The Last Girl on the Rails - The Corpse in the Ice Cellar
Pinch of snuff between thumb and forefinger was how Mayor Lin liked to start an execution, even if he called it an evening prayer.
Tess watched him through a three-inch gap between two rotting cedar planks on the second-story hayloft of the livery stable across the lane. The old man was sitting on his front porch under a paper lantern smeared with mutton tallow, his horn-handled cane propped between his knees, methodically packing dark brown tobacco into his left nostril while two armed townsfolk in padded blue coats stood guard at the courtyard gate. Down below in the muddy lane, three players from the Detroit freight crew were arguing about whether a twelve-gauge slug would penetrate a six-foot stone wall, their voices carrying through the freezing drizzle with all the stealth of a brass band falling down a flight of stairs.
“Idiots,” Black Cat whispered from the hay behind Tess’s right boot. The Philadelphia girl was crouched on an empty oats sack, picking dried horse manure from the tread of her high-topped sneakers with the tip of an iron nail. “They’re gonna kick that front gate open, get hit with six crossbow bolts from the eaves, and drop their shotguns right in the mud for Lin’s cousins to scoop up. I saw the same play in South Philly back when the warehouse gangs tried to take the shipping docks. You don’t hit the front door when the boss is sitting on the porch smoking his pipe. That’s an invitation to a funeral.”
“They aren’t going to hit the front gate,” Tess said, not taking her eyes off the courtyard. “The big guy with the orange hunting vest has been checking the corner watchtower every ninety seconds. He thinks he’s being clever. He’s going to wait until Lin goes inside to drink his evening tea, boost his two buddies over the pigpen fence on the east wall, and walk straight into the deadfall pit the mayor dug behind the smokehouse.”
Lady Elyse Brandt didn’t look through the cedar slats. The noblewoman sat upright against a vertical support timber, her sheathed parasol balanced horizontally across her thighs, her long, scarred fingers gently peeling the dead yellow leaves from the miniature cedar bonsai strapped to her canvas satchel.
“A provincial tyrant always keeps his butchery close to his larder,” Elyse murmured, her dry, papery voice barely carrying across the loft. “My father’s seneschal did the same thing during the Great Salt Famine. He kept thirty hogs in the cellar beneath the great hall and told the tenants the screaming at night came from wandering bog-witches. When we finally hung him from the portcullis, we found four years of grain hoarded behind the wine casks and half the village blacksmith’s apprentices pickled in brine barrels. Men with soft hands and long lineages are remarkably unoriginal, Miss Caldwell.”
Tess pulled her pocket chronometer from her windbreaker: 8:14 PM.
The drizzle was turning to sleet, rattling against the cedar shingles like handfuls of dry rice. Down in the lane, the Detroit players finally gave up on their tactical debate and slouched off toward the village tavern to buy watered-down plum wine, leaving the muddy street empty save for the yellow puddle beneath Mayor Lin’s tallow lantern.
On the porch across the way, the old man folded his brass snuffbox, tucked it into his padded sleeve, and stood up. He knocked his cane twice against the stone threshold. The two guards immediately locked the heavy oak courtyard gate, threw two thick iron dropbars across the timber, and retreated into the side guardhouse to escape the sleet.
“Time to earn the gold,” Tess said, unhooking The Crescent Cleaver from its back-sling.
She looked at Black Cat. “You stay on the roof. If the Chicago syndicate or the shotgun crew comes back from the tavern with torches, you drop a brick down the chimney of the guardhouse to keep them busy. Don’t engage in the street.”
Black Cat tucked the iron nail into her pocket, weighed her four-foot bastard sword across her knees, and gave a sharp, asymmetric smirk. “I’m a thief, sister, not a brawler. You find the safe, you make sure there’s a stack of Train Coins in it with my name on the ledger.”
Tess didn’t answer. She slipped through the hayloft loading hatch, dropped eight feet into the shadow of the drainage ditch behind the stable, and moved across the muddy lane with low, silent strides.
The rear perimeter wall of The House of Accumulated Virtue was six feet of rough-dressed river granite topped with a mortar bed studded with broken green bottle glass.
Tess reached the masonry, uncoiled two feet of Sirensilk from her haversack, and threw the frictionless cloth over the glass shards. She planted the toe of her Stride Boot in a mortar gap, hauled herself over the coping without making a sound, and dropped into the wet cabbages of the mayor’s kitchen garden.
Elyse cleared the wall half a second later, landing so lightly that her boots barely indented the black mud.
The compound was laid out like an old northern manor. The main hall sat in the center with its tiled roof sweeping upward, flanked by a kitchen wing on the left and a series of windowless, padlocked storehouses on the right. But Tess ignored the main residence.
She followed the smell.
It wasn’t the smell of braised pork or burning sandalwood coming from the mayor’s dining room. It was a faint, suffocating draft creeping out from beneath the stone foundations of the secondary root cellar behind the icehouse―a smell that combined the sharp, burning chill of ammonia with the sweet, sickening reek of rotting pond lilies and stagnant swamp mud.
The icehouse door was solid oak, six inches thick, reinforced with crisscrossed iron straps that had rusted into a flaky orange crust around the rivets.
A heavy brass padlock, shaped like a sleeping coiled snake, hung from the iron hasp.
Tess reached into her utility pocket, pulled out the heavy steel bolt-cutters, and clamped the hardened jaws over the shackle.
“Hold the latch,” she whispered.
Elyse wrapped her gloved hand around the iron hasp, bracing the metal so it wouldn’t rattle against the wood.
Tess bore down with all seven points of her physical strength, her boot heels digging two inches into the frozen turf.
The brass shackle sheared in two with a sharp, muted pop. Tess caught the falling lock before it hit the stone, eased the iron bar out of the staple, and pulled the door outward.
A blast of freezing, necrotic air rolled out of the dark opening, instantly condensing the moisture on Tess’s eyelashes into tiny needles of ice.
The stairs leading down weren’t wood. They were rough-cut blocks of blue-grey limestone, slick with a thick, glassy coating of black permafrost that smelled intensely of old vinegar and sulfur.
Tess pulled a small brass hurricane lantern from her haversack, struck a sulfur match inside the glass globe, and trimmed the wick down until it threw only a faint, amber circle of light three feet across. She held The Crescent Cleaver in her right hand, its wave-steel blade angled forward, and began the descent.
Step. Slide the heel. Check the mortar.
The cellar was massive―easily sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, carved directly out of the mountain’s granite bedrock.
Massive blocks of lake ice, each four feet thick and packed in damp sawdust, were stacked ten feet high along the southern wall to preserve winter meat. But there were no sides of beef hanging from the iron hooks. There were no barrels of salted cabbage.
Arranged in two neat, parallel rows along the center of the stone floor were thirteen low wooden trestle benches.
And resting on each bench was a human body, wrapped in heavy, grey funeral canvas that had frozen stiff as sheet metal in the sub-zero chill.
“They aren’t at the temple,” Elyse whispered, her rapier clearing its parasol scabbard by three inches with a dry, singing hiss. “The old man lied to the entire square. The corpses on the mountain were straw dummies wrapped in shrouds.”
Tess stepped to the nearest bench―the body of a burly, thick-shouldered man whose grey canvas wrap had split along the seam.
She peeled the stiff fabric back.
Butcher Zhang.
The man had been dead less than four days, but his skin had turned the color of wet slate, pulled so violently taut over his cheekbones that his lips had retracted, baring teeth that were yellowed and dry as chalk. There were no defensive cuts on his knuckles. No broken fingernails.
Tess leaned down with the lantern, bringing the flame within two inches of the dead man’s neck.
Just below the left earlobe, over the deep junction of the jugular vein and the carotid artery, sat two clean, circular punctures. They were roughly three-quarters of an inch apart, wide as pencil leads, their edges smooth and slightly flared outward, looking less like bite marks and more like the entry points of industrial drainage needles.
Radiating outward from the punctures, spiderwebbing through the pale grey meat of the neck and chest, was a dense, crystalline network of dark emerald veins.
The blood inside those vessels hadn’t clotted. It had calcified into tiny, glassy green needles that poked against the underside of the skin like grains of coarse sand.
“Look at the drainage angle,” Tess said, pointing with the tip of her knife. “The punctures are angled downward at forty-five degrees. Whatever did this didn’t attack him from the front. It hovered over him while he was lying in bed, inserted the feeding conduits, and pumped in an enzymatic anticoagulant while his heart was still beating.”
“To refine the marrow,” Elyse said, her dark eyes flashing with cold recognition. “In the old duchies, when an alchemist sought to brew a homunculus elixir, he did not butcher commoners in the street. He selected families whose ancestral blood had been steeped in temple incense for generations. The spiritual residue in their organs acts as a catalyst. Thirteen lives to force a third-tier evolutionary breakthrough.”
A sharp, scraping sound echoed from the far end of the cellar.
Ssssshh-clack.
It wasn’t the sound of boots on stone. It was the heavy, muscular friction of hundreds of smooth, overlapping scales dragging across frozen granite, accompanied by the wet, rhythmic clicking of claws against ice.
Tess blew out the lantern instantly, dropping the cellar into pitch-black shadow save for the faint, pale green luminescence bleeding from the dead butcher’s veins.
She backed against a stack of ice blocks, her boots finding a dry patch of sawdust, her fingers tightening around the rubber grip of The Crescent Cleaver.
Through the gloom, forty feet away at the rear of the cavern, a section of the stone wall slid open with a deep, grinding thud.
A figure walked through the opening, carrying an ornate brass brazier filled with glowing sandalwood coals.
Mayor Lin.
The old man had discarded his padded winter coat. He wore a long, sleeveless robe of dark green silk embroidered with coiling silver serpents, his withered arms bare to the shoulders. But his skin was no longer liver-spotted and pale; along his forearms and down the side of his neck, patches of diamond-shaped jade scales had erupted through the pores, glistening with a thin, oily mucus under the coal light.
And coiling behind him, emerging from a massive subterranean drainage tunnel that stretched deep into the mountain’s roots, was a shape that filled the entire twenty-foot width of the chamber.
It was a python, but an abomination of one.
The beast was easily thirty feet long, its body thick as a beer keg, covered in overlapping, armor-plated scales of deep emerald and obsidian. But its head was grotesque―a deformed, swollen parody of a human skull, four feet long, with a toothless human jaw beneath two slit-pupil golden eyes that burned with a manic, insatiable intelligence. Where its neck met its shoulders, four stunted, withered human arms protruded from the scales, their long, blackened fingernails twitching in the cold air.
Grandfather Willow. The Corrupted Serpent Spirit.
Mayor Lin set the brazier on a low stone altar, bowed three times until his forehead touched the frozen flagstones, and spoke in a voice that was half-whisper, half-hiss:
“Great Ancestor… the harvest is prepared. The thirteen vessels have yielded their essence. The out-district rail pigs are roaming the valley like blind cattle. Before the dawn whistle blows, we shall draw their vitality into the great vessel, and your divine ascension will be complete.”
The massive serpent lowered its human-faced head, its black, forked tongue darting out to lick the frost from Butcher Zhang’s exposed cheek. It gave a low, vibrating hiss that shook the ice stacks, its golden eyes rolling backward in pure, gluttonous ecstasy.
Then the tongue stopped.
It hovered an inch above the corpse’s neck, tasting the air.
The beast’s golden pupils snapped forward, locking onto the stack of sawdust where Tess and Elyse stood in the dark.
Mayor Lin froze, his head snapping around, his jade-scaled hand reaching into his silk robe to draw a short, curved bone dagger.
“Who is there?” the mayor shrieked, his grandfatherly mask completely shattering into a snarling, feral grimace. “Guards! Seal the hatch!”
Tess didn’t wait for the guards.
She stepped out of the shadow of the ice blocks, bringing The Crescent Cleaver up into a high, two-handed guard.
“You should have kept the thirteen bodies on the mountain, Lin,” Tess said, her voice cutting through the sub-zero chill like cold steel. “Your meat’s spoiled.”