Smoke still curled from the cut neck of the fox-demon on the floorboards of the rear bunkhouse.
Lu Chen wiped his palms on his oilcloth apron.
The coarse fabric scraped away clumps of singed gray fur and sticky, yellow fat under the skin.
His resting pulse sat at forty-four beats per minute, steady as water dripping into an iron water tank.
His blood heat hovered at sixty-five degrees.
Through the thin soles of his boots, he felt the oak planks beneath him shaking.
It wasn’t the wind.
The howling blizzard outside had suddenly died down into a choking, unnatural dead calm.
The silence that followed was heavy, cold, and total.
Then came the cry.
It rose from the high crags above the Black Crow Post-Station, cutting through the mountain pass like a rusted saw blade through frozen bone.
The sound began as the shrill, quavering wail of an old woman weeping over an empty grave.
Midway through, the timbre shifted, dropping into the deep-throated, rasping roar of a hungry beast.
The shaking rattled the loose clay shingles on the bunkhouse roof.
Fine dust of dried mud and mountain frost sifted down between the cedar rafters.
In the corner of the room, the animal fat candle flickered from yellow to a sickly, pale-green hue.
The flame shrank to the size of a bean. It shivered against an unseen draft that smelled of ancient damp and rancid mutton.
“The Mother,” a weak voice choked out from the doorway.
Station Master Han stood clutching the doorframe, his knuckles white and bleeding from cracked cuticles.
His knees were knocking together so wildly that his hemp trousers rustled.
“That’s her,” Han whispered, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling in sheer panic.
“The Centenary Yin-Fox. The Matron of the high crags.”
“She knows,” Lu Chen said.
He didn’t look at the station master.
Lu Chen bent down, retrieved his notched ox-bone cleaver from the bloodstained wool blanket. Then it weighed the twelve-pound weapon in his right hand.
The iron spine felt cool against his feverish skin.
“She smelled the blood of her litter,” Han babbled, spit frothing at the corners of his mouth.
“Fifty years ago, a country judge shot her third daughter for a winter pelt.”
“She surrounded and trapped the guard post for three nights.”
“When the cavalry broke through in the spring, they found two hundred men sitting at their banquet tables.”
“Every single one of them had their skins peeled off while they were still breathing.”
Lu Chen walked past the trembling official into the main hall.
“Panic wastes breath and grease,” Lu Chen said.
“Get your men to the common hall.”
The common room of the post-station was in total chaos.
Thirty-odd merchants, mule drivers, and armed escorts were scrambling over overturned benches and scattered crates of dried tea bricks.
Two caravan guards were fighting each other at the back door, trying to squeeze through into the frozen stables.
“Bar the shutters!” an old caravan leader screamed, waving a dented bronze broadsword.
“Stoke the fire bowl! Don’t let the fire go out!”
Lu Chen stepped onto the raised threshold of the hall.
The sheer heat pressure rolling off his body made the nearest men freeze in their tracks.
A visible haze of heat rippled around Lu Chen’s shoulders. He smelled faintly of scorched animal fat and boiled sulfur.
The charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his left collarbone and forearm pulsed with a dull, underground amber glow beneath his slate-gray skin.
“Silence,” Lu Chen said.
His voice was neither loud nor strained. But the low hum cut through the frantic shouting like a heavy mallet striking wet timber.
The men in the hall looked toward him.
For three breaths, no one moved.
A guard posted at the high wooden wall watching slit suddenly let out a strangled shriek.
“They’re coming down the ridge!”
Lu Chen walked across the room with measured, deliberate strides.
The merchants parted before him, pressing themselves against the mud-brick walls to avoid brushing against his scalding linen tunic.
Lu Chen mounted the wooden watching ladder and peered through the narrow level firing slit.
Outside, the blizzard had not ceased. It had merely gathered into a tight, vortex-like wall of driving snow around the outer edge.
Beyond the ten-foot hardwood wooden wall, the rocky slopes were alive with moving shadows.
They weren’t wolves.
They weren’t living men.
Dozens of flayed, skinless shapes were scrambling down the jagged scree on all fours.
Some possessed the long, gangly limbs of mountain bandits. Others had the heavy torsos of royal couriers or the crushed ribcages of pack mules.
Every single one of them was stripped of outer hide.
Raw, glistening muscle tissue and crimson muscle fibers were exposed to the sub-zero mountain gale, freezing into dark, crystal-hardened rime as they moved.
Their joints bent at ugly, impossible angles, snapping and popping with the sound of breaking firewood.
In their empty eye sockets, faint needles of pale-blue fox-fire flickered. It cast eerie, shifting halos across the snowdrifts.
Leading them from the high limestone boulder fifty paces up the trail was a massive dark shape.
It sat on its haunches, easily the size of a bullock, its snow-white fur trailing across the rocks like frozen water.
Around its haunches, seven long, bushy tails whipped through the gale, each one tipped with a sharpened shard of yellowed bone.
Where its head should have been, the dark shape bore the pale, waxy face of a dead noblewoman, framed by matted silver hair.
The waxy lips parted.
Another long, ear-splitting howl tore through the night.
The sound struck the wooden wall like a physical ram.
The heavy spruce timbers groaned, cedar dust puffing from the wood slot joints.
Down in the snow, the horde of skinless ghouls answered with a collective, wet chittering of exposed teeth.
They surged forward.
Lu Chen’s gaze tracked the spread of the approaching mass.
There were forty-two distinct corpses in the first echelon.
Their movement was ragged, asymmetric, and driven by corrupted Yin tendons rather than living muscle stretch.
Each ghoul carried an estimated mass of one hundred and forty pounds, moving at nine paces per second down the thirty-degree incline.
That aggregate driving force struck the wooden wall. Then, the sideways tearing force on the iron mounting bolts would exceed four thousand pounds of force.
No mortal joinery could hold for more than eight minutes under sustained blunt battering.
“Station Master,” Lu Chen said, stepping down from the ladder.
Han was crouching beneath the tax desk, his arms wrapped around his shins, rocking back and forth like a frightened child.
“How much salt is stored in the larder?” Lu Chen asked.
“Salt?” Han squeaked, wiping snot from his upper lip with a trembling sleeve. “Three... Three bags of coarse rock salt from the salt commission. Ten pounds each.”
“And animal fat?”
“Four barrels of mutton grease in the cellar,” Han stammered. “For the guard post lamps and axle lubrication.”
“Burning lime powder?”
“Two stonework bins in the rear shed,” an older merchant blurted out, cowering behind a pile of sheepskin bales. “We were hauling it to the border kiln.”
Lu Chen glanced toward the five surviving caravan escorts who still held their weapons.
Their faces were pale as lard, their knuckles white against their spear hafts, but their legs were braced.
They were veterans of the northern border trails. They knew what happened when an Uncanny horror breached a wooden wall.
Once the outer edge collapsed, running into the sub-zero blizzard was suicide.
“Bring the cooking pots,” Lu Chen said.
“Roll the animal fat barrels to the inner courtyard threshold.”
An escort captain with a scarred lip stepped forward. He gripped a heavy poleaxe with both hands.
“Brother,” the captain rasped, his voice trembling despite his broad shoulders. “That thing outside isn’t a stray ghost. It’s a centenary mountain demon. Iron can’t bite through fox-curse frost. Cold steel passes through that mist like water through fingers.”
“Steel doesn’t bite frost,” Lu Chen said, his gaze locking onto the captain’s bloodshot eyes.
“Boiling fat does.”
Lu Chen reached into his belt pouch, pulled out a thumb-sized chunk of dried sheep fat. Then he bit into it.
The waxy fat coated his tongue, sliding down into his searing stomach.
His internal fire absorbed the calories instantly, stoking the embers of his dantian.
“Move the cooking pots,” Lu Chen added. “Or die cold.”
The escort captain swallowed hard, looked at the steam rising from Lu Chen’s collar. Then he barked an order to his men.
“You heard the master! Shift the iron pots! Move the lard, damn your mothers’ eyes!”
Before the men could take three steps, a tremendous crash shattered the outer stillness.
BOOM!
The hardwood timbers of the wooden wall bowed inward, the three-inch iron crossbar screaming under the shearing load.
Spruce splinters flew into the dark courtyard like shrapnel.
Through the widening gaps in the upright planks, dozens of red, flayed hands pushed through, their fingernails torn away to expose yellow bone points that gouged wildly into the wood.
A sickening wave of stench rolled through the gaps—the odor of raw, half-frozen muscle, bile, and ancient cemetery mildew.
From the crags above, the Mother Fox howled once more, chilling the blood in every mortal vein.
The crossbar shrieked again under the next impact.
Eight minutes, Lu Chen had judged. He watched the planks bow. He doubted they had five.