He dipped his head in respect but didn’t dismount. “Are you here to collect, mistress?”
I was momentarily startled by the distinctly female voice. On the few occasions I’d crossed paths with members of the Wen military, I’d never noticed any women. Back home in Sian, all military personnel were male.
Concealing my surprise, I pulled out a Fu talisman and said, “As you see.”
Ganshi priests and priestesses had immunity when it came to working across borders. Smuggling goods, on the other hand, was the exception.
But the soldier couldn’t possibly suspectmeof that, I told myself.
“Which side?” the soldier asked sullenly.
“Are you authorized to arrest a ganshi priestess based on the affiliation of her clientele?”
The soldier pursed her lips but didn’t argue. She turned her horse around, toward the town. Before riding off, she said, “Ateam will arrive near sundown to bury the dead. You’d best be gone by then.”
“Rest assured, I will be.”
I secretly hoped I was right. Usually I was hired by grieving relatives whose child or sibling had passed away in a distant city. It was always obvious who and where the corpse was. I’d never had tosearchfor a body before. I’d never even been to a battlefield. Propelled by the soldier’s warning, I quickly got to work inspecting the corpses for identification papers and comparing dirtied, ashen faces to the portrait that Official Yi, the man who’d hired me, had provided. The dead soldiers had been preserved fairly well, despite having been there for a week. Perhaps it was the colder temperature.
I noticed that the bodies, arranged neatly in rows, had already been relieved of anything worth money—metal weaponry and armor, personal tokens, cash. The fractured polearms and arrows scattered about were missing their steel tips as well.
The victors were astonishingly efficient. I didn’t know the precise circumstances of the battle, but it looked like an ambush. It seemed the Wen army had prevailed in more ways than one. War was a lucrative business. And considering how the Sian monarchy had been leeching off the Wen territory’s resources for years, it made sense that Wen was desperate for any gain.
I waded through the sea of lifeless soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted like pieces on the Sian king’s xiangqi board. I had to remind myself to hold my sympathy at bay. Objectivity was crucial to being a priestess.
Although it wasn’t easy to maintain while waves of emotions rippled past me.
As a ganshi priestess, I was spiritually attuned to the feelings of the deceased—particularly the remnants of fear, shock, regret, or sorrow that accompanied their last breaths. Sometimes, if I wasn’t careful, the more intense emotions could break past my walls of tranquility and strike me with memories of the dead’s final moments, their happiest times, or their greatest heartbreaks.
Walking among a felled army tested the limits of my training, but I managed to withstand the grief weighing over the field. I had a job to do.
I spent the following hours trudging through soft earth. I didn’t bother resting for lunch; surrounded by decay and misery, I had no appetite. The sun was halfway down the sky when I found the identification papers I was searching for. The name matched the one from the official’s documents: Renshu.
I would’ve hesitated—neither the documents nor identification papers offered a family name—if the soldier’s face didn’t match the portrait. He was young, around my age. Handsome too. Dried blood caked the side of his head, spilled from a wound that’d likely been inflicted from the killing blow. A cut blemished his jaw and dirt dusted his skin, but his straight nose, his thick brows, and the mole by his eye were undeniably the same as the drawing’s.
I pressed my fingers to his neck, sensing the terror that’d colored his death and forcing myself to brush it aside. No sign of a pulse. I proceeded to prepare the reanimation talisman. Moving habitually, I attached the iron bells to my staff and rang them gently while I murmured incantations. As I placed the consecrated paper on his forehead, I wondered how someone worth so much money—that was why I’d taken the job, after all—could end up dying so tragically, so young.What a terrible waste.
The reanimation spell needed a moment to fully transfer through the corpse. While waiting, I slogged down the row of soldiers, pressing shut the eyes of those who’d died staring at the wide, unforgiving world. They would be buried without ceremony, their spirits reduced to roaming on foreign land, but they still deserved respect.
I briefly wondered if I could take them all back to Sian with me. But I’d draw too much attention, and I had no idea where their homes were. Did I even have the skill or spiritual strength to reanimate so many bodies at once? I’d been a full-fledged priestess for only three years.
A hand clamped around my exposed ankle. My startled shriek was high enough to frighten the birds in the trees; their wings beat loudly as they shot into the sky.
But I didn’t watch them leave. I was too focused on the fingers, purpled and rotting, latched on to my leg. My gaze traveled up the hand and past its arm to the dead soldier sprawled across the ground. His one intact eye, filmy and dull, stared straight through me. The other had been ravaged by a slash that opened up half his face, exposing bloody bone and muscle. A fly crawled out of the gash, its fat black body pausing on a flap of loose flesh before zipping into the air.
Worse than the corpse’s decay, however, was the dark aura he emitted, hitting me with his memories of blood and screams. Dread filled my veins.
Jiangshi.
A corpse possessed by evil.
I reached for the purification talismans I’d tucked into my pockets, but my hands were shaking too much, and then the corpse was yanking me, hard, to the ground. Bile filled my mouth at his smell. His grip tightened, and a numbing sensation wrapped aroundmy ankle. I remembered Baba’s stories of jiangshi absorbing the qi, or life force, of the living to feed their own evil spirits. All they needed was to touch your skin.
Horrified, I tried to shake the jiangshi off. When that didn’t work, I stabbed at him with the end of my peach staff. Though the sacred wood burned his flesh, it wasn’t powerful enough to break the monster’s hold. The only chance I had was the purification talisman.
My fingers brushed the edge of the paper just as a melon-sized rock came smashing down on the monster’s wrist, strong enough to crack bone. The pressure around my leg released. I slapped a purification talisman onto the jiangshi’s forehead and rang my iron bells, muttering the incantations my father had made me memorize during training.
The jiangshi immediately went still, a trail of translucent white smoke rising from his body. The smoke hovered in the air like a hesitant ghost, then dissipated into nothing.
