The black limousine of Apex Biogenics had vanished into the heavy-duty smog of Sector 4. That left behind a puddle of scorched man-made signal fluid and two deep ruts in the wet cobblestones where its rear axle had bottomed out against the curb.
Inside the Vance Breeding & Recovery Depot, the silence was broken only by the hiss of the copper kettle on the hearth and the scratching of Toby Mallow’s steel nib across parchment.
“Two hundred and ten entries,” Toby murmured, his glasses perched precariously on the tip of his ink-stained nose. He dipped the nib into a baked-clay inkpot. Then he drew a thick, double ruled line across the bottom of the thick parchment sheet. “Thirty-two draft horses, forty-one haulage oxen, seventy-eight canal terriers, and fifty-nine working burros. Every single one de-hardened, steadied, and returned to active hauling service.”
Toby picked up a small counting frame of brass beads, sliding them with rapid, rhythmic clicks.
“Liquid capital on hand,” Toby announced, turning the ledger toward Arthur with a grin that threatened to split his cheeks, “exactly forty-two Vanguard brass credits net profit after all expenses. But that’s merely our cash reserve. In the dry loft, we have two point four tons of whole rolled barley, one point eight tons of clean oats, six barrels of sheep fat, and three hundred pounds of sun-dried willow bark. Arthur, we have two months of guaranteed feed in reserve. We’re officially solvent.”
Arthur stood behind the three-ton zinc cutting-open table. He wiped down a ten-inch bistoury with an alcohol-soaked linen cloth.
“Enter three credits under tool upkeep,” Arthur said. “The bone saws need resetting on the diamond wheel. The hollow tube rubber rings are degrading under high-pressure acetic sterilization. We replace them before they fail under load.”
“Already budgeted,” Toby said proudly, blotting the page with crushed chalk. “And look at the town registry signboard. Old Man Kael delivered it from the Guildhall this morning while you were checking the heavy cart ponies.”
Toby pointed to a newly polished brass plate mounted beside the double entrance doors.
Inscribed in deep, acid-etched block lettering beneath the crossed-razor knife emblem of the Vanguard Medical Division was a formal official badge:
“A sovereign relief station,” Toby sighed. He leaned back against the cedar desk with a satisfied groan. “Pendelton can’t shut our doors without a direct order from the High Military Trial, and Gregory Vance’s court guards can’t set foot across that threshold without committing armed treason. For the first time since we left the Academy dormitories, Arthur, we have ground under our feet.”
Beneath the bench, Barnaby the burrow-hog let out a series of contented, snoring wheezes, his three-hundred-pound frame buried up to his ears in clean barley straw, his belly round from a double ration of boiled turnips.
Arthur looked toward the great brick hearth.
The fire was burning low to a bed of glowing birch embers. Grimm lay curled on his wool bedroll, his jet-black coat drinking the amber light. But something about the hound’s stance was unnatural.
Normally, Grimm slept stretched out on his side, his chin resting squarely across the eighty-pound cast-iron hoist metal tube that served as his permanent pillow. Today, however, Grimm was curled into an awkward, rigid crescent. His paws were tucked tightly beneath his brisket, guarding a suspicious lump under his straw bedding.
Arthur walked quietly across the flat stone slabs, his boots making no sound.
Grimm’s intact right ear swiveled backward forty-five degrees. The hound didn’t open his eyes, but his breathing slowed to an exaggerated, artificial rhythm intended to simulate deep, unconscious sleep.
“Grimm,” Arthur said.
The hound’s eyelids squeezed tighter. A faint tremor rippled through his whiskers.
Arthur reached down with his boot and gently nudged the edge of the straw blanket aside.
Gleaming dully under the straw was a thirty-pound six-sided iron dumbbell. An antique piece of foundry exercise ballast that the haulage wagon drivers had brought in two days ago to weigh down the barley bins.
Grimm had dragged the thirty-pound block of solid cast iron five yards across the floor, hoisted it into his bedroll. Then he buried it beneath three layers of wool sacking.
Arthur folded his arms. “Grimm. Look at me.”
The hound froze. His eyes popped open, wide and guilty, the golden irises darting from Arthur’s face to the iron dumbbell, then back again.
Realizing his crime was exposed in broad daylight, Grimm didn’t whine, bark, or beg.
Instead, with excruciating, deliberate slowness, the jet-black hound rose to his feet, turned ninety degrees away from Arthur, and padded silently across the floor until he reached the total corner between the brick chimney and the stone foundation wall.
Grimm lowered his head and shoved his black nose directly into the straight-across corner joint. He pressed his snout so hard against the brick mortar that his whiskers bent double. He stood fully motionless with his back to the entire room.
It was Grimm’s total, inviolable doctrine of gutter stealth. If the nose is in the corner, the dog doesn’t exist.
Toby looked up from his ledger, caught sight of the fifty-two-pound apex hound attempting to make himself invisible by ramming his snout into a brick wall. Then he erupted into uncontrollable howling laughter.
“He’s doing it again!” Toby wheezed, pounding his ledger with an open palm until his glasses nearly fell into the inkpot. “The World-Eater! The terrifying deep-sea beast that crushed a noble frost drake in four seconds! He’s sitting in the timeout corner because he stole a piece of workout equipment!”
“He isn’t stealing,” Arthur said, though his own lips twitched with amusement. “His marrow is rebuilding. The Fenrir lineage absorbs outside magnetic flux to stabilize high-thickness bone crystal-forming. He thinks thirty pounds of cast iron makes his bedroll denser.”
Arthur walked over to the chimney, knelt down. Then he placed a firm, reassuring hand on Grimm’s muscular neck. He scratched the sensitive depression behind the hound’s ragged, notched ear.
“Come out of the corner, Grimm,” Arthur murmured. “You can keep the dumbbell by your paws. Just don’t hide it under the clean wool.”
Grimm gave a deep, shuddering sigh that blew a small cloud of soot out of the brick mortar. He turned around with slow, majestic dignity, picked up the thirty-pound dumbbell in his jaws as casually as if it were a dry twig, carried it over to his iron hoist metal tube, dropped it with a dull thud. Then he rested his chin across both pieces of metal.
His tail gave two deliberate, muffled thumps against the flat stone slabs.
Before the laughter could fade from the hall, the courtyard gate outside rattled wildly.
Grimm’s head snapped up. His ears pinned forward, his pupils contracting into upright black slits.
A small figure tumbled through the clinic double doors, hitting the stone floor with a wet, ragged gasp.
“Master Vance!” a cracked, sobbing voice cried out. “Master Vance, help!”
Arthur was across the hall in three strides, kneeling in the straw beside the boy.
It was Pipkin—a twelve-year-old street urchin with a shock of untamed brown hair, wearing a giant wool coat tied at the waist with frayed hemp cord. Pipkin was the courier the Fourth Haulage Guild used to carry messages between the canal docks and the recovery clinic.
The boy’s face was bruised purple across the left cheekbone, his lip split and caked with dried blood. His threadbare coat was torn at the shoulder, soaked with greasy canal muck. His right arm hung at an unnatural angle, out-of-joint at the shoulder joint.
“Pipkin,” Arthur said, his voice dropping into calm cold and exact stillness. “Breathe. Toby, warm water and clean towels. Now.”
Arthur supported the boy’s back with one hand. Meanwhile, his fingers gently checked the injured shoulder. With a smooth, practiced twist of his thumb and forearm, Arthur manipulated the humeral head back into the glenoid socket.
CLICK.
The joint popped into place with a dull sound. Pipkin gasped, crying out in momentary pain before the excruciating pressure released, slumping forward against Arthur’s knee.
“Who did this to you?” Arthur asked quietly, wiping the blood from the boy’s cheek with a damp linen sponge.
“The... The Under-City scrap ring,” Pipkin sobbed, clutching his coat against his chest. “Debt Enforcer Fang... And the Iron-Jaws Trade ring. Kael sent me to the lower canal siding with forty silver groschen to pick up the shipment of pure steamed bone meal from the Western Rail... But Fang’s thugs ambushed our handcart at the drainage gate.”
The boy looked up at Arthur with wide, scared eyes.
“They took the bone meal, Master Vance. Two hundred pounds of high-grade marrow flour! And Fang beat me with a lead pipe. He said... He said to tell the little butcher in Ward 9 that if he wants his medicine back, he has to come down to the Scrap Ring Cauldron tonight and wager his dog against the debt.”
Pipkin pulled a crumpled, blood-stained slip of zinc scrap from his coat pocket and handed it to Arthur.
Scratched into the zinc with a sharp iron punch were crude, jagged words:
VANCE: YOU COST US TEN THOUSAND CREDITS IN Debt claim FEES ON THE OXEN. BRING THE BLACK MUTT TO ROUNDHOUSE NINE BY MIDNIGHT. IF YOU DON’T SHOW, WE BURN THE GRAIN SIDING.
Toby stared at the zinc slip, all color draining from his face.
“Debt Enforcer Fang,” Toby whispered, his hands trembling. “He runs the underground beast-fighting pits beneath the old railway roundhouse. They splice illegal cybernetics into rift hounds—silver-steel jaws, high-pressure pump rigs, military stimulants. Arthur, it’s an ambush. If you take Grimm down there, they’ll surround the pit with fifty armed guards.”
Arthur took the zinc slip, turning the cold metal over in his hand.
He looked at Pipkin’s bruised face, then across the hall to the clean holding pens where forty recovered working beasts were resting peacefully in the straw.
“Fang didn’t just steal two hundred pounds of bone meal,” Arthur said, his voice turning to ice. “He threatened our grain siding. If they burn the rail storage, every commoner animal in Ward 9 starves by winter.”
Arthur stood up, his gray eyes hard as flint.
“We’re going to Roundhouse Nine tonight. But we’re not going unarmed.”
Arthur turned toward the weapon rack beside the hearth.
“Toby, get your coat. We’re going to the Disaster Forge. It’s time to pay a visit to Old Anvil Szabo.”