NOVEL NEXT Chapter 277: The Funeral Procession
The north road wore last night's frost like a thin lie.
Wagon ruts had glazed over; every step cracked a little history. Yan Luo set a steady pace, Gaoyu half a step behind, four riders fanning out into the scrub where thorn and winter grass hid quick exits and slower ambushes. The crane head sat against his wrist bone, a small weight that never let him forget why he was still breathing.
They'd left the pilgrim square behind in a silence thick enough to chew. Word would run ahead of them—word always did—but fear would run faster. A "monk in red" carried a boy north. That was the shape of the trail. He didn't believe in monks. He believed in costumes.
"Smell," he said without looking back.
Gaoyu lifted his chin, drawing cold air deep. "Dye. Glue. Bad tea."
"Bathhouse kit," Yan Luo murmured. "They didn't wash it off clean."
Beyond the first turn the road narrowed, pinched between a stand of bare wutong trees and the ditch that fed into the winter-dry streambed. The stream would run again in spring. Some men bet their lives like that—on water that wasn't there yet.
A bell tolled once in the distance. Not temple. Gate. He let the sound crawl over the skin of the morning and die.
They met the first pilgrim knot just past the mile-stone, twenty-one people in gray, too neat for people who'd slept rough. Ropes strung at waist height kept the line close; the man carrying the rope called it precaution against getting separated. Yan Luo called it a leash.
Gaoyu swept them with his eyes, already cataloging shoes, bruises, scarves. A boy at the tail had the shaved head of a novice and the unsteady knees of a child who should have been in his mother's kitchen, not on a winter road. Yan Luo stopped the line without a word, took the boy's wrist, turned it, looked for the faint stain from incense ash ground into the skin where a gag string might have rubbed. Nothing. Not this one.
"Temple?" he asked the man with the rope.
"North Hermitage," the man said. "We go to pledge the spring labor."
Yan Luo smiled. "Winter is just starting," he pointed out.
The man blinked. "We—start early."
Yan Luo nodded as if it were wisdom. He cut the rope with one clean stroke and handed the end to a woman two places down the line. "You carry it," he told her. "If he pulls too hard, let go."
They walked on.
Past the second turn, just before the road straightened toward the old kiln village, the first cart sat with a wheel off, its axle propped on a stack of rocks. A man was cursing under it like prayer done wrong. Two more sat on the cart, heads bent, the picture of frustration.
The mule looked bored. Then again, mules always looked bored.
Yan Luo stopped. "Unlatch it," he grunted, his eyes narrowing.
The men blinked. "What?"
"Unlatch the side." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't repeat himself.
One of them moved, his fingers clumsy on the hook.
The panel swung down, showing baskets, cloth, a mess of straw pressed in the shallow way straw gets when someone hurried the job. He reached in, palmed a handful, lifted it to the light.
One filament gleamed dull green before the frost took it—thin as a vein, frayed where small fingers had worried it.
A green ribbon.
He could see it in her hair, tied lazy around her wrist. He could see it in a boy's clenched fist when fear made hands into hooks.
His jaw tightened. He smelled sweet paste under the straw, the lingering ghost of that bathhouse mixture. Most of the crowd would miss it. He didn't.
"False bottom," he said.
The nearest man laughed too quickly. "What bottom? It's straw."
Yan Luo ran the blade of his knife along the wood seam. The sound changed halfway through. Hollow under the left slat. He tapped once with his knuckles… and nothing but air answered.
Gaoyu jerked his chin. Two men slid hands under the slat and lifted. It stuck, then gave with a pop and a puff of dust and cold glue stink. The compartment was empty. At the edge, a smear of dye marked wood—red-brown, thin.
It was fresh.
"You moved him here," Yan Luo said.
The man under the axle stilled. "Moved what?" he said to the dirt.
Yan Luo crouched. "A child." He held the green filament between two fingers. The man's eyes flickered to it and away, too fast.
"North," Gaoyu muttered. "If they got him out of the box, they changed the method of transportation."
"Not a cart," Yan Luo said, rising. He looked at the road ahead, where the sun tried to pull a shadow out of the world and the world pretended it didn't have one. "A bier."
Gaoyu swore under his breath. "Do you really think that they would have put the kid in a coffin? It's a funeral procession."
"Men don't stop funeral processions," Yan Luo reminded him. "Men cross the road, take off their hats, and pretend they're pious."
He turned to the axle man. "Which way."
The man swallowed. "Potter's field," he said. "For the poor."
"When?"
"Not long ago," the man whispered. "A quarter bell."
Yan Luo stood, smoothed his sleeve. "Thank you for telling the truth," he said.
The man nodded once, relief spilling across his face like he could breathe again. Gaoyu killed him with one thrust that kept the blood off the load. The other two didn't run. Men who have watched a clean death up close don't make messy choices.
"Leave them," Yan Luo said. "The road will take care of them later."
They moved on.
The north road widened, touched the edge of the kiln village where the kilns squatted like sleeping oxen under their dust roofs.
Children sometimes played here when the heat bled into the cold and made a kind of comfort.
There were no children now.
They heard the bell again at the top of the slope before they saw it: a thin single note, then silence.
The coffin appeared between two lines of poplar, carried by four men in gray with their heads bowed under the load. A red-robed monk walked ahead, a sutra banner tied to a pole. The banner read "merit" in quick brush, the kind a hand writes when the coin is inside the sleeve already.
Yan Luo stepped into the road.
The monk did not slow. "Please," he called, voice sweet with borrowed holiness. "A child has died. Let his small spirit pass in peace."