Prologue

Darkness had come down across the General's residence like black lions to the shore, but in the House of Cloud Moon many lamps were burning bright.

The glow from the brazier melted along the jade-like jaw of a young woman, illuminating a beautiful face and clear, dark eyes. She had the loose hair of a young maiden, arranged around a set of silver plum blossom ornaments flecked with lapis. The delicately made pieces matched bracelets decorating an arm that moved gracefully to the momentum of fingers tracing an elegant, curling script across paper.

In the center of the well lit room was a corpse, lying most decorously.

The arms were slack, splayed just slightly, palms facing up as if the air runs through them like a river. The cadaver's gut was torn open; loops and coils of the abdomen's contents spilled abattoir mess onto the floor. A second body was slouched next to it, this one still breathing — hard, heavy and inter-spaced with the guttural crescendos of pain strangling his throat as he clutched at the freshly bleeding stump that ended his left arm.

His black clothes were nondescript, but well made. Though he had the calloused, toned fingers of a killer, one of them bore a signet ring no ordinary assassin could own. The ornament — a gold cicada pressed into opal — gleams on the severed hand that sat atop the beautiful young girl's writing desk, right next to her languidly drifting wrist as she punctuated her calligraphy with the slender black characters of a signature.

The soft gold lamp light described her dark hair like gilding when she leaned down to blow on the damp ink, breath caressing two lines of glossy black text.

The letter was rolled, sealed, and tucked carefully into the red washed palm of the severed hand. Fingers already beginning to stiffen were forced down in tight around the parchment — a grisly grasping fist.

The girl carried it with her as she unfolded from behind the desk and moved across a floor made slick from blood and bile ejected from fleshy cavities; cat-like as ankles enter the shadow of the maimed shadow guard who cringed back in terror.

"I did as you asked." His voice was pain-painted nerves singing out in half-garbled agony; bleeding like the wound the girl's bodyguard had given him. He waved his stump at her in recrimination. "You said if I told you why we killed Qingshan Gongzhu you'd let me keep my hand. It was all the truth! I told you the truth!"

"And I believe you." She crouched low, down to eye level, and the fingers that tipped the man's twisted face up to hers slid a gentle caress along the ridge of his jaw before dropping to turn his remaining limb palm up. "That is why this is yours... to keep." His own hand, still grasping her letter, dropped into it's mate. "Take it back with you to your masters. And then I suggest preparing a grave, for the rest of you."

In the back of the room a handsome young man in imperial gold watched from the shadows, a chill sliding down his back as he recalled the two lines she'd written.

What is coming for you is not vengeance, but cautionary tale:

I destroy.