Zen straightened and stepped out onto the road. In three brisk strides, he was at the shop door, the frail frame of old, rotting wood smashed easily through. The dusk bells had just ceased their tolling, which meant that the Twelfth Cycle celebrations were to begin imminently. The highest-ranking officials of the Elantian government’s southern stronghold would be gathered in the cushiest district of Haak’gong while foot soldiers prowled the streets.
Not that Zen had anything to fear from them; in his long black peacoat, flat cap, and those horrible patent leather dress boots, he was effectively disguised as a Hin merchant under Elantian employ.
The only government officials Zen needed to avoid were the magicians.
He glanced up and down the street and, seeing and sensing nothing, stepped inside the small store.
The place was drenched in blood. He sensed it as soon as the currents of qì enveloped him—water and metals constituting the makeup of blood, all tinted in yin: the side of qì that represented cold, darkness, wrath, and death. The counter to yáng, comprising warmth, light, joy, and life.
Yin and yáng: two halves of all qì, two sides of a coin constantly shifting, one into the other in a continuous cycle of balance. Warmth to cold, light to dark…and life to death.
It was when the balance was thrown off that there was a problem.
He picked his way across the wreckage: splinters of wood from overturned shelves, shreds of floorboards torn awayto reveal patches of foundation beneath. He caught sight of objects amidst the ruin: a horsetail brush with the handle snapped, a dragon figurine split in half, a folding fan bent like a broken wing. Objects that had significance for the Hin, yet that the Elantians destroyed without a second thought.
Zen drew a deep, stilling breath and turned to the figure on the floor. He took in the sight of the corpse, limbs jutting at awkward angles, mouth parted in surprise or a helpless plea. The shopkeeper had been an elder: liver spots dotted his forehead, white hair gleamed in the moonlight. Zen could sense an unnatural wetness to the man’s lungs—a disease, perhaps, as a result of the eternal damp of the southern atmosphere.
Pushing down the fury that roiled up to his chest, Zen cleared his mind and called on his master’s teachings.Calm the storm of your emotions. A restless ocean is not one to sail upon.He needed to treat the body as naught more than evidence, a puzzle waiting to be pulled apart and put back together.
Old Wei,he thought, eyes taking in details of the dead man with clinical precision.What happened?
The shopkeeper was a contact Zen had procured after moons of searching. It was said that the man dealt in contraband: items the Elantians had banned and knowledge strictly classified by the government.
Zen was here for one thing: the trading ledger of metals purchased by the government, key to understanding Elantian troop movements. The past twelve cycles had seen the conquerors ignore the Central Plains—a vast, untamed region of the Last Kingdom—in favor of establishing their foothold in the major trading ports and cities down the eastern and southern coastlines.
Something had changed in the last few moons: sightings of the trademark Elantian metal armor deeper in the bambooforests than ever before, rumblings of troops gathering in the Southern Elantian Outpost. All this had led Zen here to investigate.
And now his contact was dead.
He clenched his jaw against embers of anger and disappointment. So much travel and time lost for nothing. The Elantians had not just removed a valuable tipoff that would set him and his school back a step, but they had also committed the ultimate crime in Hin eyes: the murder of an elder.
It slowly occurred to him that there was something off about the smell of the place. Elantian magic smelled of burnt metal from the way magicians harnessed the alchemical power within metals to craft their spells, but the shop held the faint—almost undetectable—aroma of something different. Something almost familiar.
Zen reached into the black silk pouch he carried at his hip at all times and drew out two sticks of incense. He inhaled, lowered his index finger toward the tips of the joss sticks, then began to trace the Seal for heat in the air. His finger was quick, practiced, and precise, sweeping in the way a calligrapher might have—only he traced a character an ordinary calligrapher would never have understood.
As soon as one end of the circular stroke met the other, he sensed a shift in the qì around him: a concentration of fire swirling into the glowing Seal before him, sparking to life on the tips of the incense, which flared red for a moment before curling to gray smoke.
All this took place in the blink of an eye.
Zen raised the incense sticks to the corpse, holding it above the old man’s heart.
For a moment, there was nothing. And then, in the silver fluorescence of the moon pouring through the torn paperwindows, the smoke began to turn. Instead of a steady spiral upward, it wafted toward Zen, shrinking away from the corpse as though it were…fleeing from it.
Zen leaned forward and took a short, precise inhale. The smoke was warm, carrying the fragrance of sandalwood and the faint tinge of ground bamboo. Yet beneath it all, like shadows clinging to light, hung a peculiar scent. A bitter smell that he’d mistaken for Elantian magic.
But…no, this wasn’t a trail left by Elantian Royal Magicians.
Zen exhaled slowly, looking down at the corpse with faint alarm. The Hin burned incense for their dead, yet the roots of this custom had long been forgotten, wiped from the pages ofhistory. Long before the era of the Last Kingdom, when the Dragon Emperor had limited practitioning to the confines of his court and eradicated the rest, practitioners had used incense to parse between yin and yáng energies. Yáng, the energy of sun, of heat, of light and life, attracted smoke. Yin, the energy of the moon, of cold, of darkness and death, repelled smoke.
Most corpses held a neutrality to the makeup of their qì—yet Old Wei’s body held the lingering stench of yin.
Though village folktales whispered otherwise, there was nothing inherently wrong with yin energy. It was a necessity, the other side of the coin constituting qì.
It was when yin energy was left unbalanced that the issues arose.
For yin was also the energy of the supernatural.
Mówas Zen’s first thought.Demon.A soul that held insurmountable wrath or hatred—an excess of yin energy—coupled with the strength of an unfinished will would not dissipate into the natural qì in the world in death. Instead, it would fester into something evil. Something demonic.
