The oil lamp above Arthur’s razor-sharp workbench flickered as cold November rain drummed rhythmically against the corrugated tin roofing of the depot.
Across the cedar planks of the recovery ward, Forge the mastiff slept deeply on his thick wool bedroll, his breathing steady, quiet, and unlabored. The copper flutter valve taped between his eighth and ninth ribs fluttered with a soft, rhythmic whuff-click on every breath out, venting the leftover traces of trapped air from his chest around the lungs into a small pool of carbolic water.
Arthur knelt beside the sleeping dog. He pressed a brass binaural stethoscope metal tube against Forge’s left chest wall. He listened with cold and exact concentration to the vesicular breath sounds.
“Vesicular deep ring restored bilaterally,” Arthur murmured, removing the earpieces. “The gut-deep lung lining has already adhered to the parietal wall. By tomorrow evening, the air leak will have ceased entirely and the copper tube can be withdrawn. But your forge won’t remain safe, Master Szabo, until we deal with Roundhouse Nine.”
Beside the bedroll sat Master Olgierd Szabo, his eight-pound rounding hammer resting across his solid steel peg-leg. He watched his shop guardian with fierce, protective devotion. Szabo reached into his leather coat, drew a battered tin flask of plum brandy. Then he took a long, burning swallow.
“Roundhouse Nine isn’t a fighting ring, Vance,” Szabo rumbled. His deep voice shook in the quiet hall. “It’s a slaughterhouse run by Syndicate Boss Sterling and Debt Enforcer Fang. They take runaway heavy cart beasts, stolen hounds, and feral badland wolves, then bolt air-powered clamps and military fight-or-flight rush pumps into their skulls. They call it the Scrap Ring Cauldron. Every thug, smuggler, and crooked scrap dealer between Sector 4 and the canal docks gathers there to bet on the butchery.”
Szabo wiped his walrus mustache with the back of his hand, his eyes burning with disgust. “They took your winter bone meal shipment because they want to force your hand. Gregory Vance has put out a quiet bounty through the underworld. Five thousand credits to whichever trade ring can break your hands and bring in Grimm’s pelt. Sterling thinks he can claim the bounty, seize your clinic, and take control of the lower canal trade in one stroke.”
“Then we’ll ensure he collects nothing,” Arthur replied, his voice level and cold.
Across the hall, on a clean cot near the hearth, lay Pipkin.
The twelve-year-old street courier had stopped trembling. Arthur had skillfully reduced the boy’s out-of-joint right shoulder with gentle traction-countertraction, bandaged the split skin over his cheekbone with carbolic gauze, and given a warm cup of willow-bark decoction to dull the throbbing pain. Toby had wrapped the boy in two dry wool blankets. Now Pipkin was sipping hot chicory broth, his wide brown eyes darting between Arthur and Grimm with respectful awe.
“Master Vance,” Pipkin whispered, his voice still hoarse from weeping. “Fang... Fang has twenty guards with iron shock-batons guarding the pit gates. They laughed when they took the bone meal. They said commoners in Ward 9 have no right to medicine. They said beasts in the slums belong in the rendering boilers or the fighting pits. And the sawdust in the ring... They throw ground sulfur into it to blind tracking dogs.”
“Commoners built the rails they walk on,” Arthur said gently, placing a hand on the boy’s uninjured shoulder. “Rest, Pipkin. Your work is done. We’ll bring the shipment back.”
Arthur turned to the equipment laid out across the zinc check table.
First was Szabo’s metalworking masterpiece: the moving shock-collar. Forged from layered spring steel and meteorite iron, its three linked leaves rested flush against Grimm’s thick neck. The polished heavy dark metal-hardened carbon-iron studs gleamed dully under the lantern light. The internal floating mid-air ring was tuned to absorb four thousand pounds of lateral jaw pressure without compressing the neck-artery vessels or neck bones.
“I tested the pulling yield on my drop-hammer,” Szabo said. He pointed a calloused finger at the studs. “Those heavy dark metal studs will ground thirty thousand volts of arc discharge. If they try to shock him with cattle prods, the moving mesh diverts the current straight into the stone floor. And the collar leaves have five tiny fractions of an inch of outward play. He can swallow and pivot without pinching his throat pipe.”
Grimm stood beside the table, fully motionless as Arthur inspected the locking pins. The jet-black hound didn’t fidget. His molten amber eyes were focused, his ears swiveling to track every draft in the warehouse. He felt the weight of the armor, lowered his neck into a test lunge. Then he gave a single, satisfied chuff. The heavy studding sat perfectly balanced over his chest muscle girdle. That added protective mass without hindering his ninety-degree head rotation.
Next, Arthur strapped on his own weapon. The eight-shot rotary air-powered gauntlet Szabo had machined from aircraft-grade high-pressure tubing.
Arthur slid his left arm into the curved heavy dark metal forearm guard. The gearwork locked with a sharp, oiled click, hugging his radius and forearm bone like a second skin. At his wrist sat an eight-chambered rotary metal tube connected to a high-pressure carbon-dioxide gas cartridge.
Arthur drew five specialized brass cannulas from his velvet case, loading them into the open chambers:
“Two high-speed aether-cooling darts,” Arthur murmured, sliding the needle shafts into chambers one and two. “The needle cores are packed with powdered zinc sulfide and tightly packed ground-stone salts. Upon impact, the compound grounds external moving shielding and shorts electric-shock circuitry.”
He turned the metal tube with a crisp click.
“Two packed curare-zinc neuro-inhibitor darts in chambers three and four. They bind acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction, inducing selective motor total numbness within five seconds. And one broad-spectrum coagulant dart in chamber five, in case we need to seal a cut main thigh blood vessel.”
Arthur rotated the metal tube back to battery. He tested the hair-trigger release lever beneath his index finger. The gas valve held forty sea-weights of pressure with zero leakage.
Toby Mallow stepped into the lantern light, wearing his heaviest oilskin duster over a heavy leather vest. In his right hand, the clerk gripped a heavy lead-weighted trench cosh. Under his left arm, he clutched his iron-bound town ledger like a buckler. Around his neck hung a pair of heavy brass knuckledusters tied to leather cords.
“I checked the town channel maps,” Toby said, his voice tense but steady behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Roundhouse Nine lies forty feet beneath the Fourth Canal basin. We take the old stormwater spillway behind the leather tanneries. If we use the main freight lift, Sterling’s lookouts will spot us fifty yards away.”
“Good work, Toby,” Arthur said, slinging his field sickness kit across his shoulder. “Remember: we’re not going there to slaughter commoners. We’re going to recover our supplies, protect the grain siding, and dismantle their operation with razor-sharp finality.”
Arthur stepped to the door, Grimm pacing silently at his heel.
The descent into Under-City Nine began through a rusted iron storm grate behind the leather works.
The narrow stone stairway was slick with black slime and dripping with stale water drops. The air grew rapidly warmer and foul, thick with the stench of stale bilge, fermented garbage, sulfur fumes, and the sweet, sickly reek of burning animal fat. Down here, thirty feet beneath the surface streets, daylight was a forgotten rumor.
In its place buzzed a chaotic maze of flickering neon tubing, hanging hardened carbon-iron lamps, and steam pipes banded in rusted sheet metal.
Under-City Nine was the sunken gut of the metropolis. Narrow walkways built from wooden pallets and corrugated iron sheets floated across stale canals of greenish-black runoff. Ragged bio-hackers huddled in alcoves behind wire cages, hawking counterfeit healing salves, recycled wired servos, and vials of military grade stimulants scavenged from frontier battlefields. In every shadow lurked desperate tamers with half-feral scavengers on iron leashes.
As Arthur strode along the canal boardwalk, the crowd parted in fearful silence.
They didn’t look at Arthur. They looked at Grimm.
The jet-black hound moved with the silent, fluid grace of a deep-sea shadow. His forty-eight pounds of tightly packed muscle made no sound against the wet planks. But the air around his shoulders seemed to distort slightly with a heavy, magnetic drag. The meteorite shock-collar around his throat caught the buzzing neon light in glints of deep violet. His unblinking amber stare scanned every shadow with lethal math.
“Look at the neck on that cur,” a scarred cart driver muttered. It pulled his mongrel back into a doorway. “That isn’t a stray. That’s a pit-wolf with rift blood.”
“He’s carrying iron,” another whispered, eyeing the heavy dark metal studs. “And look at the man’s arm. That’s a razor-sharp gauntlet.”
Arthur ignored the murmurs, following the deep, rhythmic thrum of heavy machinery that shook through the stone foundations.
Two hundred yards ahead. There, the underground canal opened into a huge cave of vaulted brickwork, the roar of a roaring crowd began to echo off the damp stonework.
It was the rhythmic, bloodthirsty chanting of three hundred voices:
“TEAR! CRUSH! RIP! SPILL!”
Above the arched entrance to the abandoned railway roundhouse, a flickering red neon sign buzzed in the gloom:
THE SCRAP RING CAULDRON: ENTRY BY BLOOD OR COIN.
Arthur checked the rotary gauntlet on his wrist, felt the cold steel studs on Grimm’s collar. Then he stepped through the rusted turnstile into the pit.