Chapter 8: Sealed In

Pingan went down the ladder two rungs at a time, with Zhuoran behind him and the black sword already in his hand.

The common room was dark.

A single coal glowed in the stove, and by its light he saw the front door.

The yellow strips nailed across it had gone the color of old blood.

They were humming, a thin note.

Beyond the paper, in the street, pale shapes were pressed against the shutters.

There were dozens of them, men and women in plain wet clothes, with river weed in their hair.

They were not the scorched kind.

They were only drowned, and cold, and lost, and every one of them was whispering the same name.

"Zhuoran. Zhuoran. Zhuoran."

"Who are they?" Pingan breathed.

"Ordinary dead." Zhuoran's face had gone tight. "The river keeps a lot of them. They've always answered something in me."

"And the Bureau's seal?"

"It doesn't keep them out. It pulls them in. He's using me for bait."

Pingan stared at the humming door.

Above them, in the rooms along the upstairs hall, three travelers and Auntie Xu were asleep.

If the drowned dead pushed through the paper, they would drink every one of them cold in minutes.

"Can you hold the door?"

"I can hold it a little," said Zhuoran. "Not long. They're not afraid of me."

He set his back against the wood.

The humming rose.

Something white pressed against the other side, and the paper bulged inward.

Pingan took a breath and bit his own thumb.

The blood came up bright and hot.

He had never done this before, and his master had warned him against it twice.

He slapped his bleeding hand flat against the center of the door and spoke the oldest word he knew.

"Be still."

The whole door shuddered.

The yellow strips blackened from the middle outward and curled away from the wood, and the humming broke into a long, ragged sigh.

In the street, the pale shapes stopped whispering.

One by one they turned and drifted back toward the river, quiet as smoke.

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