Ling glanced at the corner. "Midori. How many?"
Midori answered without opening the ledger. "Thirty-one. Potentially more that weren't recorded."
"And the bodies?" Jin asked.
"There are no bodies," Ling said. "Not one, out of thirty-one."
"The families come here every morning asking for news," Xiao said, quieter than before. "We don't even have something for them to bury."
Thirty-one people, and not a single body. So, they're being taken somewhere.
Ling laid her finger on the western end of the map and drew it along the coast as she talked. "It started two months ago. Kuroshio, a fishing village half a day west of here. Three gone in one night. Then Obama, then Tsuwa, each one closer than the last. Always the same story. Somebody goes out alone around dusk, and in the morning there's nothing to find." Her finger stopped on the city. "Three weeks ago, it reached Yamatai."
"Aiko," Noah said.
Ling looked up.
"A woman at the market told us. Her neighbor's boy. He went to check his father's night-lines and never came back."
"Page forty," Midori said from her corner. "Aiko. Sixteen. The night-lines sit below the east pier."
"The magistrate thinks the missing ran off to Serica," Ling said. "It is easier for him that way. Thirty-one runaways are a story. Thirty-one taken is a monster."
"And it's a monster," Noah said.
"It's a monster."
"What is it?" Noah asked. "What are we dealing with?"
Ling stood up and took the halberd off the wall in the same motion.
"Words won't do it justice," she said. "Come. We caught one."
She led them out along the top of the sea wall, the long stone barrier that kept the winter sea off the lowest streets. The tide was out, and below them the shore ran wide and dark, mudflats and weed-slick stone, with the drying racks throwing long thin shadows across it. Gulls stood in rows on the rack-poles and watched them pass. Ahead, on the strip of shore outside the wall, a low ice-shed stood alone, well away from everything else, and Noah noticed that the fishermen working the flats had all set their baskets down at the far end of the beach.
Xiao went ahead and worked the bolt.
Inside, the cold of the packed ice bit through their clothes. Fish frames stood empty along the walls, and the salt barrels had been shoved into a corner to make room.
The thing lay on a drying rack.
It was shaped like a man, but stretched, the limbs were long and thin, and even dead, flat on its back, the thing looked like it was looming over something. There was no flesh on it anywhere. The whole body was made of twisted, pale, stalk-like fibers, thousands of strands woven tightly together into the shape of muscle. Where the halberd had cut it open, the fibers showed in severed bundles, no blood, only a wet, spongy pulp that had frozen grey.
In place of a head, it had a mushroom cap. A massive, overhanging cap, wide as a cartwheel, its top the deep reddish-brown of a bruise. A single stroke had split it down to the stem. Smaller caps grew in clusters from its shoulders and down its spine; two of them had been sheared off in the fight. It had no face. Instead, a cluster of round nodes dotted its chest where a face should have been.
Its hands and feet had no fingers. Each limb simply tapered into hardened tendrils, sharpened at the tips, the points stained dark. One forearm lay next to the body, severed at the elbow. Patches along its left side were burned black, seared shut. And between its joints, stretching from the underside of the great cap down to its arms, hung thick strands of webbing, frozen stiff. Caught inside the webbing were fish bones, shreds of kelp, and a white crust of dried brine.
Jin already had his kit open.
The heart sat apart from all of it, inside an open iron box on a barrel, a green stone the size of a fist. It was the only thing in the shed without a single mark on it.
"We hit the body with everything we had," Xiao said. "But of course, since we are Eldritch holders and not cursed, not a scratch on the heart."
Noah crouched next to the burned patches. The edges of the wounds had melted into black glass. "This burn... heat? Or something caustic?" He glanced at Xiao's scarred hands. "One of yours, I'd guess."
"Both," Xiao said. He held his hands up and turned them over, the scars running all the way to the wrists. "Hot and caustic at once."
The power of Xiao's Eldritch heart came from a bombardier beetle, and it was classified as GOLD TIER. The beetle brews two liquids in its body that are harmless apart; the instant they mix, they boil. Xiao's spray came out the same way, a scalding, corroding mist that could strip flesh from bone and cook what was left.
"The scars are from my first year with it," he said, and there was no grin behind it for once. "The mixing happens in my own hands. I aimed badly. You only aim badly once."
"Tell them how we caught it," Ling said.
"A lamplighter went missing near the sea-caves, an hour west along the shore, eight days ago," Xiao said. "It leaves prints in the cave-damp. And it sheds, fibers, everywhere it brushes against stone."
"Does shed fiber hold a scent?" Izumi asked.
"Enough for the dogs. Barely. We tracked it for two nights and set on it at dawn, all four of us. It didn't fight like a beast. We flanked it, and it gave ground, it kept the rock at its back the whole time. Then it broke and ran, and the trail it left was easy to follow." He looked at the thing on the rack. "It came out of a side passage behind us. It went straight past me, past Ling. It went for Midori."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Ling hit it off its feet with the flat, and when it raked her arm, its point skidded off like it had struck the wall."
Ling said nothing. She rolled her left sleeve back to the elbow. A pale scratch ran along the forearm, no deeper than a cat could have done.
The power of Ling's Eldritch heart came from a tiger beetle, and it was also classified as GOLD TIER. A tiger beetle is armor that runs; nothing its size is faster on the ground, and nothing its size is harder to crack. Her body hardened where a blow landed, and her legs carried her in bursts too quick for the eye to hold onto.
"That stroke there," Xiao said, pointing at the split cap, "was the second one."
The ice ticked quietly in the walls.
"Beasts don't do that," Ling said flatly. "I have fought them many times. They don't retreat, and they don't set traps."
An eldritch beast that thinks. Noah stared at the split cap. I know exactly one beast in this world that thinks. And she's the size of a cathedral, and she runs an empire.
Jin was scraping at one of the cut bundles with a thin blade. "The salt isn't on it," he said. "It's in it. All the way through the strand." He held the sliver up against the lantern. "Sea spray sits on the surface and dries. This soaked. For a long time."
"There is nothing like it in the garrison catalogue," Xiao added. "We sent sketches north. Nothing came back."
"It wouldn't be in the catalogue," Ling said. "I soldiered in Mother's army for years. Every Eldritch under her, the beasts we field and the hearts we're given, all of them are insects. Mine. Xiao's. Yours." She nodded at Izumi. "That thing is no insect."
"Then it isn't Sutra's," Noah said. "And it came from the south."
"South of here is water," Jin said, "and more water, and then the Southern Continent, if the old charts are honest."
"Then how did it cross?" Noah asked.
Nobody answered him.
"I say we break the heart and burn the rest," Xiao said. "Noah... you could destroy it, right? You are cursed, so you could do it right now."
Only a cursed human can destroy an Eldritch heart.
"Mother wants it so we can investigate it," Ling said. "It is valuable. Someone is coming to take it to her."
"Fair enough." Xiao pulled the shed door open again.
Back at the customs house, the lamps were lit, and Xiao set a pot of fish stew over the fire. Hana had gone out for the evening rounds.
"My grandmother's recipe," Xiao announced, ladling the bowls full.
"He added ginger to it last month," Midori said.
"I improved my grandmother's recipe."
The stew was good, and he watched every one of them discover that it was good, which seemed to feed him more than his own bowl did. Izumi finished first and held her bowl out without a word, and Xiao filled it like a man accepting a medal.
"So what does a tracker do in the capital," he asked her, "when nothing needs tracking?"
"Something always needs tracking."
"People?"
"Sometimes people. Mostly things people lost. Once, a shipment of bees."
"You tracked bees."
"They tracked themselves. I tracked the man who dropped the crate and walked away from it."
Xiao laughed loud enough that the fire jumped. Then he pointed his spoon at Xiangli. "And you? What's your heart? You said you glow."
"Firefly."
"And?"
"And nothing. That's the whole of it. I glow."
Xiao waited, in case there was more coming. There wasn't.
"It's a good glow," Jin offered.
"Thank you, Jin."
Jin had a bowl in one hand and a stub of charcoal in the other, sketching the coastline from memory on the back of an old customs form. Xiangli had found the one cushion in the building and was defending it.
For a little while, nobody talked about anything at all, and it was good.
Then Noah set down his bowl.
"You killed it seven days ago," he said.
"Seven," Ling confirmed.
Noah turned to Midori. "How many since then?"
She opened the ledger, even though she didn't seem to need it. "One, three days after you killed it. Another, five days after." She turned the page. "And two more, two nights ago."
She closed the ledger and laid her hands flat on top of it.
So there are more of them. Out there, right now.
The fire popped in the grate. From somewhere along the harbor road, faint through the shutters, came the sound of singing, festival practice.
Then the door banged open.
Hana stood in the doorway, breathing hard. She had run the whole way.
"A dock porter is gone," she said between breaths. "Taken out of his own yard. Last night, inside the walls." She looked at Ling, then at Noah. "And this time, somebody saw it."
Noah took his coat off the peg.