The Sub-Basement Morgue of the Ironfang Vanguard Academy was located thirty feet below the cadet dormitories, at the end-post end of a stuffy hall where the smell of formalin and harsh cleaning acid overpowered even the stench of city coal.
To reach the morgue, Arthur had walked through the underground vaults where the second-year cadets’ beasts were housed in cold iron cages. He had seen the commercial purebloods bred by the big genotech corporations. Drakes with bloated, lacquered scales, griffins with clipped pinions shivering from nutrient deficiency, and massive mastiffs doped on man-made hormonal stimulants. They were animals engineered for quick profits and public arena spectacle, their life expectancies rarely exceeding five years once their growth hormones burned out their internal organs.
Arthur pushed open the heavy oak door of the morgue. The hinges, soaked in animal fat, swung inward with a faint, greasy hiss.
The lab was forty paces long, lit by flickering quartz gas-lamps suspended from iron chains. Down the center of the vaulted stone hall ran a row of six heavy zinc cutting-open tables, each fitted with copper drainage gutters and lead collection buckets. Shelves of clouded glass jars lined the walls, containing floating specimens of rift fauna. Preserved tentacles, cut drake talons, and baby manticores curled in pale yellow fluid.
At the far table, lit up by a harsh, focused curved reflector, stood Professor Bramwell Heseltine.
The Scalpel Dean had his back turned. He wore his stiff rubber apron over a tweed vest that had lost its buttons during the second border war. His yellowed sleeves were rolled up past his corded, vein-mapped forearms. A fresh clove cigarillo smoldered in the corner of his mouth, sending thin ribbons of blue smoke curling toward the brick ceiling.
On the zinc slab before him lay the carcass of a young Silver-Rank Frost Wyrm, roughly three meters in length. Its pale crystal-clear scales were dulled, coated in a sticky film of greenish-gray bile.
Beside Arthur, Grimm stepped into the room. The hound’s claws clicked sharply against the wet flat stone slabs. Grimm stopped three paces inside the threshold, his nostrils flaring as he analyzed the cocktail of formaldehyde and dead reptile meat. But his stance remained calm and grounded.
“Close the door, boy,” Heseltine rasped without turning. “The draft makes the gas lamps flicker. I can’t measure blood-vessel black rot in the dark.”
Arthur pushed the heavy door shut, letting the iron latch click into place. He walked to the edge of the zinc table, keeping his hands loosely clasped behind his back.
“Teacher,” Arthur said.
Heseltine set down a pair of ten-inch blunt-nosed metal tongs with a wet clatter. He turned his weathered, craggy face toward Arthur. He peeked over the top of his thick jeweler loupes. His single earlobe was scarred. His fingers were stained with dark nicotine and copper sulfate.
“Your hound,” Heseltine grunted, gesturing with his chin toward Grimm. “Where did you get the catalytic vector?”
“Melted rock waste iron broth from the foundry gutters,” Arthur replied evenly. “Combined with native umbral lichen and ice-cold well tar.”
Heseltine stared at him for four long seconds. Then, a dry, rattling wheeze escaped the old man’s chest—a sound that Arthur recognized as a laugh.
“Melted rock waste iron and ditch moss,” Heseltine muttered, shaking his head. “Fifty thousand credits of pureblood breeding in Julian’s drake. You broke its knee with fifty coppers’ worth of heavy-duty scrap. Gregory Vance is currently in the High judge’s office demanding a full audit of your parents’ estate. He claims your father hid a cache of military-grade marrow elixirs before he died in the trenches.”
“My father left sixteen copper tokens in a tin cup, Teacher,” Arthur said. “And an unsharpened bayonet.”
“I know,” Heseltine said, his gaze dropping back to the dead wyrm on the table. “I signed his death certificate. The man was an honest fool who believed the Vanguard Federation cared about commoner scouts.”
Heseltine picked up his fourteen-inch black glass bone-saw. He tapped the flat of the micro-serrated blade against the dead wyrm’s swollen belly wall.
“This carcass arrived two hours ago from the third-year breeding pavilion,” the professor said. His voice turning was cold and exact. “Belonged to Senior Cadet Moros. Died thirty minutes after its morning feeding. The academy veterinarians approved it as acute heart failure caused by congenital mana stall. They want it burned up by noon.”
Heseltine looked up, his sharp gray eyes locking onto Arthur’s face.
“Tell me what killed it, Arthur. You have two minutes.”
Arthur stepped up to the zinc slab. He didn’t right away activate his type-list monocle. Instead, he relied on the instincts sharpened across twelve years of careful trauma sickness on Earth.
He drew a pair of thin rubber gloves from the table’s supply tray. It snapped them over his wrists.
His fingers moved over the wyrm’s belly wall, pressing firmly into the right hypochondriac region. The tissue beneath the scales was taut, drum-tight with trapped gas and fluid. He checked the oral cavity. The gums were cyanotic, a dark slate-blue, and the tongue was retracted into the pharynx.
He slid his fingers down the ventral midline to the mesenteric junction.
“Not heart arrest,” Arthur said calmly. “The right ventricle is empty. The neck-vein veins are collapsed, not engorged. If it were heart failure, the liver would be congested with back-pressure blood.”
Arthur picked up a ten-inch straight bistoury from the instrument tray. With a smooth, uninterrupted stroke, he parted the belly scales along the linea alba.
A sharp, foul rush of fermented gas escaped the clean cut.
Beneath the pale gut-deep fat, the small intestine was twisted one hundred and eighty degrees around the mesenteric root. The entire loop of the mid-gut was a deep, rotting plum-purple, gorged with stale dark blood.
“Volvulus,” Arthur diagnosed, his gloved fingers lifting the twisted loop with clean, steady care. “Mesenteric twisting force combined with acute gastric dilation. Look at the stomach wall—it has thinned to less than a tiny fraction of an inch. The third-year trainers were force-feeding this sample with dry, pelletized protein concentrates to speed up its scale hardening before the winter tournament. The pellets swelled in the stomach, the wyrm rolled in its pen to relieve the cramps. The gut twisted on its axis.”
He looked up at Heseltine.
“It died of septic shock and blood-vessel strangulation in thirty minutes. It wasn’t congenital. It was malpractice.”
Heseltine stood motionless for several heartbeats, the clove cigarillo burning down to the ash line between his lips.
A slow, vicious smile spread across the old corpse-judge’s weathered face.
“Tissue never lies, boy,” Heseltine whispered softly. “Aristocrats lie. Corporate breeders lie. The academy council lies every time they open their mouths to announce tuition fees. But black rot is a total moral truth.”
The professor reached into his vest pocket, withdrew an official brass seal. Then he slammed it down onto an open parchment docket resting on the desk behind him.
“Effective as of zero-eight-hundred hours today,” Heseltine said, sliding the parchment across the zinc table, “you’re appointed Senior Dissection Assistant to the Department of Comparative Sickness. Pay: eighty Vanguard credits a week, payable from my personal office research grant.”
Arthur looked at the paper. It bore the heavy crimson stamp of the Vanguard Medical Checker office.
“And my legal status?” Arthur asked.
“As an appointed research assistant under an active military medical chair, you’re exempt from cadet bunkhouse eviction and summary charter seizure,” Heseltine said, his tone dry as bone meal. “Gregory Vance can’t touch your family charter without a formal military inquest signed by the Garrison Provost Marshal. And the Provost Marshal happens to be a former student of mine who still owes me for removing three manticore quills from his lower-back spine.”
Heseltine picked up the bone-saw again, turning back to the dead wyrm.
“Take whatever organs you need from the sample lockers for your hound, Arthur. Bone marrow, catalytic bile, tendon sheath—it’s all waste manifest to the academy. But make sure that wolf of yours is ready for the frontier proving grounds next month. Gregory Vance won’t stop with court guards. He will send real hunters.”
The old professor gestured with his bone-saw toward the vaulted iron door at the rear of the morgue.
“The cold locker contains the carcasses of sixteen beasts culled over the past three months. Most of them are discarded low-rank runts from the lower pens. Horned sheep with fractured metatarsals, river hounds with lung rot, and three juveniles from the outer edge skirmishes. The academy writes them off as total losses. But the marrow in their long bones is rich in organic aether salts. You know how to extract it without triggering cellular rusting.”
Arthur walked over to the heavy iron locker door. As he turned the brass wheel, a cloud of chilled, dry vapor billowed outward. He smelled of frozen pine sawdust and ancient stone cold. Inside, rows of preserved carcasses hung from stainless steel hooks. Grimm stepped up beside him, his nostrils flaring as his golden eyes scanned the shadowed vault. The hound didn’t lunge. He waited with quiet discipline until Arthur reached inside, his fingers selecting a dense thigh bone from a flawless shadow-wolf sample.
“We’ll use every scrap, Teacher,” Arthur said. He turned back with the dense marrow bone in his hands.
Arthur picked up the signed appointment letter. Grimm stepped up beside him, resting his cool black glass nose against Arthur’s palm.
“Understood, Teacher,” Arthur said. “We’ll be ready.”