Chapter 1
As always, I smelled death before I saw it. The odor was gut-deep, a blend of sickly-sweet and putrid rot. Most humans rushed away from such a scent, not toward it.
But I was a ganshi priestess, a shepherd of the dead, and I’d been offered forty thousand silvers to retrieve a corpse from enemy territory.
I approached the abandoned battleground, a large, rugged field. The yellowed grass had been trampled by heavy boots and horse hooves, human waste mixing with mud made from past rain.
People always assumed the iron tang of blood would be strongest, if blood was present at all in death. But it was the stench of excrement, released after the body’s muscles failed, that prompted me to wrap a scarf around my nose and mouth.
Accustomed to death as I was, I couldn’t help but shudder as I took in the field.
Roughly a hundred dead Sian soldiers littered the cursed ground.
Arrows and spears jutted from the earth like snapped bones.
Even the trees framing one side of the land looked forlorn, their branches bent in reverence toward the broken dead.
Though it was early morning, the deep-orange sun looked as if it should be setting, not rising.
I took in the lineup of corpses and knew I had my work cut out for me.
But it was work that needed to be done.
As I stepped up to the nearest body, the clip-clop of horse hooves drew my attention backward. It was a Wen soldier, dressed in full armor, with his face obscured by an iron mask. I watched his eyes sweep over me, taking in my teal pao robe and peach staff.
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 suspect me of 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, “A team 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 to search for 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 around my 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.
Breathing hard, I turned to face my rescuer, the one who’d been bold enough to break the jiangshi’s arm with a rock. “Thank y—”
The gratitude died on my lips as I recognized the soldier I’d come to find, my reanimation talisman still glued to his head.
To my growing alarm, the soldier lifted the end of the paper, enough to reveal his eyes, and smiled.
In a slightly shaken voice, he said, “That was rather terrifying, wouldn’t you say? ”
I shot to my feet and ripped the talisman from the soldier’s forehead. He instantly collapsed to the ground, leaving me standing alone and bewildered in a gradually darkening field. I bit back a squeal, tasting iron. What in heaven’s name?
Reanimated corpses were just that—reanimated. They had no minds of their own, no emotions, and certainly no voice.
And yet the soldier had spoken to me. He’d rescued me from the jiangshi and smiled while expressing his fear. Living, human fear.
I should’ve been the one who was more afraid. Not only had I faced a jiangshi, but now I was dealing with a talking corpse. Though the first was rare, I knew what it was. The second was unheard of.
What I did know was that the soldier needed to be brought to Hulin, the capital of Sian, where Official Yi was expecting us. Cognizant or not, he remained a job I had to complete.
I considered the boy crumpled at my feet. How was I to guide him without a reanimation spell? Our destination was too far—I couldn’t drag him, unconscious, the entire way. But the last thing I needed was a reanimated corpse making decisions on his own.
I decided to first resolve the issue of his awareness. Was he some kind of jiangshi, albeit an unusually friendly one? Or had I simply been wrong when checking his pulse? But no—I was never so careless.
Whatever the case, only when I was sure he was a normal—lifeless—corpse could I figure out how to bring him to the capital.
I peered across the field at the pink-flushed horizon, anticipating the burial workers on their way. I couldn’t let them see the soldier.
Then I remembered a nearby town—Ninghe. A client of mine lived there, a wisewoman I’d developed a close friendship with. Perhaps she could help. She had to.
Because whatever was going on with the soldier, I needed to complete this job.
My father’s life depended on it.