The granite shelf groaned, stone dust weeping into the two-thousand-foot deep pit.
Twenty paces behind the rear outriders, Lu Chen kept his boots firmly planted on the stable inner bedrock as hairline fissures raced across the frozen slate. The sub-zero mountain draft whipped down the granite ravine. But the air around his collar shone with a faint, oily haze.
His skin ran at sixty-five degrees. Every breath he exhaled left a thick plume of white steam that dissolved against the gray rock face like smoke from a blacksmith’s chimney.
Ahead of him, the iron-hoofed draft oxen groaned under their yokes.
Six massive northern beasts, their nostrils caked with bloody frost, strained against the heavy trace-chains. Behind them rolled the royal escort’s main transport. A four-wheeled heavy hardwood wagon clad in three-inch iron plates.
The timber carriage shrieked under the burden.
Ten thousand pounds of solid pig iron rested on those oak timbers. Lashed to the flatbed was a sarcophagus nine feet long. It was bound with seven linked iron chains as thick as a grown man’s wrist.
Each chain link was stamped with royal red stone wards. But the crimson red stone had long since grayed. A brittle layer of frost crawled across the iron, creeping from the lid downward like mold across stale bread.
THUD.
The dull impact rattled through the frozen gravel under Lu Chen’s boots.
It wasn’t a tremor of the earth. It was a single, heavy strike delivered against the inside iron plating of the coffin.
The lead draft oxen stumbled, their hooves skidding on the iced slate. They let out a panicked, deep-throated bellow, white foam slinging from their iron bits.
“Keep the beasts moving!” Commander Tie barked from the head of the column.
Tie rode a shaggy northern warhorse, his broad shoulders wrapped in black iron scale armor. His hand rested permanently on the shark-skin handle of his dragon-headed broadsword.
“Another league to the pass post,” Tie shouted, not looking back. “Drive the iron spikes deeper if the trace-lines slip!”
Two armored outriders rushed forward with iron-tipped whips, lashing the shivering oxen across their haunches. The beasts strained, iron shoes clawing at the dangerous ledge.
Lu Chen paused his stride.
His eyes narrowed, tracking the rhythmic shaking through the soles of his boots.
THUD. THUD.
The strikes were speeding up. The interval had dropped from ten breaths to four.
With each impact, the heavy iron lid bowed upward by a tiny fraction of an inch, straining against the forged pins. A faint, sickening stench escaped through the seam. The smell of pickled flesh, copper filings, and rancid grave grease.
The pale amber tracking data flickered across Lu Chen’s eye nerve and dissolved.
Dead Man’s Ridge was barely eight paces wide at this crossing.
To the left rose a sheer granite wall, scarred by hundreds of years of rockfalls and winter frost-heaves. To the right yawned a two-thousand-foot upright deep pit dropping straight into the frozen rapids and jagged scree of the river gorge.
“The carriage is leaning,” Lu Chen called out.
His voice was quiet, flat, and devoid of hurry. Yet in the freezing mountain canyon, the syllables cut through the howl of the blizzard with distinct clarity.
A squad sergeant riding the rear flank wheeled his mount around, his hand dropping to his saber.
“Shut your mouth, vagrant,” the sergeant snapped, his breath fogging through his iron visor. “The Commander gave orders to push through before nightfall. Fall back thirty paces or take thirty lashes.”
Lu Chen kept silent, neither slowing down nor quickening his pace.
He simply shifted his weight toward the inside mountain wall. He stepped onto a stable outcropping of dry limestone.
Above them, high on the gray crest of the ridge, a sharp crack echoed through the canyon.
CRACK.
It sounded like green timber snapping in a kiln.
Commander Tie yanked his horse’s reins, his face hardening as he looked upward. “Rockfall! Shield wall—form the turtle!”
Thirty veteran guards moved with practiced royal discipline. Iron shields snapped into place over their heads, overlapping like scales.
But this was no ordinary gravel slide.
The internal pounding from the iron coffin had rang through the rock strata, shattering the brittle frost-wedges holding a fifty-foot slab of limestone to the cliff face.
A roar like collapsing thunder tore through the ravine.
A five-ton slab of granite snapped away from the cliff face. It dragged thousands of pounds of frozen shale, ice, and boulders behind it.
The avalanche hit the lead oxen first.
The two front beasts were crushed instantly, their ribs and skulls crushed into red slush before they could even scream. The sheer driving force of the falling rock struck the left side of the armored wagon.
The heavy hardwood frame groaned. The left wheels splintered into flying iron shards.
“Jump!” Commander Tie roared, diving from his saddle as a falling boulder crushed his warhorse’s spine.
The armored wagon tilted wildly toward the deep pit.
Ten thousand pounds of iron shifted in an instant. The massive flatbed flipped onto its side with an ear-shattering crash, the wood shearing off the bronze undercarriage with the screech of tortured metal.
The 10,000-pound iron coffin smashed into the frozen rock shelf. It slid five yards toward the lip of the deep gap before wedging between two jagged limestone pillars.
The impact tore through the column.
Four royal guards were swept off the ledge by the cascade of shale, their screams cut short as they tumbled into the two-thousand-foot deep pit below.
Dust, powdered ice, and the rotten-egg stench of shattered rock choked the narrow trail.
“Report!” Tie scrambled to his feet, spat a mouthful of blood and grit, and drew his heavy broadsword. “Form defensive ranks and pull the winch ropes!”
“Commander!” a sergeant cried out, pointing a trembling iron gauntlet at the overturned wagon. “The chains!”
Through the settling cloud of limestone dust, the iron coffin lay wedged against the edge of the cliff edge.
The violent impact had snapped the wagon’s heavy oak bed. But it hadn’t shattered the coffin.
Instead, the violent impact had passed directly into the seven binding chains.
PING.
The first chain link, brittle from sub-zero corpse frost, snapped in two. The cut iron whip lashed through the air, cutting through an armored guard’s helmet and caving his skull inward with a wet thud.
PING. PING.
The second and third chains snapped in rapid row.
The heavy pig-iron links whistled through the mist, bouncing off the cliff wall and striking the shale.
From inside the sarcophagus, the pounding stopped.
In its place came a sound far more terrible: the wet, slithering drag of cold flesh pressing against iron plate.
A plume of dark green vapor hissed from the seam where the lid met the basin.
The vapor was so cold that the falling snow froze into crystal-clear pellets before touching the stone. Where the gas drifted across the shale, the rock turned black and cracked with hairline frost fractures.
Lu Chen stood twenty paces back, his boots rooted into the limestone ledge.
The air around him was dropping fast. The surrounding heat fell from fifteen below zero to thirty below in five heartbeats.
Inside his chest, the Molten Tiger Vajra fire surged.
The black glass melted rock waste-veins along his collarbone and left arm throbbed with a dull, cherry-red heat, resisting the creeping rotting chill.
“Form the ring!” Commander Tie roared, his voice cracking with royal power. “Spears forward and magic charms ready—if that thing breaches the seal, every man here hangs for treason!”
The surviving twenty-six guards formed a half-circle around the wedged sarcophagus, their heavy iron tower shields locked together.
Their spears trembled.
Not from cowardice, but from the bone-deep chill streaming from the green mist.
Lu Chen kept his cleaver sheathed for now.
His eyes remained fixed on the center of the coffin lid.
The leftover four chains were glowing with an unnatural, sickening green rust green. The pig iron was not breaking from the outside.
It was being dissolved from within.
SCREEECH.
The fourth chain groaned, stretched, and parted with the shriek of parting metal.
The heavy iron lid, three inches of solid cast metal, bulged outward in the center like a bubble in boiling animal fat.
Then, five blackened bronze claws punched straight through the iron plate.
The jagged metal curled back like parchment.
Through the hole, two dead, golden pupils opened in the dark, fixed on the trembling royal guards.
Lu Chen slowly reached behind his back. His fingers wrapped around the coarse leather grip of his twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
The mountain road was closed.
Behind the curling iron plate, the bronze claws twisted, ready to tear the coffin apart.