In the tenth year of the Xianchun era, Lin’an. A nobody discovers a corpse in a dry well on Huitang Lane.
Coroner Zhao Guitian only wants to finish examining the body and go home to brew medicine for his blind mother. But the bitter-almond scent he detects leads to a servant from the Jia household, a secret letter from Xiangfan, and four words on a slip of paper: “Three thousand li north.”
Three thousand li to the north lies Dadu. The Mongols’ iron hooves await.
The storyteller Liu Niang turns the truth into a coded tale and sings it in the theaters. Zhang Zhennang, a female clerk at the Directorate of Arms, discovers that the shoddy gunpowder beneath Xiangfan’s walls comes from a workshop owned by the Jia family. Tang Yu, commander of the imperial guards, commands an army but has no idea whom he should fight for.
Meanwhile, atop Ge Ridge, Jia Sidao toys with his cricket cage and tells a man in black, “Just keep an eye on things.”
The day the Yuan army crosses the river, the fires in Lin’an turn half the sky red.
Zhao Guitian thought that if he simply kept his mouth shut, he could stay alive. But when a frail concubine kneels before him with two small children in her arms, begging him to help them escape the city
he finally understands: some corpses are not done with once the examination is over. Some roads must be taken, whether you want to or not.
He is no general or chancellor, just a coroner who wants to go home. But when his country needs someone to remember, he chooses to stand at Yashan.
Good looking, compact plot