Inside the common hall of Black Crow Post-Station, the air smelled of wet sheep wool, stale lard, and choking terror.
Thirty men stood with their backs pressed flat against the rough-hewn pine walls, their eyes darting from face to face in the flickering orange glow of the central peat hearth.
Nobody dared to sit down.
Nobody dared to reach into their robes for a dry pipe.
Escort Leader Jiang stood five paces from the barred entrance, both hands clamped on the handle of his unsheathed ring-handle knob saber.
Behind him, eight seasoned caravan guards held short iron spears leveled at the center of the room. The three-sided steel points shook with suppressed fight-or-flight rush.
“Keep your hands where I can see them!” Jiang bellowed, his gravelly voice scraping against the timber rafters. “Anyone who reaches into a coat gets three inches of cold iron through the throat!”
In the corner, an elderly silk merchant dropped to his knees. It grabbed a bronze incense metal tube against his chest.
“Mercy, Master Jiang! We’re honest merchants from the southern valleys! We’ve shared tea with you for four days on the road!”
“Merchant Qian shared tea with us two hours ago,” Jiang spat back, not lowering his blade by a single inch. “Now he’s sitting in the latrine without his hide.”
A young courier from the royal dispatch office backed into the counter. His knees knocked against the cedar boards.
“It could be anyone,” the boy whimpered, tears cutting clean tracks through the road dust on his cheeks. “It could be Station Master Han! It could be one of the wagon drivers! We don’t even know what we’re looking for!”
Station Master Han stood behind the heavy oak ledger-desk, his scarred knuckles white on his iron-banded heavy club.
“Hold your tongues, the lot of you!” Han rasped, his gravelly voice cutting through the panic. “I spent twenty years in the northern border guard posts! If any man draws an unprovoked blade under my roof, I’ll crack his collarbone before the ghosts can peel him!”
The room was seconds away from a bloody, chaotic brawl.
Fear was turning thirty frightened men into wild dogs.
If a single spear thrust slipped, the guards would start butchering the merchants. The merchants would draw their baggage knives to defend themselves.
Lu Chen stepped over the threshold. He closed the thick cedar door behind him to shut out the howling blizzard.
Where his left boot struck the floorboards, a patch of gray frost melted instantly into dark water with a faint, heard hiss.
A column of pale white steam drifted from his coarse linen collar into the chilly room.
He left the notched ox-bone cleaver on his back and kept his mouth shut.
He walked past the leveled spear points with steady, unrushed strides, his heavy wooden-soled boots thudding against the floorboards with rhythmic weight.
“Lower the spears,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was quiet, but it had the thickness of cold iron dropping onto an anvil.
Escort Leader Jiang didn’t lower his blade, but his knuckles relaxed slightly.
“You said it was in this room,” Jiang said. His eyes tracked Lu Chen’s slate-gray throat and the dark black glass veins visible beneath the skin. “How do we tell them apart? The thing took Qian’s face. It looks like flesh and bone.”
“A stolen coat doesn’t change the fire,” Lu Chen said.
He walked to the peat hearth in the center of the hall.
The fire was dying, suffocated under a heap of damp black turf that gave off thick, pungent smoke.
Beside the stone hearth rested an iron fire-poker, three feet long, its square tip resting deep within the red-hot embers.
Lu Chen reached down and pulled the iron rod from the coals.
The square tip of the poker glowed with a dull, cherry-red heat, shedding waves of dry heat distortion into the freezing air.
He held the iron rod loosely in his right hand, the heat harmless against his calloused skin.
“Flesh breathes,” Lu Chen said, turning his amber eyes toward the frightened crowd. “Blood circulates. A living man carries fire in his chest.”
Station Master Han peered over his counting frame, his eyebrows twitching.
“What does that mean, traveler? Speak plain words!”
“A human heart pumps warm blood,” Lu Chen said. His tone as were cold and careful as a dead-house coroner lecturing a fresh apprentice. “In this freezing hall, warm breath condenses into white mist. Every living man here exhales steam.”
The men in the room blinked, suddenly looking at one another’s mouths.
Every single guard, merchant, and servant was breathing heavily in the cold room, and from every open mouth, clouds of pale white vapor drifted into the lantern light.
“The Uncanny has no heart,” Lu Chen continued. “It wears dead skin like an oiled raincoat. But beneath the hide, its marrow is frozen solid. It can’t produce Yang heat.”
He lifted the glowing red iron poker six inches into the air.
“When living flesh nears hot iron, pores open and sweat flows,” Lu Chen said. “When frozen marrow meets hot iron, the stolen skin cracks. White frost rime forms on the hair follicles.”
He looked at Escort Leader Jiang.
“Line up,” Lu Chen said. “One by one.”
Jiang paused for half a breath, then gritted his teeth and stepped forward.
“I go first,” Jiang growled. “Let the men see.”
The veteran escort approached the hearth and stood before Lu Chen.
Lu Chen brought the glowing tip of the poker to within two inches of Jiang’s scarred cheek.
The intense heat wave baked the veteran’s skin.
Right away, thick beads of salty, greasy sweat broke out across Jiang’s forehead and temple. It ran down into his beard.
Jiang exhaled a deep, ragged breath through his nose.
Two thick jets of warm white vapor plumed into the air, swirling around the red iron.
“Living blood,” Lu Chen said, stepping to the side. “Next.”
One by one, the men filed past the hearth.
The second was the young dispatch courier.
The boy trembled like a leaf in the mountain wind as the red iron drew near his face. But his skin flushed bright pink under the heat. A great cloud of steaming breath burst from his shivering lips.
“Next,” Lu Chen said.
Station Master Han limped forward on his stiff right knee, his single bloodshot eye fixed on the glowing metal.
The cherry-red iron neared his scarred jaw. Then, coarse sweat broke out along his gray sideburns, his breath jetting in thick white plumes against the heat.
“Living blood,” Lu Chen murmured. “Next.”
Twenty-four men passed the iron test.
Caravan wagoners, porters, old peddlers, and guard post guards all sweated, breathed warm steam. Then they pulled back to the south wall. They grabbed their chests in exhausted relief.
Soon, only six men remained near the north corner of the hall. There, a dark hallway led to the rear bunkhouse.
Four of them were cotton traders from the western valleys, who hurried forward and passed the heat check with chattering teeth and dripping foreheads.
That left two men.
They were dressed in thick woolen trading coats lined with river-otter fur, seated quietly on straw mats near the mouth of the bunkhouse hallway.
Their baggage packs—two large wicker hampers wrapped in oiled canvas—rested behind them in the shadows.
Throughout the entire panic, neither man had shouted.
Neither man had drawn a weapon.
They sat side by side with their hands tucked neatly into their wide fur sleeves, their heads bowed slightly. They looked like weary travelers enduring a tedious royal check.
Lu Chen walked toward them, the glowing iron poker held at his hip.
The heat in the common hall seemed to drop with every step he took toward the bunkhouse hall.
The air here was not merely winter cold.
It had a thin, greasy stillness to it. He carried the faint, rancid sweetness of raw marrow and frozen copper.
The system readout burned faintly behind his eyes.
Seventy-seven degrees of heat difference between his own stoked blood and the stale corner ahead.
Lu Chen stopped three paces from the two wool merchants.
In the dim light of the animal fat lanterns, their faces looked ordinary—weather-beaten skin, heavy eyebrows, and thin, dry lips.
One looked to be forty years old. The other seemed slightly younger, perhaps a nephew or a junior partner.
“Stand up,” Lu Chen said.
The older merchant looked up, offering a timid, respectful smile that creased the corners of his eyes.
“Honored master,” the older merchant said, his voice soft, polite, and fully empty of tremors. “We’re only humble wool buyers from Pingyang. We have no quarrel with anyone.”
“Stand up,” Lu Chen repeated.
The two men rose slowly to their feet, their movements smooth, silent, and eerily coordinated.
Lu Chen lifted the iron poker, holding the glowing cherry-red tip three inches from the older merchant’s face.
The heat was intense enough to scorch the whiskers on the man’s cheek.
Yet not a single drop of sweat welled up from the man’s pores.
His skin remained dry, taut, and waxy, like the surface of a polished lard candle.
And then, along the man’s hairline and collar, a hairline web of pale-blue frost rime began to crawl across the skin. It hissed faintly as the sub-zero marrow beneath rejected the living heat.
“Exhale,” Lu Chen said.
The merchant smiled wider, his teeth unnaturally straight, white, and sharp.
He parted his lips.
A long, slow breath hissed from his throat.
In the freezing air of the mountain hall, not a single wisp of white steam appeared.
The air coming from his mouth was colder than the blizzard outside.
Beneath the collar of his woolen coat, a line of fine black catgut stitching began to writhe like an earthworm.
“Flesh is cold,” Lu Chen said.
His fingers tightened around the heavy iron grip of the fire-poker.
“Skin doesn’t fit.”