The stronghold of the Black Tiger Gang sat on the northern spit of the Yun River. He was built from blackened barge timbers, salvaged ship ribs, and river mud.
Inside the great hall, everyone could feel the stench of roasting pork fat, stale rice wine, wet dog fur, and the metal tang of river rot. Suspended from the smoke-blackened rafters were heavy iron cages, some holding fighting cocks, others holding the bleached skulls of river pilots who had refused to pay the seasonal water toll.
At the head of the long redwood frame stand table sat Iron Claw Hu Biao.
Hu Biao was fifty years old, standing six feet two inches, with a chest like a beer cask and shoulders thick with old, white battle scars. His head was shaved clean, revealing a scalp mapped with purple sabre furrows.
Strapped to his massive forearms were the weapons that had given him his name. The three-pronged hard dark metal tiger claws.
The gauntlets were forged from dark, hardened hard dark metal iron, fastened to his wrists with double-layered oxhide straps and brass buckles. From the back of each knuckle protruded three curved, eight-inch steel talons, serrated like wolf teeth along the inner curve.
Hu Biao was not a man of careless motion.
For twenty years, before he claimed the river wharves of Cloudford, he had served as an official headsman for the country water guard post. His duties had not involved clean decapitations with a headsman’s broadsword. He had been the man sent onto rogue pirate junks to tear out throats, drown mutineers, and break the limbs of smugglers in the dark holds of cargo vessels.
He knew the exact clockwork pushback of living human tissue.
He knew that a collarbone needed forty pounds of direct downward shear to snap. Meanwhile, a throat pipe collapsed under barely fifteen pounds of focused squeezing.
Hu Biao sat motionless, clicking the talons of his right gauntlet against the iron rivets of his leather vest.
Clack-rasp. Clack-rasp.
The rhythmic, metal scrape was the only sound in the cavernous hall.
Two river guards staggered through the entrance. They carried the limp, blood-drenched form of Mountain Pig on an overturned timber door. The seven-foot brute was barely conscious, his face grey as wet ash, a crude tourniquet of hemp rope cutting into the bloody stump of his cut right elbow.
Behind them limped Scar-Faced Liu.
Liu’s hands shook so wildly that he could barely hold his torn leather vest together. His teeth clicked together in an irregular, chattering tremor.
“Biao... Biao Ye...” Liu whispered, his voice cracking as he reached the edge of the frame stand table.
Hu Biao didn’t look at Liu. His cold, pale eyes remained fixed on the cut stump of Mountain Pig’s arm.
He stood up, walking around the table with slow, heavy strides. He knelt beside the door stretcher. He reached out with his left hand, the steel talons hovering two inches above the torn flesh.
He inspected the cut with the cold, calm focus of a butcher examining slaughtered livestock.
“Clean,” Hu Biao murmured. His voice was a low, gravelly rasp, like river boulders grinding together under a spring flood. “A four-inch oak club and six inches of living muscle and bone. Snapped in a single stroke. The bone wasn’t crushed. It was sliced. Not even the judge’s heavy guillotine cuts that clean.”
He slowly raised his eyes to Scar-Faced Liu.
“Who did this?”
“The... The third son,” Liu stammered, dropping to his knees on the grease-stained floorboards. “Pei Jing. He came down from the mountain forge. He carried a beast of a blade... Three feet long, black as charcoal, wide as a butcher’s block. One swing... Mountain Pig’s club broke like dry straw, and his arm flew into the ditch.”
Liu reached into his torn tunic. His bloody fingers pulled out a scrap of coarse charcoal paper with Pei Jing’s message written in crude, bold strokes:
Account overdrawn. Principal due at the East Stone Bridge at first dawn.
Hu Biao picked up the paper with two of his steel talons, his expression leftover fully impassive.
He held the paper over an oil lamp. The parchment caught fire, curling into black ash that drifted onto the redwood table.
From the shadows behind the table, a slender figure in a dark silk robe stepped forward.
It was Steward Qian, the chief financial agent of Patriarch Zhao Cangshan. Qian was forty years old, with thin, oiled moustaches, soft white hands that had never held a weapon, and eyes like a river otter.
Qian laid a stitched silk pouch onto the table. The pouch clinked with the heavy, clear ring of solid silver metal bars.
“Fifty silver coins, Gang Leader Hu,” Steward Qian said in a cultured, oily purr. “A down payment from Patriarch Zhao. The terms remain as discussed: wipe out the active fighters of the Pei Clan, break the legs of the elders. The entire South Hill riverfront—from the timber wharves to the deep coal docks—belongs to the Black Tiger Gang for ten years. You’ll collect the water toll on every barge, every basket of grain, and every pound of iron.”
Qian leaned closer, glancing at the blood pooling beneath Mountain Pig’s stretcher.
“Patriarch Zhao doesn’t wish to see this third son alive when the county tax collector arrives next week. A youth who can cut through iron clubs is a dangerous debt. Cut his throat, throw his carcass into the rapids. The Zhao Clan will add thirty coins of gold to your vault.”
Hu Biao turned his head slowly, his cold eyes locking onto the silk-robed steward.
“Patriarch Zhao sits in his walled manor drinking jasmine tea while my boys bleed in the mud,” Hu Biao said. His talons tapped the table with a sharp clack. “You told me the Pei family had only twenty tired guards and two sons who knew how to swing farm scythes. You didn’t mention a monster who can sever seasoned oak with a single hand.”
Steward Qian’s smile stiffened slightly. “A seventeen-year-old boy, Gang Leader. However lucky his stroke was at the kilns, he’s one man. You have two hundred fighters.”
“Numbers mean nothing if the men run like frightened geese,” Hu Biao said. He stepped toward a thick pillar of cured hardwood near the hearth.
Hu Biao’s eyes narrowed.
His massive chest swelled as he drew breath through his teeth.
Tendon Stretching Peak.
His forearms swelled, the veins rising like knotted blue cords beneath his scarred skin. He didn’t step forward. He simply snapped his right arm in a six-inch level arc. He drove his three hard dark metal talons into the cured hardwood post.
THUNK-RIP.
The eight-inch curved steel talons sank three inches deep into the solid wood.
With a flick of his wrist, engaging the spinning whip of his lower-back tendons, Hu Biao twisted his gauntlet.
A chunk of hardwood the size of a man’s fist was gouged clean out of the pillar, sending jagged yellow splinters flying across the table.
Steward Qian blinked, his throat swallowing convulsively as he stepped back half a pace.
“That’s tendon power,” Hu Biao said, his voice flat and deadly. “When a man has stretched his tendons to the peak, he doesn’t hit with muscle. He hits with the stretch of tightly packed bowstrings. The boy who cut Mountain Pig has unlocked the same power. He’s not a farm boy swinging an axe. He’s a hunting beast.”
Hu Biao turned back to his three senior lieutenants standing by the weapon racks.
“Two hundred men,” Hu Biao said, his voice filling the hall like rolling thunder. “Pass the word to every dock, every gambling den, and every brothel along the river.”
The lieutenants straightened their backs, their faces hardening into cruel grimaces.
“Mobilize every blade,” Hu Biao commanded. “Seal the North Wharf. Block the Cross-Bazaar. Impound every grain cart entering the Pei Clan compound. If a dog wearing Pei Clan colors tries to cross the street, spear it and hang it from the bridge.”
He turned back to Scar-Faced Liu, who remained trembling on the floor.
“And send for Poisoner Ma Liu,” Hu Biao added. His voice dropped into a lethal, quiet hiss. “Tell him to bring his bamboo blowpipes, his barbed hemp nets, and his fermented swamp-viper venom. I don’t care how dense the boy’s bones are. A single drop of swamp-viper bile will curdle a water ox’s blood in sixty breaths. Ambush him in the alleys. Trap him in the dark. Bring me his ears before sunrise.”
Hu Biao looked down at his three-pronged hard dark metal claws, clicking them once more against his belt rivets.
Clack-rasp.
Across the river in the Pei Clan compound, Pei Jing sat by his lamp. The Black Mountain Whetstone was resting between his palms as he gave the Cloud-Splitter’s chisel tip three steady, whispering passes. The dense dark rock anchored his concentration. Meanwhile, a cold, sharp-angled audit crystal-hardened across his vision:
Hu Biao spat into the hearth coals. He watched the yellow flames turn green from the copper scale on his gauntlets.
“East Stone Bridge,” Hu Biao muttered, a slow, terrible grin revealing his broken teeth. “The boy wants an audit. At dawn, I’ll show him how the river balances its books.”