Dawn broke over Black Water County like a bruised plum.
Sulfur smog drifted low between the roof edges of Seventh Ward. He mixed with the bitter stench of burning pit coal and night-soil carts.
Lu Chen walked down the narrow alleyway, his heavy hemp coat pulled tight across his chest. Every breath he released formed a thick cloud of white vapor that hung in the freezing air long after he passed.
His blood heat was slipping.
The warning pulsed across his outer vision in dull crimson light.
Thirty-nine point eight degrees. To a normal mortal, that was a raging fever that melted reason.
To Lu Chen, it was an engine running out of firewood.
The black glass melted rock waste-veins along his left forearm pulled tight against his flesh. It felt like strings of hardened resin. If his blood cooled another degree, the hardened backup spirit veins would turn brittle enough to snap during ordinary muscle hard effort.
He needed dense animal fat right away.
He turned into Butcher Row.
The alley smelled of sour blood, wet sawdust, and rancid animal fat. Heavy elm-wood chopping blocks lined both sides of the muddy lane, their surfaces scored by decades of cleaver strikes.
Normally, the row was loud with haggling laborers and squealing pigs. Today, it was deathly quiet.
A dozen butchers stood behind their empty blocks with their arms crossed over grease-stained leather aprons, their eyes hollow with sullen dread. Behind them, empty iron meat-hooks swayed in the freezing wind like iron ribs.
Lu Chen stopped before the widest stall in the middle of the alley.
A massive man with shoulders like an ox stood behind the elm block, his bare forearms matted with coarse black hair.
“Master Zhang,” Lu Chen said.
Butcher Zhang looked up from a half-quartered bull carcass, his bloodshot eyes narrowing as he recognized the dead-house apprentice.
“Boy from the dead-house,” Zhang grunted. He spat a wad of red betel leaf into the sawdust. “No offal for dogs today. Move along.”
Lu Chen unfastened the hemp purse at his waist, letting twenty copper coins clink against the blood-stained wood. “I don’t want offal. I need animal fat.”
Zhang froze. His scarred eyebrows pulled together in a tight knot.
“Animal fat?” the butcher rasped, leaning over the block. “You got gold in your teeth, boy?”
“I have copper,” Lu Chen said. “Ten pounds of sheep fat.”
Zhang gave a bitter, dry laugh that sounded like a saw hitting an iron nail. “Ten pounds? You couldn’t buy ten ounces with that handful of brass.”
Lu Chen’s gaze remained flat. “The market price is eight copper a pound.”
“Was eight copper,” Zhang said, leaning closer and lowering his voice to a harsh whisper. “Since three days ago, it’s twenty-five. If you can find any.”
Lu Chen studied the empty iron hooks behind the stall. “Why twenty-five? The cattle didn’t vanish.”
“The cattle didn’t,” Zhang spat, his beefy jaw tightening. “The Iron Fist School did.”
He pulled back his right leather sleeve. He exposed a dark purple deep bruise the size of a fist across his forearm bone. The skin was split, weeping yellow fluid that smelled of sour vinegar.
“Master Tie Shan put the squeeze on the whole row,” Zhang growled. “Every scrap of animal fat, every tub of pig lard, every bucket of cattle suet. All of it belongs to the martial hall.”
Lu Chen’s analytical mind registered the fracture pattern on Zhang’s arm. Blunt trauma. Heavy iron-studded wraps.
“Why do they want animal grease?” Lu Chen asked.
“Palm liniment,” Zhang muttered bitterly. “They boil the fat with powdered iron sand and toad venom to temper their knuckles. What they don’t boil, they hoard to burn in their night lanterns.”
The butcher wiped a greasy hand across his forehead.
“Anyone who sells grease to the town folk gets their thumbs cracked,” Zhang said. “Two apprentice boys from West Alley had their kneecaps broken yesterday just for carrying a lard jar home to their sick mother.”
Lu Chen looked down at his own left hand. The dark black glass veins hummed beneath his skin, demanding fuel to lubricate the scorched channels.
If he went without fat for another six hours, his core would stall.
“I need five pounds,” Lu Chen said quietly. “Whatever you have hidden.”
Zhang scoffed, reaching for his cleaver. “Are you deaf, boy? I told you, there’s nothing—”
The butcher’s voice broke off with a grunt of frustration.
He had jammed his iron cleaver into the frozen spine of the bull carcass, trying to split the dense lower-back bones. The bone was gray and knotty with frost, locking the steel blade fast.
Zhang hauled on the hickory handle with his good arm. But his injured forearm gave out with a sickening wince of pain. The blade remained wedged tight in the frozen bone marrow.
“Rotten ice,” Zhang cursed, panting in the freezing air. “Can’t even split a dead ox.”
Lu Chen stepped forward.
“Let me,” Lu Chen said.
Before Zhang could shout, Lu Chen drew his notched ox-bone cleaver from the leather sling beneath his coat.
The twelve-pound tool looked crude and heavy, its iron spine notched from skinning drowned corpses, its edge darkened by dried lime and charcoal.
No wild, dramatic stance. His eyes scanned the frozen lower-back spine, instantly calculating the line of least pushback along the stone grain of the frozen bone. He adjusted the angle of his grip by three degrees.
He raised his arm and brought the cleaver down.
Thwack.
There was no spray of bone chips. There was only the clean, dull thud of heavy mass meeting frozen calcium.
The notched blade sliced straight through the frozen ox spine as if cutting through chilled butter, severing the spine bones in a single unbroken stroke and biting half an inch into the elm block below.
The two halves of the bull carcass fell apart with a wet slap. It exposed the gray marrow within.
Butcher Zhang stood frozen, his jaw slack, staring from the split bone to the slender dead-house boy.
The butcher knew ox bone. He had swung a cleaver for thirty years. He knew that splitting a frozen spine needed the shoulder power of a third-tier martial artist.
“You...” Zhang whispered, his eyes wide with sudden terror and respect. “You broke the bone clean.”
Lu Chen calmly wiped the grease from his blade against his sleeve. Then it slid the cleaver back into its sling.
“The grain was straight,” Lu Chen said.
Zhang swallowed hard, his gaze shifting nervously toward the alley entrance.
He reached beneath his cutting block. It slid aside a false panel hidden beneath piles of salt-cured hides. From the dark cavity, he hauled out a heavy, glazed clay pot crock sealed with beeswax and coarse twine.
The crock weighed at least six pounds, smelling intensely of rendered beef suet and salted sheep fat.
“Take it,” Zhang hissed, shoving the jar across the block and snatching Lu Chen’s twenty copper coins. “Five pounds of unrendered beef suet and sheep fat. It’s all I have left.”
Lu Chen gathered the heavy crock into his arms. He felt the dense cold of the grease through the clay pot. “Thank you, Master Zhang.”
“Don’t thank me, boy,” Zhang warned, his voice shaking with nervous urgency. “Get out of the row.”
“Tie Shan’s jackals are patrolling the corner of Grain Street,” the butcher added. “If they smell that animal fat on you, they’ll crack your skull and feed your liver to the river ghouls.”
Lu Chen pulled his heavy oilcloth coat over the crock, hiding the wide baked-clay shape against his ribs.
“Understood,” Lu Chen said.
He turned and walked toward the mouth of Butcher Row, his strides steady and rhythmic in the slush.
At the corner where the meat alley met the canal bridge, three figures lounged beneath the awning of an abandoned tea shed.
They wore sleeveless boiled-leather vests over coarse gray robes. Their thick wrists were bound with iron-studded hemp wraps. Calloused knuckles the size of walnuts rested against heavy oak cudgels leaning against their knees.
Iron Fist students.
As Lu Chen stepped past the shed, the cold morning wind shifted.
A faint whiff of rich, salt-cured beef animal fat leaked from beneath his coat.
The lead student—a stocky man with a broken nose and a scar across his chin—sniffed the air. His eyes snapped toward Lu Chen’s back, narrowing like a hawk spotting a field mouse.
“Hey,” the scarred student barked, tapping his heavy club against the frozen cobbles. “Dead-house boy. Stop right there.”
Lu Chen didn’t stop.
He kept his pace steady. His boots splashed through the freezing mud. He turned down the narrow passage leading back to the Seventh Ward dead-house.
Behind him, heavy footsteps crunched on the frozen gravel.