Arthur stopped dead in the greasy mud of the drainage alley.
Around him, the sounds of Outpost 09 filtered through the narrow passage. The harsh clatter of air-powered drills biting into pyritic shale, the distant shouts of drunken dredge miners wagering their shifts on underground cockroach races, and the wet, rhythmic slapping of wastewater chimney pipes emptying into the lower canals. The air here was even heavier than in the main bazaar, thick with the stench of decomposing fish offal, stale bilge oil, and the sharp, coppery tang of raw aether slow leak.
Grimm paused beside Arthur’s left knee. The three-hundred-and-fifty-two-pound direhound didn’t merely stop. His entire massive frame lowered by two inches, his hindquarters coiling into a spring-loaded stance. His scarred, single ear swiveled toward an overturned wooden handcart parked between a mountain of discarded drill bits and an open sewer trench. His nostrils flared repeatedly, sifting through hundreds of competing chemical signed names.
“Meat?” Grimm’s mind-voice asked, the low mental shaking tinged with genuine canine excitement. “Old river carp? Smells wet. Smells cold.”
“No,” Arthur murmured, resting his gloved hand on the black glass bone ridge between Grimm’s shoulders. “Not fish. Something else entirely.”
Arthur navigated the slick boardwalk bridging the sewer gutter, his combat boots sinking half an inch into piled up coal grime. The drainage alley was an open cut between two towering scrap-metal apartments cobbled together from crushed shipping containers and zinc-coated steel siding. Overhead, bundles of bare spark cables hummed with unstable current, dripping…
