Foes

The zither players and singers of Pangzhen, sealed into wood, whose music now has only the one use left to it.

A crowd that never formed a unit: bomb carriers, archers, butchers, twinblade swordsmen, shadow killers — each fighting for itself.

White-robed disciples of the Mandate who took Transcension, and kept only a hollow where a face had been.

The most bloodthirsty of the killers sent after traitors, swinging across sheer cliffs on a pair of chained sickles.

A hammer-swinging brute and the faceless thing riding his neck — a pair chained to each other.

Cavalrybane holds the streets, Soulclaimer the docks, Heartpiercer the White Serpent House — three elite Shadow Wardens, one achievement.

Killers who turned their own trade on themselves: doll masks, years of drugs, and bodies no taller than a child's.

The people of Lujia Village, moved into wooden bodies one by one, still keeping to the roles they held in life and killing the way those roles suggest.

Six kinds of puppet built by the Herald — cannon, spike, umbrella, severed head, halberd and shield — most of them carrying a living mind inside.

A girl in a Big-Head Doll headpiece, half smiling and half weeping, who stops travelers with a band of puppets she calls friends.

A woman gnawing corpses in a barren graveyard, swinging a rake with no technique at all, yet able to summon shadows of herself.

A grade above the village sort: complete bodies, finer craft, and minds scraped down to the part of them that kills.