The Zither Butcher

Yan Lv is blind, poor, and has the best ears in the empire. For nine years he has played the Peace Hymn, the safest music ever written, in teahouses and banquet halls, hiding the gift his dead teacher left him: he can kill with a pitch.

Then, at the prefect of Qinghe's banquet, the seventh note of the Peace Hymn answers itself. A hidden second voice locks onto his tone and stops the prefect's heart in front of two hundred witnesses, and the blind musician learns what the ballads mean by zither butcher. The charge should hang him. It does not, because the assassin dying in the next cell leaves a message instead of a confession: an organization called the Hall has spent thirty years collecting the thirteen sacred strings of the murdered Music Bureau, and it needs the strings he carries. Twelve to lock the world's mouth. One, the thirteenth, the mouth of the array itself, the string that belongs to the dead, to open it.

The Hall's prize is nearly finished. Under Mirror Lake lies the drowned great hall of the Bureau, its twelve ceremonial bells strung into the Voice-Silencing Array, a machine that swallows sound whole. Where it wakes, towns go dark, martial artists' breath-art locks in their chests, and dogs, drums, and dying words are eaten by a bell. The court that strangled ninety musicians and their households wants it as a wall to unmake armies and whispers. The Hall's master, a man with no heartbeat who signs nothing, the Quiet Master, wants it finished, permanent, and pointed at the throne. Both sides need the blind player with the burnt-tail zither, because his teacher hid the thirteenth string where no thief would think to look: strung, carried, and played every night for coppers.

Yan Lv is not a swordsman. His weapons are the twelve pitches, the gong that unmans a heart, the shang that severs metal, the spring pitch that calls every beast for miles, and the enemies who come for his strings keep dying of their own instruments. What he has instead of an army is stranger: A Bi, a deaf-born storyteller's daughter who reads the world through her skin and is the one creature the silence cannot touch; a string-maker's widow whose house itself takes the kill; a tongueless man who has held one note in silence for thirty years; a captain who risks the scaffold to keep evidence breathing; and a murdered hall's worth of screams, tuning themselves in his skull toward a chord someone will have to answer.

The court offers him a license to live. The Hall offers him a share of the quiet. Yan Lv chooses a third door. At the solstice, on the ash ground of the old Music Bureau, he will play the Peace Hymn before the throne with the murdered seventh note restored, and make an empire that has spent thirty years taking sound give something back.

The Zither Butcher is a complete wuxia saga of music as martial art: killing songs, bells that eat towns, a duel fought through another person's nerves, and a blind musician and a deaf girl who stand up to a machine built from a nation's silence, to prove that a sound, once given, cannot be taken.