Records of the Night Rain

Chang'an, third year of the Dazhong era. The Lantern Festival has just ended when a faceless official's corpse surfaces in Qujiang Pond. A sixth-rank scarlet robe, an etched fish tally, and watermarks indicating the third quarter of the Tiger hour: every detail betrays that someone tampered with the time of death. Lu Zhao, a judicial officer with the Chang'an Prefecture, is ordered to examine the body. With an abacus and a bronze water clock, he turns a case the authorities hastily dismissed as “accidental drowning” into the key to an unsolved palace coup from fourteen years ago, when the court was bathed in blood. After the Sweet Dew Incident, hundreds of aristocratic clans were slaughtered, exiled, or wiped out to the last. The survivors went into hiding, became monks, or learned how to kill with “celestial phenomena.” Lu Zhao only trusts what can be calculated. Yet the more he investigates, the more he realizes that the killer he pursues is using the same calendrical arts he learned to forge the Mandate of Heaven and destabilize Chang'an. And the Taoist nun who plays the xiao at night and helps him lay out unidentified corpses is the daughter of his enemy, as well as the only person who refuses to reason with him. In late Tang Chang'an, beyond the reach of the lamplight, someone is using the dead to calculate the fate of the living.