The late afternoon gloom settled early over the canal basin of Slum Ward 9. Outside the drafty timber walls of the converted freight shed that served as Arthur Vance’s beast-doctor clinic, a persistent drizzle hissed against heaps of cold foundry melted rock waste. Inside, the air smelled of harsh cleaning acid, boiling pine vinegar, and the dry, bitter dust of ground sulfur moss simmering over an iron fire bowl.
Arthur stood behind the zinc razor-sharp bench, rolled sleeves revealing scarred forearms. In his right hand, a polished dark rock pestle ground rhythmically against an iron mortar. He was pulverizing hardened bone meal with dried umbral lichen, reducing the stone shards to an ultra-fine gray powder that could pass through a thirty-gauge feeding hollow tube.
Beneath the bench, stretched across the cedar planks, Grimm lay quietly.
The jet-black hound was forty-eight pounds of lean muscle and dense, carbon-heavy bone. His coat took in the dull amber lantern light. His massive chin was propped squarely across the steel toe of Arthur’s left field boot, pinning the leather with the comfortable gravity of an old habit. Grimm’s single intact ear was cocked toward the alleyway, twitching whenever a heavy freight wagon rumbled over the iron bridge two streets away. His left ear, torn down to a scarred three-sided notch during his starvation months in the cull pens, remained flat against his skull.
Arthur shifted his stance slightly to reach a measuring dish. The movement bumped the wooden handle of a bone scoop off the shelf. It sent the iron tool clattering against the zinc rim.
Grimm scrambled backward in an undignified flurry of claws, startled from his light doze. Realizing there was no intruder, the hound froze. He cast a mortified, side-long amber glance up at Arthur, his jowls tightening. Then, with exaggerated dignity, Grimm slunk into the darkest corner beside the water barrel. It turned his nose fully to the damp brick wall. Then it curled into a tight, reproachful ball of invisible shame.
Arthur let out a quiet breath through his nose. He walked over to the barrel, knelt on the damp boards. Then he rubbed the tense back-skull ridge behind the hound’s good ear.
“It was only a bone scoop, Grimm,” Arthur murmured. “Nobody is invading the outer edge.”
Grimm gave an aggrieved canine sigh in his chest. He leaned his heavy skull against Arthur’s knee, his tail giving two slow thuds against the brickwork before he uncoiled and rested his snout back on Arthur’s boot.
Before Arthur could pick up the pestle again, the double doors of the clinic flew inward with a splintering crash.
The timber shuddered on rusted hinges, slamming back against the doorframe. A blast of wet, rotten-egg wind swept into the room, fluttering the hanging herbs and chilling the lantern mantles.
On the threshold stood Master Olgierd Szabo.
The fifty-five-year-old armorer of the Iron Ghetto looked like an iron statue cracked by a quarry blast. His soot-blackened forge apron was torn down the bib, spattered with fresh, dark gore. His thick walrus mustache was matted with rain. His massive, burn-scarred forearms—usually steady enough to swing an eight-pound meteorite sledge for ten hours without a tremor—were shaking wildly.
In his arms, wrapped in a singed wool horse blanket, Szabo carried Forge.
Forge was a six-year-old Melted rock-Mane Mastiff, seventy-five pounds of broad-skulled mountain stock. For five years, the copper-brindled beast had guarded Szabo’s scrap forge, his deep barks warning off iron-thieves. Now, the dog hung limp across the blacksmith’s chest, his hindquarters dangling like wet sacking.
“Vance!” Szabo’s voice was a ragged roar, choked with panic and soot. “Vance, help him! They ambushed us at the south alley turn... Sterling’s debt hounds... One had an air-powered pry-bar... Struck him full in the flank! He collapsed at the door! He can’t pull a breath!”
Arthur didn’t waste a syllable on questions. His face settled into the cold, detached focus of a trauma surgeon.
“On the zinc table,” Arthur commanded, his voice slicing through the smith’s hysteria. “Left lateral recumbency—keep his right side upward. Szabo, control his muzzle with your left forearm, but don’t compress his neck-vein or wrap your hands around his throat.”
Szabo hefted the massive dog onto the zinc surface. The metal groaned under the weight.
Forge was dying.
The mastiff’s eyes were glassy and fixed, pupils dilated. His gums and tongue were a pale, purplish cyanosis, devoid of tiny blood vessel refill. His breathing was a desperate, backward hitching. With every contraction of his belly, the right side of his ribs remained frozen and bulging. At the same time, his neck strained outward in a futile search for air. A hollow rattle bubbled in his pharynx.
Arthur laid his flat palm against Forge’s right chest wall and tapped his middle finger with three sharp percussions.
Thump. Drum-tight. Tympanic deep ring.
The right hemithorax sounded like a stretched drumhead. Arthur pressed his ear against the dog’s left ribs. Then, the heartbeat was displaced far toward the armpit, muffled and racing at over two hundred thready beats a minute. The throat pipe at the base of the throat was visibly bowed toward the left, pushed aside by an unseen water-pressure fist.
Arthur flipped the zoom dial on his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe.
The internal quartz prisms rotated with a soft snick-click. Across Arthur’s pupil, the glowing amber runes of the type-list engine condensed over Forge’s convulsing chest:
“Tension pneumothorax,” Arthur said. He reached into the sterilizing tray of boiling alcohol with dressing metal tongs. “The air-powered blow fractured the seventh rib inward. The sharp bone margin tore the gut-deep lung lining covering the lung. Every time Forge breathes, air leaks into the chest cavity. But the tissue flap seals on breath out. It’s a one-way valve.”
Szabo’s eyes were bloodshot, his knuckles white as he pinned Forge’s head against the zinc. “Speak plain, boy! Can you weld him back together?!”
“The air is trapped inside his chest, outside the lung,” Arthur explained, his hands moving with clockwork speed. “The pressure has climbed past eighteen kilopascals. It has crushed his right lung into a fist, pushed his heart fully into his left ribs. Then it kinked the vena cava shut. His heart has no blood to pump because the veins are pinched flat. In two minutes, his brain starves.”
“Gods above...” Szabo whispered, his rough voice breaking. “Forge... Hold on, old iron...”
“Hold him firm,” Arthur said. “He will jump when I pierce the wall.”
Arthur seized a bottle of carbolic spirits and doused Forge’s right flank. It soaked the coarse bristle down to the pale skin over the eighth rib gap. He didn’t have time to clip the fur. Every second burned up thirty drops of leftover oxygen from the dog’s crashing breath flow.
From his wooden instrument roll, Arthur took his ten-inch heavy dark metal razor knife. The dark, unreflective alloy gleamed dully under the lantern glow.
Beside the table, Grimm stood tall on his toes, his neck extended, nostrils flaring as he scented the sharp iron tang of the dog’s distress. Grimm didn’t bark. He stood two paces back, his amber eyes locked onto Forge’s chest, anchoring the outer edge.
Arthur set his left index finger in the depression between Forge’s eighth and ninth ribs, two handspans behind the breastbone. He located the skull margin of the ninth rib. Striking the skull edge avoided the between-rib artery, vein, and nerve bundle running along the tail-end border.
“Stay down, Forge,” Arthur murmured.
Arthur reversed his grip on the heavy dark metal razor knife. He pointed the tip straight-across to the taut skin.
With a swift, controlled thrust, he drove the blade through the skin, the muscle tissue, and the rib muscle, piercing the parietal lung lining.
Pssssssshhhhhhh!
A violent, high-pressure jet of trapped air erupted from the clean cut with the screech of an over-high-pressure boiler valve. The escaping air carried a fine spray of warm, aether-tinged serous fluid that speckled Arthur’s linen apron and smelled of ozone and hot blood.
The sound was so sharp that Szabo flinched, his jaw dropping.
Instantly, the massive, drum-tight bulge in Forge’s right chest flattened. The tracheal deviation at the base of the mastiff’s throat visibly rebounded back toward the midline as the trapped gas evacuated into the room.
Forge gave a sudden, full-body burst. The mastiff’s eyelids fluttered, and his jaw relaxed against Szabo’s scarred arm.
“He’s dying!” Szabo cried out, hands trembling. “He went limp!”
“He’s decompressing,” Arthur said calmly, keeping the razor knife flat to prevent premature tissue closure. “The positive pressure just dropped to surrounding. Now we must keep sky air from rushing back into his chest. Or the lung will collapse from the outside.”
From a glass jar on the side table, Arthur retrieved a five-inch flanged copper hollow tube. A piece of salvaged steam tubing that he had carefully filed, chamfered. Then he bored out with smooth lateral drainage eyes. Stretched over the outer collar of the copper tube was a four-inch sleeve of thin, flexible hardened rubber cut from an apothecary finger-cot, lightly dusted with talc.
It was a home-made Heimlich flutter valve: an elegant, primitive one-way gate. Positive pressure pushed from within the chest. Then, the rubber sleeve parted easily to vent air. When the dog inhaled, negative pressure collapsed the flat rubber lips together, sealing out the air.
With steady fingers, Arthur guided the sterile copper tube along the razor knife tract, slipping the flanged tip into the pleural space between the ribs.
Flutter-snap.
The rubber sleeve flapped open as Forge exhaled, venting a burst of trapped air and frothy fluid. Then, as Forge inhaled, the rubber flattened shut with a tight click. He held the empty pocket.
Haaaaah.
Forge drew his first deep, unhindered breath in four hours.
The mastiff’s massive chest swelled on both sides with balanced, even power. Within ten heartbeats, the dreadful purple tint on his tongue faded, replaced by healthy salmon-pink. His heart rate, heard even without a stethoscope, slowed from a wild flutter to a deep, ringing eighty beats per minute.
The mastiff’s tail gave three heavy, rhythmic thumps against the zinc table.
Szabo stood frozen. The massive blacksmith slowly lowered his hands. It stared at the fluttering copper tube taped securely to his dog’s ribs. He looked at Forge’s bright, clear eyes, then down at Arthur Vance, whose hands were already securing the bandage with strips of boiled linen.
“He’s breathing,” Szabo choked out, wiping soot from his eyes. “Breathing like a pup.”
“The lung lining will seal over forty-eight hours with rest and calcium-gel,” Arthur said, knotting the final tie. “Keep him warm on blankets. No barking, no sudden turns. The tube stays until the air leak stops.”
Szabo stepped forward, his peg-leg thudding on cedar planks. He drew a steel punch and pressed it into his palm, drawing a dark bead of blood. He pressed his thumb against his hammer pendant and extended his hand.
“By the cinder, hammer, and cool,” Szabo rumbled. “The Blood-Forge Oath. You asked nothing to save my hound. From now on, Szabo’s fire belongs to you. Iron, armor, or sledge—my forge is yours.”
Arthur looked at the blood on the smith’s hand. He knew the pride of commoner artisans in the Iron Ghetto. They took charity from no one, and they bowed to no noble crest.
Arthur took a clean linen gauze, stepped forward, and firmly clasped the smith’s forearm with his right hand. He pressed the cloth against the puncture.
“I accept your oath, Master Szabo,” Arthur said quietly. “Keep your hammer sharp. We’re going to need it.”
Szabo gave a single, ferocious nod, a fierce gleam returning to his soot-ringed eyes.
In the corner, Forge shifted onto the wool blankets, letting out a huge, contented groan. Grimm stepped quietly across the floorboards. The black hound approached the edge of the blanket. He lowered his snout, and sniffed Forge’s twitching ear with calm, respectful hunting beast solidarity. Forge gave Grimm’s muzzle a slow, tired lick.
Grimm snorted softly, satisfied that the pack’s outer edge was secure. He trotted back to the workbench, stepped across the cedar planks, and dropped heavily across Arthur’s boots, resting his dark head against the leather as the rain drummed softly on the clinic roof.