The iron gates of the Vance Breeding & Recovery Depot hung askew on their hinges, held in place only by thick swags of rusted chain and decades of soot.
Above the entrance, an enameled iron signboard had weathered to a dark, flaky orange. Beneath the streaks of lime and coal grease, the faint impression of the Vance crest—a winged raptor perched above an anvil—still clung to the metal.
Arthur pushed the gate inward. The hinges screamed in protest, shedding crusts of rusted iron into the black mud.
Beside him, Grimm stepped across the threshold with slow, calculated steps. The hound didn’t rush. His head lowered, amber eyes sweeping the courtyard, nostrils flaring as he sifted through thirty years of heavy-duty decay. Stale rain, decomposing horsehair plaster, rat droppings, dry rot, and the lingering, metal tang of cold sulfur melted rock waste.
Behind them came the squelch of heavy hooves and the rattle of handcart axles.
“Arthur, this isn’t a breeding station,” Toby panted. He dragged the wooden handcart over the shattered cobblestones. He pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose, his breath smoking in the November chill. “This is an unsafe ruin. Look at the stonework on that chimney! If a heavy gale blows off the badlands, that sixty-foot brick chimney pipe will collapse straight through the roof.”
Beneath the cart, Barnaby the burrow-hog let out a joyful, deep-throated snort.
The three-hundred-pound swine heaved himself free from the handcart’s tailgate, dropped his bulk into the courtyard with a wet thud, and right away drove his broad, rubbery snout into a mountain of decomposed wood shavings and coal dust beside the old kiln. Within seconds, Barnaby was snorting clouds of steam, happily excavating underground grubs and bulldozing decades of rubble into neat, flat terraces.
“Barnaby approves of the foundation,” Arthur said, unhooking his leather medical satchel. “The bedrock here is solid dark rock. My father chose this site. That was because the underground chimney pipes run straight into the earth-heat drainage ducts of Sector 4. It stays dry below the frost line.”
Arthur walked toward the main warehouse double doors. The timber was black oak, heavy with slanted iron strapping. A heavy brass padlock hung from the hasp, green with green rust. Arthur drew a tarnished brass key from his waistcoat pocket. The only physical inheritance left behind in his father’s footlocker.
He pushed in the key into the tumbler. With a sharp, dry click, the internal pins yielded.
Arthur pushed the double doors wide.
The vast inside hall opened before them. It was eighty feet long and forty feet wide, spanned by massive timber roof beams darkened by fire smoke. High window row windows, their glass coated in soot, cast long beams of amber light across the flat stone slab floor. Down the center of the hall ran a double row of ten heavy iron holding pens, their slide-bolts rusted solid but their load-bearing posts anchored deep into the stone bedrock.
At the far end of the hall, resting on four cast-iron pillars, stood a three-ton zinc cutting-open and check table.
Beside it, a hand-pump connected to an underground sandstone water tank stood beside a massive brick hearth built directly into the base of the sixty-foot heavy-duty chimney pipe.
“No leaks over the main floor,” Arthur observed, looking up at the rafters. “The roof shingles are slate. The water damage is confined to the hay loft on the east wall.”
Grimm didn’t wait for instructions. The jet-black hound began his tactical outer edge patrol.
He moved along the inside walls with soundless footsteps, testing each pen gate with a nudge of his nose, cataloging the smell of old disinfectants, and checking the small drainage grates that lined the stone floor. When he reached the northwest corner near the great brick hearth, Grimm stopped.
Resting half-buried beneath a heap of dried sacking was an eighty-pound cast-iron engine metal tube, discarded decades ago from a mine hoist.
Grimm approached the iron metal tube, sniffed its greased pipe rim, and nudged it with his snout. The eighty-pound mass didn’t budge. Grimm gave a soft, satisfied chuff. Turning in a tight circle twice, the fifty-two-pound hound dropped heavily onto the flat stone slabs, rested his neck against the cold iron metal tube. Then he crossed his massive front paws.
“Look at him,” Toby muttered, leaning his broom against the wall. “He had his pick of thirty dry wool sacks. He chose an eighty-pound heavy-duty piston as a pillow. Your dog has the nesting instincts of an anvil.”
“He likes thickness,” Arthur replied, setting his razor-sharp satchel on the zinc table. “The Fenrir lineage gravitates toward heavy metals. Iron stabilizes his gravity channel.”
“Well, the anvil can guard the hearth while we prevent this place from giving us black flesh-rot,” Toby said. He pulled off his coat and rolling up his wool shirt sleeves. “Where do we start?”
“We secure water, heat, and quarantine,” Arthur said. “Toby, prime the water tank pump with boiled water. If the valves are leather, they’ll need to swell before they draw suction. Clear the muck out of the hearth chimney pipe so we don’t suffocate on back-draft. I’ll take the holding pens.”
For the next four hours, the abandoned depot echoed with the sounds of careful labor.
Toby scrubbed decades of soot from the pump handle, poured a kettle of boiling water down the casing, and pumped vigorously until the rusted spout gasped, coughed. Then it finally gushed a steady, freezing stream of crystal-clear underground water bed water.
Outside, Barnaby proved more effective than a work crew. The burrow-hog systematically cleared the courtyard, using his wedge-shaped skull and muscular neck to shove rotted pallets, broken timber, and rusted scrap into a neat pile against the outer edge wall. He met a patch of noxious weed roots. Each time, he devoured them with noisy relish, grinding them between his heavy back teeth.
Arthur worked with a cold chisel and a lump hammer. He knocked the rusted hinge pins out of four central pens, soaked the iron sleeves in kerosene, and rehung the heavy gates until they swung smoothly without a sound. With stiff horsehair brushes and a bucket of packed antiseptic wash, he scrubbed the zinc check slab until the dull metal gleamed like polished silver.
By mid-afternoon, the low winter sun began to dip behind the melted rock waste heaps of the Iron Ghetto.
Arthur laid seasoned birch logs across the hearth iron grate, placed dry pine shavings beneath them. Then he struck a spark with his steel striker.
The dry shavings caught instantly. A tongue of bright yellow flame curled around the birch bark, crackling as it drew air. At first, a puff of cold, gray smoke curled out into the hall. Then, as the column of air inside the sixty-foot chimney pipe warmed, the natural draft took hold with a low, ringing roar.
The brick chimney acted like a huge lung. It drew the damp, stale air from the warehouse floor and expelled it into the sky. It filled the hall with the dry, fragrant scent of burning birch.
Within an hour, the heat radiated out from the brickwork, warming the flat stone slabs.
Toby collapsed onto a newly scrubbed wooden bench beside the hearth, his glasses spattered with suds, his face streaked with black ash. He held a battered tin mug of steaming chicory tea between his blistered palms.
“The water is sweet,” Toby sighed, blowing steam from the mug. “Tested it with copper strips—zero lead, zero runoff contamination. The underground water bed tap is ninety feet deep. We have clean water, four clean pens, and enough firewood outside to survive a siege.”
He pulled out his small leather ledger, opening it to a fresh page.
“Now for the grim arithmetic,” Toby continued, dipping his steel nib into a small bottle of ink. “Our current liquid assets: ninety-four Vanguard brass credits and eighteen silver groschen. We paid sixty credits for cart rental and feed grains yesterday. Rent on this depot is zero because your father held the freehold patent. But town taxes are due in thirty days: thirty-five credits. We have twenty days of feed for Barnaby and eighty pounds of bone meal for Grimm. If we don’t generate revenue within two weeks, Arthur, we’ll be eating Barnaby’s cabbages.”
Under the bench, Barnaby let out a defensive snort. Then he tucked his snout deeper into his trotters.
“We’ll generate revenue,” Arthur said. He sat on an upturned timber crate and laying out his razor-sharp tools across a clean linen cloth.
He opened his wooden instrument roll. Three care bistouries, two bone scrapers, five pairs of artery metal tongs, a brass hand-drill for skull trepanation, and six sets of nickel-plated cannulas. Beside them sat his living type-list magnifying glass, its quartz lenses polished to crystal clarity.
Arthur pulled a battered, leather-bound notebook from the bottom of his satchel—his father’s journal. It was stamped with the title: Comparative Sickness of Rift-Adjacent Working Fauna (Vol. IV).
Arthur turned the yellowed thick parchment pages. His father’s neat, cold and exact handwriting covered every leaf, detailing body sketches of common draft animals, joint padding degradation under heavy haulage, and forgotten folk remedies using common slum minerals.
On the last written page, his father had penned a single sentence in dark sepia ink:
The noble clans breed for spectacle and slaughter. The empire survives on the broken backs of beasts that no one sees. Cure the foundation, and you command the realm.
Arthur closed the notebook, feeling the worn leather beneath his calloused thumb.
“Tomorrow morning,” Arthur said quietly, “we open the gate.”
“To whom?” Toby asked, gesturing around the vast, empty brick hall. “The high-born cadets go to the Apex Medical Pavilion in Sector 1. The guild masters take their prized coursers to corporate breeding barns. Nobody in Ward 9 even knows this door is unlocked.”
Grimm’s head suddenly lifted from the eighty-pound cast-iron metal tube.
The hound didn’t rise, but his black ears swiveled sharply toward the courtyard gate. His golden eyes narrowed, staring into the dusk. Through the flat stone slabs, Arthur felt a faint, rhythmic shaking sent through the ground. The dragging, uneven rhythm of steel-shod hooves slipping in cold mud, with the slow, painful squeal of an overloaded iron axle.
Arthur stood up, sliding his monocle magnifying glass into his waistcoat pocket.
“They know,” Arthur said.