toward the corner of the privy stall.
“Look at the rafters. Look at the snow on the ledge.”
The men strained their eyes through the dim lantern light. The narrow air-flow slot above the latrine was covered in a clean, undisturbed sheet of powdery snow. Not a single flake had been disturbed.
“Where are his clothes?” Lu Chen asked calmly.
The hall went dead silent.
The two retainers stared into the stall, their breath catching in their throats.
The emerald silk robe lined with silver fox fur was gone.
The white linen undershirt was gone.
The stitched leather boots, the jade belt buckle, the scented silk handkerchief—all gone.
“The clothes weren’t left behind,” Lu Chen said. His voice echoing with was cold care down the timber hall. “And neither was his skin.”
Station Master Han’s hand began to tremble against his iron-banded heavy club.
“What are you saying?”
“The thing that flayed him didn’t flee into the storm,” Lu Chen said. His eyes swept across every face gathered in the drafty hall. “It took his skin, put on his clothes, and walked out.”
A collective gasp sucked the air from the hallway.
Men instinctively leaped backward. They pressed their spines against the walls, their hands gripping their blades in blind, wild terror.
“It’s inside,” Tie Gou shrieked, his voice climbing an octave. “The skin-stealer is inside the station!”
Caravan Leader Bao spun around, his broadsword raised, his eyes scanning his own men with sudden, savage suspicion.
“Back to the common room!” Han roared, his voice cracking with panic. “Bar the hallway! Line up against the wall! Every man keep his hands where they can be seen!”
Panic blew up through the outpost.
Men scrambled backward toward the common hall, tumbling over benches, shouting curses, knocking over flagons of wine in a desperate rush to escape the dark hall.
Lu Chen didn’t run.
He stepped out of the privy, his boots leaving dry, sizzling prints on the frosted floorboards.
His internal blood fire surged, stoking the blood heat in his chest from sixty-two degrees toward sixty-five. White steam curled from his collar. His knuckles tightened around the notched handle of his twelve-pound cleaver.
The skin-stealer was in the house.
And in a locked room sealed against a blizzard, a monster wearing a dead man’s face could only hide until the fire went out.