The hall emptied with the scramble of boots over frozen pine.
Shouts, clattering iron sword sheaths, and overturned benches pulled back into the main hall as thirty men bolted from the dark hallway, desperate to put timber and iron between themselves and the privy.
Lu Chen remained motionless before the stall.
Sub-zero air spilled from the doorway like water from a punctured barrel. It smelled of bitter pine-resin wax, frozen hog fat, and the sweet, copper reek of an open chest cavity.
On the pine latrine bench, Merchant Qian sat upright in the lantern light.
Without eyelids, his milky eyes stared into the void. Without lips, his teeth showed in an unbroken white sneer. His stripped chest muscles and between-rib bundles glistened like freshly carved beef. But not a single bead of blood dripped to the frosted planks.
The tiny blood vessel beds had been frozen shut before the blood could spill.
Lu Chen reached into his sleeve and drew the four-inch iron bone awl.
He didn’t hurry. In the dead-house of Black Water County, haste was how an apprentice ruined a stitch or cut a vital tendon during an inquest. A corpse was a balance sheet written in meat. One only had to read the ledger with steady hands.
He stepped over the frosted threshold.
Where his boots pressed against the planks, rime frost hissed into dirty water under his sixty-five-degree soles. His blood fire hummed in his chest, sending steady waves of dry warmth through the coarse hemp of his tunic.
He stepped behind the dead man.
With his left thumb and forefinger, Lu Chen parted the raw neck muscle bundles at the nape of Qian’s neck.
The skull sat clean atop the atlas vertebra. Along the bone lamina. There, the deep spinal rotators anchored, four curved micro-grooves ran parallel to the cord.
They weren’t butcher cuts. They were finer than a cobbler’s needle, curved like the sickle claws of a hunting weasel.
The killer had hooked its claws beneath the base of the skull, worked them down the spinal column like a seamstress slitting an inner lining. Then they pulled the entire human skin free in one unbroken sheet.
Lu Chen pressed the tip of the iron bone awl into the neural canal between the fourth and fifth neck bones.
The metal met pushback.
Not the soft pushback of spinal marrow, but the hard, brittle crunch of sub-zero ice.
A shock of biting chill traveled up the iron awl, stinging his calloused palm.
A pale blue light flickered across his vision.
The test box burned behind his eyes for three breaths before fading into the gray dark.
Lu Chen withdrew the awl.
A crust of blue rime coated the iron needle, crackling faintly as it met the sixty-five-degree heat of his skin.
“Sub-zero marrow,” Lu Chen murmured to the empty stall. “Living flesh on the outside; dead ice on the inside.”
He knew what this was.
In the old post-road ledgers of the northern guard posts, it was recorded under three names. The Corpse-Shifter, the Weasel-Priest, and the Eight-Tailed Yin-Fox.
Born in the high ice-slow fissures of the Old Crow Pass, the beast possessed no thick pelt of its own to withstand the white disaster. Its flesh was pure Yin-ice. To cross mortal settlements without freezing into a brittle sculpture of frozen bile, it harvested human skin.
It wore a dead man like an oiled mountain cape.
It pulled the warm skin over its skeletal frame, secured the seam with mucosal secretions along the spine, and walked among the living.
Yet a stolen coat couldn’t generate blood heat.
Beneath the stolen hide, its living core remained ten degrees below zero.
“Flesh breathes; blood resists; anchor checked.”
Lu Chen whispered the anchor phrase under his breath. He felt the iron anvil in his lower belly steady his mind against the rising spectral foul fog.
Heavy, dragging footsteps sounded from the dark hall.
Lu Chen turned his head.
Station Master Han stood in the doorway of the rear wing, his back hunched, leaning his weight onto his good left leg.
The jagged scar across his jaw twitched as his single bloodshot eye took in the flayed corpse on the latrine bench. In his right fist, Han gripped an iron-banded pine heavy club, its iron studs scarred from decades of border skirmishes.
The old veteran didn’t vomit. He had seen royal guard posts overrun by steppe raiders in his youth.
He spat a thick wad of dark tobacco onto the frosted planks. It hissed and froze into a brown lump.
“By the nine kings,” Han rasped, his voice low and serrated like a saw. “It’s true. The boy didn’t lie.”
“He didn’t lie,” Lu Chen said.
“Is the beast still in the stall?” Han raised his heavy club, his scarred knuckles turning white.
“No,” Lu Chen said, wiping the awl against his oiled leather wrist guard. “The kill happened less than fifteen minutes ago. The killer peeled him, pulled the hide over its back, and walked down your hall.”
Han cursed under his breath, a string of foul guard post oaths.
“The outer edge gates are barred with three four-inch oak crossbars,” Han said, his eye darting to the ceiling rafters. “The wooden wall is twelve feet of oiled pine. Nothing climbed out into the blizzard without leaving tracks in the snow.”
“It didn’t climb out,” Lu Chen said. “It had no reason to. Out there, the storm is twenty below zero. In here, thirty men are burning peat and boiling mutton.”
Han sucked in a harsh breath.
“It’s in the common hall,” the station master said.
“It’s in the hall,” Lu Chen agreed.
From the front of the lodge, the muffled roar of shouting men rattled the timber partitions. Iron sword sheaths clanged against tables. A baked-clay bowl shattered on the floorboards.
“They’re going to butcher each other,” Han spat, clutching his heavy club. “Escort Leader Jiang has his sabers drawn, but Qian’s two retainers have their daggers out. They think Jiang’s wagoners murdered their master for the silver chests. If blood spills in the hall, the station will burn before dawn.”
“Let them shout,” Lu Chen said calmly. “Panic makes men move. A moving man burns fat and blood.”
“What does that mean?”
“The thing took Qian’s skin,” Lu Chen said, stepping past Han into the hall. “It has his face, his hair, his clothes. If you ask it for royal travel papers, it will show Qian’s seal. If you search its baggage, you’ll find Qian’s silver.”
“Then how do we find the bastard?” Han demanded, limping beside him down the cold hall. “Cut open all thirty men to check their ribs?”
“No,” Lu Chen said. “We use heat.”
Lu Chen stopped three paces from the thick cedar doors that separated the rear wing from the common hall.
Through the heavy timbers, the hysteria inside was reaching a crescendo.
“A mortal man is an open hearth,” Lu Chen said. “His heart pumps warm blood. In this mountain cold, every living man exhales thick white steam. When you bring hot iron near his cheek, his pores open and sweat flows.”
He held up his right palm. That let the faint, amber shimmer of his stoked blood fire radiate against the frosted pine walls.
“An Uncanny beast has no fire,” Lu Chen said. “Its core is frozen marrow. It wears human skin, but it can’t heat the meat. When hot iron nears its stolen face, it won’t sweat. And when it breathes, no steam will rise from its mouth.”
Station Master Han stared at Lu Chen’s calm, unblinking face, then looked down at the steam coiling lazily from Lu Chen’s linen collar.
A slow, grim understanding dawned in the old veteran’s scarred eye.
“The peat hearth,” Han whispered.
“The hearth,” Lu Chen confirmed. “Keep your heavy club ready. Tell Jiang to level the spears against anyone who breaks the outer edge.”
“And the poker?”
“I’ll hold the poker,” Lu Chen said.
He reached out his left hand, gripped the heavy iron ring latch of the cedar door. Then he paused for a single breath to steady his pulse.
Behind the wood, thirty men were on the verge of slaughter.
Ahead of him lay two entities disguised in mortal wool and fur. Their frozen marrow waited in the shadows.
Lu Chen pushed the door inward.