The morning sun over Slum Ward 9 was nothing more than a pale copper smudge bleeding through the rain-streaked grime of the clinic’s high window row windows.
Inside, the drafty surgery was warm for the first time in three weeks. The cast-iron stove in the corner glowed cherry-red around its lower draft vents, fed by two shovelfuls of dry anthracitic coal that Toby had purchased with their black-market duel winnings. Atop the stove sat a ten-gallon iron cooking pot. It bubbled with a thick, aromatic broth of cracked beef marrow bones, dried meadowsweet, coarse sea salt, and crushed sulfur clover.
The rich, savory steam rose in lazy curls toward the cedar rafters, thoroughly driving out the sharp, eye-watering stench of iodine and harsh cleaning acid that usually defined the room.
Arthur Vance stood by the zinc preparation table, stirring the cooking pot with a long-handled wooden paddle. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows, revealing forearms corded with lean muscle and marked by faint, pale razor knife scars from his last life. Every time the heavy wooden spoon rolled a dense marrow knuckle to the surface, the dark yellow fat parted in shimmering golden rings.
Beside the cutting table, Toby Mallow was humming a cheerful, out-of-tune as he unpacked the grocery hamper.
For Toby, financial solvency was a spiritual experience. He had washed his glasses, combed his unruly brown hair. Then he donned a clean canvas apron that smelled of fresh laundry. On the scrubbed oak cutting board lay three thick links of smoked garlic sausage. Two solid pounds of cured pork that had cost a princely twelve silver coins at the surface butchers.
“Two pounds of honest meat,” Toby declared. He tapped the plumpest sausage link with the tip of his paring knife. “Not gutter rat, not man-made yeast paste, and not recycled soy mash. Real pork from the agricultural barges up-river. Arthur, do you realize this is the first meal in four months where Barnaby and I won’t have to share a bowl of turnip water?”
In the straw pen beneath the window, Barnaby let out a ringing, snuffling grunt. The three-hundred-pound spotted burrow-hog was lying flat on his side, his pink, mud-speckled belly rising and falling in rhythmic sleep. A bundle of sweet potato vines lay tucked beneath his chin. Even so, he had already stripped every tender leaf before daybreak.
“Save half the sausage for dinner, Toby,” Arthur said without looking up from the simmering pot. “We need high-calorie protein for the next three days. Grimm’s body-energy turnover is running at three times baseline while the new osteoblasts finish mineralizing his thigh shafts.”
“I bought four links, Arthur! Four whole links!” Toby protested, turning toward the stone sink to rinse a wooden bowl. “I budgeted for Grimm’s bottomless fire. I budgeted for Barnaby. I even budgeted three coppers for pipe tobacco, though I haven’t bought a pouch since the third-year entrance exams!”
Arthur smiled faintly, lifting the paddle to let a stream of golden broth drip back into the cooking pot.
Across the room, near the foot of Arthur’s cot, a massive black shape stirred.
Grimm had spent the night in a state of deep, body-energy torpor. But the persistent, rich aroma of garlic, smoked fat, and curing salt drifting from the cutting board had finally reached his newly heightened smell receptors.
The jet-black hound lifted his head.
He was unrecognizable from the starved stray that had once shivered in Gregory Vance’s rusted wire crate. His shoulder stood broad and heavy, muscled like an iron draft collar. His coarse dread-fur lay in dense, overlapping layers along his spine, dark and lustrous as polished slate. His amber eyes, glowing with quiet intelligence, narrowed as they locked onto the wooden cutting board across the room.
Grimm didn’t bark. He didn’t beg.
He rose from his rug with the terrifying, soundless fluid grace of a sixty-five-two-pound shadow. His heavy black paws touched the scrubbed floorboards without making a single squeak, his claws retracted just enough to keep from clicking against the oak nails.
He lowered his shoulder, testing his swelled spatial awareness.
In the dim light between the cast-iron stove and the timber drying racks, Grimm’s dark shape seemed to waver. A faint shifted weight of air rippled through the kitchen nook. A smooth, soundless four-meter glide that brought his massive muzzle directly level with the edge of the prep table.
His dark jaws parted, revealing clean, carbon-sheathed canine teeth.
With the delicate, razor-sharp care of a falcon plucking a feather, Grimm closed his front teeth around the hemp twine binding the two-pound smoked sausage. He lifted the heavy meat without disturbing the greaseproof paper beneath it, lifted his head. Then he began to back away with slow, deliberate steps.
Toby turned from the stone sink, drying his hands on his apron.
He looked down at the cutting board.
The cutting board held two sausages.
Toby blinked. He adjusted his brass glasses. He looked at the empty space on the greaseproof paper where the thickest, two-pound link had rested five seconds earlier. Then his gaze tracked slowly across the kitchen floor.
There stood Grimm. The massive jet-black hound was frozen mid-stride, three paces from the doorway, with two feet of dark wood-smoked pork sausage dangling horizontally from his jaws like a fat cigar.
Toby’s face turned the color of a ripe beet.
“My sausage!” Toby shrieked, his voice climbing two octaves into the rafters. “Arthur! Look at him! Look at your prize hound! That’s two pounds of prime river pork! He’s robbing us in broad daylight!”
Arthur turned from the cooking pot. “Grimm.”
The single word was quiet, devoid of anger, but carried the weight of total command.
Grimm didn’t drop the sausage. Instead, realizing that his tactical stealth breach had been compromised by direct visual confirmation, the hound made an executive decision. With three rapid, earth-shaking gulps, his powerful jaws snapped three times. It folded the entire two-pound sausage into his throat. A single wet gulp echoed through the quiet clinic as sixty-five pounds of Fenrir metabolism swallowed the pork whole.
Then, facing immediate punishment reckoning, Grimm carried out his emergency protocol.
He didn’t flee toward the door. He didn’t bare his teeth.
Instead, the massive black war-beast turned on his heel and trotted with heavy, dignified strides straight toward the corner of the brick chimney.
He stopped in the corner. He wedged his broad, carbon-heavy black nose directly into the ninety-degree seam where the red brick mortar met the whitewashed plaster wall. He pressed his face flat against the bricks, tucked his thick tail tightly between his muscular hocks. Then he went fully, utterly rigid.
Silence dropped upon the clinic.
Grimm stood like a stone gargoyle plastered against the stonework, his face shoved firmly into the corner. His dog-logic was total and rock-steady. If my nose is in the dark corner and I can’t see Arthur, then Arthur can’t see me. I’m an invisible shadow in the mortar.
Only his single upright ear betrayed him, swiveling backward by forty-five degrees to track Arthur’s footsteps. Meanwhile, the very tip of his tail twitched once against his flank with guilty hope.
Toby stood frozen with his paring knife in hand. He stared at the sixty-five-two-pound beast trying to hide behind two inches of chimney trim.
A sputter escaped Toby’s lips. Then another.
Within three seconds, Toby was leaning against the prep table. He grabbed his belly as helpless, howling laughter tore through his chest.
“Look at him!” Toby wheezed, wiping tears of amusement from his glasses. “He just crushed an armored warg’s silver-steel jaw yesterday. Now he thinks he’s invisible because his snout is in the soot! Arthur, you can’t punish him. How can you be angry at a siege engine that acts like an overgrown pup?”
Arthur walked over to the chimney. He stopped two paces behind the rigid, motionless hound.
“Grimm,” Arthur said.
The ear swiveled further back, but the nose remained firmly planted in the brickwork.
Arthur reached out and rested his palm on the warm, coarse dread-fur along Grimm’s neck. He gave the dog’s shoulder a firm, reassuring rub, feeling the huge thickness of the restructured muscle underneath.
“The corner doesn’t grant invisibility, Grimm,” Arthur said softly. “Next time, wait until the meat is in your bowl. You have twenty-five grams of raw brimstone residue still clearing your liver. Cold garlic will give you stomach cramps.”
At the sound of Arthur’s calm voice, Grimm’s rigid stance melted. The hound turned his massive head around, blinking his amber eyes with huge relief. He pressed the side of his broad skull against Arthur’s thigh. That let out a deep, rumbling sigh through his nostrils that blew a puff of white dust from the hearth.
Toby shook his head, still chuckling as he walked over to the vegetable basket. He pulled out a fat, roasted sweet potato that had been softening on the back plate of the stove. He split it open, releasing a plume of sweet, sugary steam. Then he held it out toward the straw pen.
“Come on, Barnaby,” Toby said warmly. “At least one beast in this house respects the domestic grocery ledger.”
Barnaby scrambled to his feet with an eager squeal, his short legs trotting across the floorboards. The burrow-hog buried his snout into the warm sweet potato, smacking his rubbery lips in sheer bliss as orange crumbs tumbled across Toby’s boots.
Arthur smiled, poured a generous ladle of the golden bone broth into Grimm’s wooden trough. Then he set it on the floor. Grimm approached with measured dignity, licking the rich marrow broth clean with rhythmic, contented laps.
The bowls were cleared. Then, Arthur pulled his charcoal field coat from the hook and unbolted the heavy front door to inspect the morning outer edge.
He stepped out onto the weathered cedar porch.
The rain had stopped during the night. That left the sagging roofs and narrow alleys of Ward 9 bathed in cold, gray dampness. But as Arthur looked toward the eastern horizon. There, the massive concrete aqueducts and towering castle walls of Ironfang Vanguard Academy loomed over the slum basin, his expression hardened.
A heavy, unnatural fog was rolling down the valley.
It wasn’t the white, clean mist of autumn rain, nor was it the gray soot of common coal hearths. It was a dense, oily vapor of sickly yellow-sulfur hue. The fog clung to the cobblestones like cold grease. It poured out of the academy’s deep heavy-duty drainage chimney pipes and chemical disposal pipes. It crept low through the drainage under-road drains. It pooled into the gutters that fed the town runoff basins where the slum’s commoner kennels and cart hauling yards were clustered.
Beside Arthur, Grimm walked onto the porch.
The jet-black hound stopped at the edge of the wood, his single ear pinning flat against his skull. His black lips curled back slightly, exposing the tips of his fangs as he caught the wind. A sharp, anxious whine escaped his throat.
Arthur raised his left hand, adjusting the sight dial of his Zeiss-Vanguard Monocle Loupe.
The quartz prisms lined up with a sharp snick. Amber tracking data scanned the drifting yellow haze:
Arthur’s jaw tightened.
“That isn’t fire exhaust,” Arthur murmured into the cold morning air. “That’s heavy-duty alchemy waste. They’re flushing the upper testing labs straight into the slum under-road drains.”
Grimm pressed his flank against Arthur’s knee, a deep, dark rumble shaking through his chest as the yellow fog swallowed the lower street.