A thunderous grinding from the Cangwu River hit Lu Chen before the mist did.
It was a deep, gravelly grinding—the sound of ten thousand tons of brown mountain runoff carving through the stone bluffs of the southern basin.
Lu Chen paused at the crest of the final switchback road.
The damp river wind whipped across his shoulders. He carried the stench of rotting water-chestnuts, wet timber, and burned coal peat.
Beneath Commander Tie’s gray wolf-skin cloak, Lu Chen’s chest remained a steady fire.
Fifty-two degrees.
Where the cold river fog touched his bare throat and oiled leather collar, it hissed softly. It drained away into wisps of faint white steam.
He adjusted the coarse hemp strap of his canvas sack.
Inside lay two jars of rock salt, three animal fat cakes, bitter pine-resin lard, and the flat iron tablet stamped with the royal courier seal.
At his left hip, wrapped in oiled hemp, hung the twelve-pound Calamity Cleaver.
Its blood-forged spine rested against his thigh, heavy, solid, and cold.
In his left sleeve, the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl lay snug against the thick callous of his forearm.
Lu Chen started down the embankment.
Every stride of his leather boots against the wet limestone shale produced a faint sound chime—ting... Ting...—deep within his shins.
His bronze-forged skeleton absorbed the downward shock like hardened bells cast in a royal bell-foundry.
His feet didn’t slip in the greasy mud.
Ten minutes later, the switchback leveled out into the boundless river flats outside Gu Ning Provincial City.
What lay before him was not a prosperous river port, but a stranded army of the damned.
The Cangwu River stretched three hundred paces wide, its brown water swirling with sluggish eddies.
Ordinarily, hundreds of grain barges, timber rafts, and salt junks moved through this artery daily to feed the two million souls within the country capital.
Today, the river was fully choked.
More than three hundred flat-bottomed freight barges and sampans were moored gunwale-to-gunwale along the muddy outer shoals.
Their red and yellow guild pennants hung limp in the freezing damp.
Along the riverbanks, an endless sprawl of refugee shanties stretched for two leagues.
Thousands of displaced peasants, runaway dockhands, and destitute boatmen huddled beneath rotted rush mats and broken oars.
Starving children sat shivering in the gray mud, their lips blue from the river draft.
Thin columns of acrid smoke rose from peat fires fueled by waterlogged driftwood and dry horse dung.
Lu Chen walked past a row of upturned skiffs.
The refugees shrank back against the willow stakes as he approached.
They saw the wide, square shoulders under the wolf pelts, the nonstop curl of steam rising from his collar, and the heavy cleaver at his belt.
No one spoke.
No one begged.
In the Great Yong Dynasty, a wanderer who stayed warm in the winter damp was either a headsman or a corpse that had forgotten how to rot.
Lu Chen ignored their frightened stares.
His gaze swept across the water toward the mouth of the inner canal.
Spanning the canal where it entered the massive black dark rock curtain walls of Gu Ning stood the Great Water Gate.
It was a huge barrier of iron and granite.
Two eight-sided castle wall towers, seventy feet high, anchored a massive drop-gate forged from thick iron metal bars bound with river bronze.
Massive rusted iron chains, each link thicker than a bull’s thigh, held the thirty-ton iron water gate dropped flush against the muddy riverbed.
The gate was shut tight.
Above the drop-gate, along the high stone low roof walls, squads of country guard post spearmen stood at attention.
Heavy repeating siege crossbows, mounted on swiveling bronze mounts, were aimed directly down at the congested river basin.
A line of floating timber booms studded with iron spikes blocked the approaches, preventing any barge from coming within fifty paces of the iron bars.
On the landing stage below the western tower, a crowd of boat captains had gathered.
Lu Chen slowed his pace, stepping behind a pile of corded firewood to observe.
A middle-aged barge master in a soaked sheepskin jacket was kneeling in the mud before a squad of guard post dock court guards.
The court guards wore boiled leather armor over green tunics, their hands resting on long iron-hooked boat-pikes.
“Have mercy, Master Officer!” the barge master begged, kowtowing into the gray slush until his forehead bled.
“My hold is packed with sixty thousand pounds of southern winter rice. If we sit in this damp three more days, the grain will sprout mould and ruin us!”
The lead court guard sergeant, a scarred man with a squinting eye, sneered down at him.
He raised his iron-tipped pike and shoved the butt hard into the boatman’s collarbone.
The man collapsed backward into the freezing river silt with a sharp cry of pain.
“The Country Judge’s seal is on the gate, you water rat!” the sergeant barked.
“Quarantine on all southern freight! Not a single sack of grain or barge enters the city moats until the Water Freight Guild completes the three-day lustration!”
“Lustration?” another boatman shouted from the crowd, his voice cracking with panic.
“That’s a lie! You locked the water gate because four grain barges vanished at the southern bend three nights ago!”
The court guard sergeant’s face darkened.
He drew a short, broad-bladed saber from his waist, the steel scraping harsh against its brass throat.
“Spread rumors again, and your head goes on a willow pole,” the sergeant spat. “Clear the landing! Back to your boats, or the crossbowmen will loose!”
Along the low roof wall, the clockwork click of forty heavy iron levers echoed across the water.
The boatmen scattered in terror, splashing through the freezing shallows back toward their moored craft.
Lu Chen remained motionless behind the corded timber.
His breathing was slow, deep, and measured.
He looked past the frightened boatmen, focusing his vision on the dark water swirling beneath the iron water gate.
The surface of the river was brown with mountain silt.
Yet three feet below the surface, Lu Chen’s heat-attuned senses picked up something else.
An unnatural, greasy chill.
It didn’t feel like melting winter ice.
It felt like the cold of an open tomb. The sweet, stale frost of an Uncanny presence that had soaked into the river mud.
The status tracking data flickered in his visual field, its pale green characters crisp against the gray river haze.
Zero malice.
His crucible was an empty, polished hearth, ready to receive whatever poison this province offered.
Lu Chen turned his eyes toward the land approach.
The river was barred by the iron water gate. But a narrow raised stone road ran along the western shore, connecting the outer docks to the land check post.
There, a heavy timber wooden wall flanked by sharpened abatis stakes guarded the entrance to the inner wharf.
A cordon of sixty armored guards stood with leveled pole-arms, funneling travelers toward a single narrow wicket gate.
Beside the gate, sheltered beneath a greasy silk pavilion, sat the dock tax bureau.
Piles of copper coins and iron tallies clinked into wooden strongboxes. Court guards shook down merchants and travelers for entry permits.
Anyone without silver was beaten back into the refugee camp with hardwood cudgels.
Lu Chen felt the weight of the iron tablet inside his canvas travel sack.
An royal courier badge was a dangerous weapon.
In corrupt country territory, waving the seal of the capital could invite an assassin’s poisoned crossbow bolt in the night.
Yet rotting outside in the refugee mud with twenty thousand starving peasants was a waste of calories.
His internal fire burned sixty grams of animal fat every twelve hours just to maintain fifty-two degrees against the river damp.
He needed beef animal fat.
He needed hot broth and dry shelter.
A loud commotion erupted at the wicket gate.
A young woman carrying a feverish child threw herself at the feet of an armored checker, pleading for entry to reach the city herb shops.
The guard kicked her aside into the muddy ditch with a cruel laugh.
Several refugee men surged forward, brandishing rusted gutting knives and broken boat hooks.
“Hold the line!” the guard captain roared, unsheathing his broadsword. “Strike down any beggar who crosses the ditch!”
Crossbows clicked into their firing notches along the wooden wall.
Lu Chen pulled the wolf-skin cloak tighter around his shoulders.
He stepped out from behind the timber pile and walked straight toward the barricade, the bronze marrow within his shins humming with a quiet bell tone against the frozen earth.
Ahead, iron-tipped cudgels rose above the snarling guards, and the barricade locked its shields.
His hand reached into his travel sack, fingers closing around Commander Tie’s royal iron tablet.