Bitterleaf smoke, bitter pine-resin wax, and fresh blood copper thickened the air inside the Seventh Ward Mortuary.
On the central slate cutting-open table lay Old Meng.
His stained canvas shirt was torn away. He exposed a chest crisscrossed with old saber scars, now distorted by three fractured ribs jutting unnaturally beneath purple, swollen flesh. Every breath produced a wet, sucking whistle from his left flank.
Doctor Bai leaned over the table, greasy glasses perched on the bridge of his hooked nose.
His stained fingers worked with the swift, unfeeling smooth speed of a leather cobbler. In his right hand was a curved bone-needle threaded with oiled sheep gut. In his left, a short bronze drain needle.
“Hold his collar bone,” Bai snapped around his pipe stem, not looking up. “The rib tip is half an inch from the lung artery. If he spasms, he drowns in his own juice.”
Lu Chen stepped to the head of the table.
He placed both hands firmly across Old Meng’s collarbones. His palms radiated a steady, soothing fifty-degree heat, relaxing the reflex muscle spasms rippling through the old watchman’s neck.
Old Meng gritted his yellow teeth, his good eye rolling back in agony as Bai punched the bronze drain needle through the rib muscle to vent the trapped air.
Hiss.
A jet of trapped blood and frothy air vented from the puncture. The whistling in Meng’s chest eased right away.
“Pinch the bone,” Bai ordered, reaching for his bone-pliers. “Pull it three hairs forward while I set the lath.”
Lu Chen adjusted his grip.
With two fingers, he seized the jagged edge of the fifth rib through the torn skin. Applying precise high-pressure torque, he pulled the bone into posture. Bone ground on bone with a dull crunch.
Old Meng gasped, biting clean through his leather striker strap. His knuckles turned white against the table edge.
“Hold steady,” Lu Chen said quietly.
Doctor Bai slapped a split bamboo lath against the lined up rib and lashed it tight with waxed catgut. He slathered the open wound with a thick paste of boiled bitter pine-resin wax, sulfur powder, and powdered toad venom, sealing the puncture against air.
Meng’s chest rose and fell in a shallow, steady rhythm. The old man slumped against the slate slab, his breath rattling but clear.
“Qian...” Meng rasped, his cracked lips trembling. “The boy... He won’t let him... Walk.”
“Save your breath, old dog,” Doctor Bai muttered, wiping bloody fingers on his apron. “Your plumbing is patched, but the seams are thin. Move your ribs before dawn and you’ll bleed out your ears.”
Meng turned his head toward Lu Chen. “The dungeon... Under the water gate. Qian has... The iron keys.”
Doctor Bai paused, his hands freezing above his needle roll.
The physician slowly turned his head toward the shuttered dead-house window. His nostrils flared, drawing in the damp drafts seeping through the oiled-paper seams.
A strange stench was cutting through the clean smell of the falling rain.
It wasn’t the smell of normal human sewage, nor was it the clean cold of an Uncanny specter. It was the heavy, nauseating reek of fermented wolfsbane, rancid mutton fat, and boiled ghoul marrow.
“Corpse-frenzy broth,” Bai whispered. His nicotine-stained pipe dropped an inch, spilling hot ash onto the floorboards. “The county water prison. He’s done it. That pig-faced coward has opened the death cages.”
Lu Chen wiped a smear of Meng’s blood from his thumb. “How many?”
“Twenty,” Doctor Bai said, his voice flat with cold, cold and exact dread. “Unsafe cutthroats and canal bandits. Three years ago, the yamen let southern chirurgeons sew ghoul tendons and wolf claws into their joints. Their pain nerves were burned out with lye. They don’t tire. They don’t bleed out. And Qian just fed them black broth.”
Lu Chen looked toward the heavy oak doors at the front of the station.
The surrounding heat in the street was dropping. The rain hitting the rooftop tiles sounded heavier, duller, weighted down by a creeping fog of malice.
“We don’t run,” Lu Chen said.
“Run?” Doctor Bai snorted bitterly, picking up his serrated autopsy saw from the instrument tray. “With an old man with punctured lungs? We wouldn’t make it thirty paces down the canal before they dragged our guts across the mud.”
“Then we hold,” Lu Chen said.
He moved toward the storage room with immediate, economical speed.
“Help me with the lime,” Lu Chen ordered.
Doctor Bai shoved his medical kit under Meng’s slab and followed.
In the rear storehouse sat four heavy fifty-pound wooden tubs of burning lime powder and coarse sea salt, used to pack decomposing corpses brought in from summer drownings.
Lu Chen grabbed two tubs beneath his arms—two hundred pounds of dead weight—and carried them to the front entrance as easily as bundles of straw.
With swift, sweeping motions, he kicked open the tubs and poured a six-inch-wide outer edge of chalky white lime and crystal-clear rock salt across the stone threshold, coating every window ledge and drainage grate.
“Burning lime powder boils on moisture,” Lu Chen said. “Corpse-grafts sweat rotting fluid-draining fluid. If their pads touch this line, their skin blisters to charcoal.”
Doctor Bai nodded, his cynical eyes gleaming with vicious practical understanding.
The doctor ran to the lamp-oil rack and hauled out three clay pot jugs of thick, raw whale oil mixed with crude sulfur, used to fuel the night watch lanterns.
He uncorked the jugs and sloshed the black, thick, sticky grease across the flat stone slab entry path outside the main doors. That created a twelve-foot slick of flammable sludge.
“One spark,” Bai said, holding up a flint striker. “Turns the threshold into a pig roast.”
Lu Chen kept working.
He lifted the heavy four-inch-thick hardwood crossbar and slammed it into the forged iron brackets securing the front gates. He took five six-foot iron dead-house studying spikes from the wall rack and hammered them diagonally into the door frame, wedging the timber into the stone jambs with bone-shattering force.
Windows were shuttered and braced with heavy oak cutting-open benches wedged against the sills.
The dead-house was turned from a workshop of the dead into an iron tomb.
Lu Chen paused in the center of the hall.
His internal heat had dipped to forty-four degrees during the labor. His backup melted rock waste-veins felt brittle, tight, and hungry. A siege against twenty bio-clockwork horrors would demand sustained, peak heat-powered burning.
He walked to the pantry crock, reached his bare hand into the cold salt water. Then he hauled out a two-pound block of salted sheep fat and rendered hog fat.
The fat was solid, greasy, and smelled of cold salt water.
Without pause, Lu Chen took a massive bite.
He chewed the dense, calorie-rich lard with clockwork rhythm, swallowing large chunks of solid animal fat down his throat. The cold fat hit his stomach and was instantly seized by the Asura Crucible.
A deep, underground rumble echoed inside his ribs.
The black glass veins across his forearm turned a vibrant, ember-red.
A wave of dry, blistering warmth surged through his arteries. It burned away every trace of physical fatigue. White steam began to hiss steadily from the cuffs of his sleeves.
Lu Chen reached into his left sleeve and drew out his four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
He lined up the blunt needle point against the thick callous of his left palm. Then he pressed down hard.
Half an inch of cold iron sank into the flesh.
A needle of sharp, hot pain lanced through his central nervous system. It burned away the lingering illusions and demonic whispers crawling through the cold air.
Fresh, dark-crimson blood welled around the iron shaft.
Lu Chen pulled the awl free and closed his fist.
Flesh breathes. Blood resists. Anchor checked.
“They’re here,” Doctor Bai whispered.
The old doctor stood five paces back, his knuckles white around the grip of his twenty-inch serrated autopsy saw, his teeth clamped so hard around his pipe that the clay cracked.
Above their heads, the clay roof tiles creaked.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
It was the sound of dozens of overgrown, curved iron claws scrambling across wet terracotta shingles.
Then, from the rainy street outside, came a sound that froze the marrow.
A heavy, wet impact slammed into the outside brick wall. It was followed by a chorus of ragged, deep-throated howls that sounded like starved wolves tearing each other apart in an iron pit.
BOOM!
The hardwood front gates bowed inward by two inches.
Dust and dried moss rained down from the ceiling rafters. The forged iron brackets groaned under huge, high-pressure force.
Through the narrow slit between the double doors, a claw shoved through.
It was a monstrosity of gray, leathery muscle and exposed sinew, sporting four thick knuckles tipped with six-inch curved iron talons stained with dried gore. Black, thick, sticky fluid dripped from the claws, sizzling and smoking wildly as it splashed onto the bed of burning lime powder below.
A hideous, milky eye pressed against the crack in the timber.
A voice like wet gravel grinding inside a rotten throat shrieked through the wood:
“Meat... The Guard promised meat...”
Lu Chen reached to his belt and gripped the rough leather-wrapped handle of his twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver.
He drew the blade.
The heavy iron spine rang with a clear, bell-like hum in the gloom.
“First wave,” Lu Chen said, stepping toward the shuddering door. “Mind the lime.”