Four inches of unpolished iron gleamed in the dim necro-soft glow.
With a single, practiced contraction of his forearm flexors, he reversed the awl in his right grip.
He drove the blunt-shouldered iron spike directly into the center of his left palm.
Squelch.
The sharpened point pierced through the thick, horn-hard dead-house callous, shearing through dense skin layers and biting half an inch deep into the grip tendons and palmar muscle sheet.
It grated sharply against the hand bone.
A blinding spike of pure, raw agony blew up across Lu Chen’s nervous system.
It wasn’t the illusory, ghostly chill of the sound song. It was the raw, primal fire of living human tissue being torn by cold iron.
