Yitian Ce

The Great Yan capital, Tianjing, Ministry of Justice Death Prison.

The bloody words in the throat of Zhao San, incense master of the Guizang Pavilion, had not yet dried: “Dark iron beneath the heavens, the Nine Provinces return to Guizang.” Qin Ce, an assistant minister at the Court of Judicial Review, held half of a copper coin with a serrated edge. He knew this was no ending. Someone had deliberately handed him a blade.

The Guizang Pavilion, remnants of the former dynasty, had lain in wait for thirty years, searching for the nine “Guizang Tokens.” Whoever gathered them all could open the hidden armory and claim dark iron, money and grain, and firearm blueprints, enough to shake the realm. But as Qin Ce dug deeper, he found something colder than the bloody words: the money trail. Salt and iron magnates laundered the money, a vice minister of revenue acted as middleman, and Chancellor Fu Song’s steward collected it at the end. Every secret ledger at Fengyuan Trading House, every banknote with its concealed seal, pointed to a masked figure: “Master Xuan.”

Mo Yu was a shadow. When Su Tan worked her abacus, she held her ring and little fingers together, just as her mother had in life. Qin Ce received his father’s keepsake, a ledger from the Shadow Tower, its corners worn and curled, recording seven years of investigation and an “accidental fall from a horse” after someone had cut the saddle girth. Who was Master Xuan? A descendant of the former imperial house, someone who could open the city gates at night and make a three-dynasty veteran curl his fingers inside his sleeves.

From the one-eyed innkeeper at the Jiangdong post station to the map marked with red dots in an abandoned granary south of the city; from the old burn scar on a matchlock gunsmith’s hand to the words spoken on the golden bricks of the court, “I am sixty. How many more years can I wait?”

His Majesty gave him only three months.

Qin Ce tucked the two copper coins close to his body. One was his father’s keepsake, the other evidence from a bloody case.

In this game of chess, he would return the realm to Guizang, and set justice right again.