The pack-saddle on Barnaby’s back groaned under eighty pounds of pots, ledgers, and dried legumes.
The three-hundred-pound Spotted Burrow-Hog waddled down the southern gravel ramp of the commoner barracks with the unrushed dignity of a steam locomotive. His gray-pink snout snuffled vigorously at the muddy ruts, his round, bristled ears twitching at every clink of the cast-iron soup pot lashed behind his shoulders. A stray cabbage leaf or turnip peel appeared in his path. Each time, Barnaby scooped it into his maw without breaking his four-beat trot. That let out a wet, appreciative grunt that made Toby sigh with frustration.
Beside the hog walked Toby, clutching a wicker crate containing his inkwells and solar batteries. Arthur walked at the point, his father’s canvas kit bag slung over one shoulder. Meanwhile, Grimm trotted alongside him with quiet vigilance. His midnight-black coat shone against the morning overcast.
Before them stretched the Iron-Span. A four-hundred-yard mid-air bridge of rusted forged iron and braided steel cables that spanned the smog-choked deep gap between the Upper Garrison Hill and Slum Ward 9.
Below the bridge, four hundred feet down in the ravine, ran the town drainage chimney pipes and sewage channels of the inner city. Plumes of warm, yellow sulfur steam billowed upward from the deep pit. It condensed into greasy droplets on the bridge railings. Across the span, Slum Ward 9 sprawled across three square miles of cracked bedrock. A dense maze of soot-blackened brick apartments, rusted corrugated zinc roofs, and endless upright smelting chimneys puffing dark smoke into the November sky.
“Look at it,” Toby muttered, pulling his woolen scarf tighter around his collar. “The armpit of the Vanguard Federation. Three hundred thousand people living on top of abandoned mine shafts, paying fifty coppers a month just for the privilege of breathing sulfur. My father always said you don’t grow old in Ward Nine. You just turn into rust.”
“It has bedrock,” Arthur said, his boots clicking evenly on the iron grating of the bridge deck. “The upper district sits on artificial landfill compacted during the first spreading. When the earth-shaking faults slip, the upper terraces sheer on their concrete pylons. Ward Nine sits on solid Precambrian flaky rock. My father knew that when he bought the depot.”
“Your father was an optimist with an engineer’s stubbornness,” Toby grumbled. “And now we own a five-year-old ruin in the middle of scrap merchants, unlicensed distilleries, and commoner draymen whose beasts haven’t seen a licensed beast-doctor since the border war.”
Grimm suddenly halted in the center of the span.
The hound’s head dropped low. His paws splayed wide across the rusted iron grid, his claws hooking into the drainage slots.
Arthur felt it an instant later.
It wasn’t a sound, but a deep, deep-rumbling shudder that rose from deep beneath the ravine floor. The massive steel cables of the mid-air bridge began to hum. A low, violent deep ring that shook through the soles of Arthur’s boots and rattled the teeth in his jaw.
Beneath the pack-saddle, Barnaby froze mid-stride, his tiny hooves locking against the iron deck. The hog let out a sharp, scared squeal, his rubbery snout pointing straight down into the deep gap.
Then came the jolt.
A sharp, upright shock wave struck the bridge piers like an underground hammer. The iron roadway heaved upward by four inches, tossing loose gravel into the air before settling back onto its spreading joints with an ear-splitting screech of tortured metal.
In the slums across the river, chimney pots toppled from brick roofs. It shattered against the cobblestones in distant crashes. Pigeons erupted from the roof edges in panicked, wheeling flocks.
“Earthquake?” Toby yelled, grabbing the iron railing as his knees buckled. “Arthur, was that a fault tremor?”
“Not an earth-shaking tremor,” Arthur said, his eyes scanning the horizon. “The hum was too high. That was an explosive pressure drop.”
Above the outer edge wall of Ward 9, a mile to the south, the sky shifted.
A plume of glowing violet vapor erupted from a massive fissure near the district drainage canal. The gas didn’t scatter with the wind. It hung in the damp air like a shimmering curtain of bruised light, crackling with static electricity that made the hairs on Arthur’s forearms stand on end.
A heartbeat later, the sirens started.
It began with a low, clockwork moan from the fortified watchtowers along the Great Bastion Wall—the Grade-1 outer edge Klaxon. The sound swelled into a rhythmic, pulsing wail that rolled over the zinc roofs of the slums, echoing off the iron bridge with terrifying clarity:
HOOO-WAH. HOOO-WAH. HOOO-WAH.
In the streets of Ward 9, the normal hum of commerce vanished, replaced by the shouts of ward wardens, the slamming of heavy oak shutters. The wild braying of frightened draft beasts.
Arthur reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his brass type-list monocle.
He unfolded the said clearlyarms and fitted the circular lens over his right eye, aligning the aiming cross with the rising violet plume. With a double-tap on the brass casing, the tiny quartz prism inside the rim rotated into focus.
Lines of sharp, amber monospace tracking data snapped into his field of view:
Arthur lowered the monocle, his jaw tightening.
“A deep-sea fissure broke through Sub-Fault Nine,” Arthur said, his voice cold and deliberate. “Raw, raw aether is venting from the deep crust into the lower mine channels.”
Toby stared at him, his face draining of color. “Raw aether? That... That’s the stuff that mutates underground vermin! Iron-Rank Rust-Beetles, Acid Grubs, Blind Ravagers—they feed on aether pockets! If the fault vents into the sewers, where do the beasts go?”
“Upward,” Arthur replied. “The aether creates a positive pressure slope in the deep tunnels. The beasts will be driven toward the surface by oxygen depletion and body-energy frenzy. They will breach the lower basement vaults of Ward Nine within forty-eight hours.”
“The guard post!” Toby shouted, pointing toward the fortified towers behind them. “The Heavy Infantry will deploy their shock-lances! They’ll seal the breach!”
Arthur looked back across the deep gap toward the Upper Garrison Hill.
High on the castle walls, massive iron blast gates were already sliding into place with dull, bone-shaking thuds. Heavy armored portcullises dropped across the northern entry points of the bridge, sealing off the wealthy inner sectors and the Academy grounds behind twenty feet of heavy steel.
“They aren’t deploying, Toby,” Arthur said grimly. “They’re locking down. The guard post doctrine for commoner wards during a Grade-One underground event is passive holding. They seal the inner bridges to protect the high-value districts, let the vermin surge through the slums, and only send in culling squads after the swarm burns itself out.”
Toby looked from the sealed castle gates to the panic spreading through the apartments of Ward 9. His hands began to shake around the crate of inkwells.
“They’re abandoning the lower ward? Just like that? Three hundred thousand people!”
“House Vance controls the town defense budget,” Arthur said, resting his hand on Grimm’s tense shoulder. “Gregory won’t spend a single copper of ammunition to protect commoner scrap shops. To the Council, an incursion in Ward Nine is just an opportunity to clear delinquent leases and buy up land for pennies on the credit.”
Grimm pressed close to Arthur’s leg, his throat emitting a low, nonstop rumble. Through their soul-sync bond, Arthur felt the sense input flooding the hound’s awareness: the taste of copper and burning sulfur in the air, the wild thumping of thousands of human hearts in the apartments ahead, and the deep, skittering shaking of millions of claws scraping against underground bedrock half a mile below their boots.
“We have forty-eight hours before the first underground breaches hit the streets,” Arthur said. “We can’t stay on this bridge. We can’t hide in a commoner tenement with a timber floor. A swarm of Acid Grubs will melt through floorboards in ten minutes.”
“Then where do we go?” Toby yelled over the wailing siren.
“To the depot,” Arthur said, his eyes fixed on the smoke-stained horizon of Sector 4. “My father’s work-yard was built during the Second Cataclysm as a military forward triage station. The foundation walls are four feet of solid granite. The recovery pens are lined with cold-rolled zinc. It has a sealed artesian well and a direct heavy-duty chimney pipe. It’s the only fortified structure in Sector Four that can survive an underground surge.”
Barnaby let out another anxious grunt, shifting his weight nervously from hoof to hoof.
“Barnaby!” Toby shouted, slapping the hog’s sturdy flank. “Move your bacon! If you want your evening cabbage, you run!”
The burrow-hog didn’t need to be told twice. Barnaby lowered his heavy snout like a battering ram. He sped up into a determined trot, his hooves clattering over the iron bridge deck as his pack-saddle jingled with copper pots and dried beans.
Arthur and Toby ran alongside the beast. Meanwhile, Grimm flanked them on the left, his amber eyes scanning every rooftop and alley mouth as they crossed the threshold of the bridge into Slum Ward 9.
The streets of the lower ward were in chaos.
Commoner merchants were wildly dragging handcarts loaded with scrap iron and grain sacks into narrow doorways. Draymen were struggling to calm scared draft oxen whose eyes rolled white at the smell of raw aether. In the tenement stairwells, mothers were shouting for their children, while ward militia volunteers in rusted breastplates were hauling timber barricades across the main intersections.
Through the crowded avenues ran Arthur’s small squad. A determined corpse-judge with an analytical mind, a panicked clerk balancing a crate of records, a three-hundred-pound burrow-hog trotting like a draft horse. A black glass wolf-hound whose ancient marrow hummed with the rising scent of war.
They turned down the narrow alleyway of Iron-Smelter Lane. Then, Arthur adjusted his collar against the gathering November rain.
Ahead, at the end of a deserted cul-de-sac choked with coal dust and broken bricks, rose the blackened dark shape of the Vance Breeding & Recovery Depot.
The safe hall awaited them, but the clock of the deep pit had already begun to tick.