The screaming started before the river spray had finished evaporating from Lin Ke’s burned forearm.
It wasn’t the panic of drowning men. It was a dry, choking rattle that issued from three throats at once, timed together down to the heartbeat. The sound carried across the newly quieted water, thin and hollow like wind whistling through cracked bamboo flutes.
Lin Ke paused on the wooden gangway leading to the Grand Fortune Guild’s main freight barge. The blistering on his right arm throbbed with a dull, wet heat beneath the layer of lard and crushed mint. But his eyes were already cataloging the symptoms on deck.
Three junior navigators lay sprawled around the central steering stone stand.
Their bodies were rigid as salted cod. Their spine bones arched off the teak planks at acute, unnatural angles, the heels of their boots drumming a wild, staccato tattoo against the deck. Their eyeballs had rolled back until only the yellowed, bloodshot white of the eye showed. A frothy slurry of grey spit bubbled over their lips.
“The spirits of the river drowned them!” an older helmsman screamed, stumbling backward into a stack of sealed cargo crates. “The demonic chill entered through the steering wheel!”
