Rancid beef animal fat and sour gutter mud clung to the narrow roof edges of Butcher Alley like cold grease on a corpse’s lip.
It was past the hour of the Dog. The official curfew gongs had not yet sounded from the judge’s central drum tower. But honest folk had already bolted their cedar shutters tight. In Black Water County, the twilight belonged to cutpurses and gang guards. The deep night belonged unconditionally to whatever crawled out of the canal mist.
Lu Chen walked down the center of the lane, his straw-padded boots making almost no sound against the slime-slick cobblestones.
Under his left arm, wrapped in a bundle of coarse oilcloth, rested two pounds of solid sheep fat. The rendered fat was waxy, yellow, and pungent. To an ordinary apprentice earning fifty copper coins a month, it was kitchen waste fit only for boiling candles.
To Lu Chen’s scorched viscera, it was high-grade fire fuel.
Beneath his coarse linen tunic, his chest radiated a dry, feverish heat.
His inner body heat sat at an unbending 40.2 degrees. Even in the bitter autumn draft rolling off the northern marshes, a thin wisp of steam drifted continuously from the frayed collar of his oilcloth apron.
The hardened veins along his left forearm throbbed with a dull, iron ache. They looked like jagged ribbons of black glass set beneath pale skin, hard to the touch and fully empty of human suppleness.
Caloric consumption is within baseline limits, he noted silently. His mind ran through the daily body-energy balance. Eat half a pound before midnight, and the melted rock waste-veins will hold without seizing.
Two wards to the east, the dull brass clatter of a night watchman’s gong sounded three hollow notes. Old Meng was already on his rounds.
A shadow detached itself from the doorway of Old Man Sun’s slaughterhouse.
Then two more shadows stepped out from the mouth of the connecting drainage passage, cutting off the southern exit toward the Seventh District Mortuary.
Lu Chen stopped five paces before the drainage gutter. He didn’t drop the parcel under his arm. His right hand remained loosely draped over the wrapped spine of his twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver. It hung from a loop in his hemp rope sash.
The man in the center was broad-shouldered and thick-necked, wearing an open vest of stiff ox-hide that showed off a torso scarred by street brawls.
A greasy topknot leaned to one side of his skull. A faint smirk pulled at his pockmarked cheeks. On his right thumb sat a heavy, rusted bronze ring, mottled with dark green rust that caught what little moonlight filtered through the clouds.
Lu Chen recognized him from the market stalls. Senior Brother Gou, the chief guard for the Seventh Ward branch of the Iron Fist School.
Flanking Gou were two younger students, both wearing boiled leather bracers and holding four-foot cudgels of seasoned hickory banded with thick iron hoops.
“Well, now,” Gou said, spitting a mouthful of bitter tobacco juice into the gutter. “I wondered what kind of mangy dog was hauling three strings of copper out of the dead-house gate today.”
Lu Chen measured the distance between them with calm, unblinking eyes.
Five paces.
The two flanking students held their cudgels low, wrists loose, weight resting far too heavily on their lead heels. They had strength in their shoulders, but their footwork was sloppy. They were street bullies accustomed to beating weeping tavern owners and kicking over vegetable carts.
“They say Doctor Bai pays his corpse-washers in good royal coin now,” Gou said. He took two slow, swaggering steps forward.
“A boy who scrapes rotting skin for a living doesn’t need copper,” Gou spat on the stones. “The Iron Fist School protects this ward, so hand over the wages.”
Lu Chen looked at Gou’s face, then at the two iron-banded cudgels.
“The animal fat is bought,” Lu Chen said. “Step aside.”
Gou blinked, surprised by the flat tone, then barked out a harsh, rasping laugh that echoed between the shuttered wooden walls.
“The corpse-boy has a tongue on him,” Gou sneered. He gestured with his chin toward Lu Chen’s hip.
“I’ll take the grease too, and that cleaver,” Gou added. “Good steel shouldn’t rot in the hands of a grave crawler.”
“The steel is for work,” Lu Chen said quietly. “You can’t afford it.”
Gou’s grin vanished. The muscles along his thick jaw tightened into knots of dark cord.
“Break his right arm,” Gou ordered, waving a calloused hand. “Leave the left so he can crawl back to Old Meng on his belly.”
The student on the left—a tall, hook-nosed thug named Zhao—stepped forward with a vicious grin. He raised his iron-banded heavy club in both hands. He drew it back over his shoulder like a woodcutter preparing to fell a stubborn pine.
“Hold still, corpse-rat,” Zhao hissed. “Let me hear bone sing.”
Zhao lunged.
The wooden heavy club hummed through the damp air, trailing a sharp whistling arc aimed directly at Lu Chen’s left collarbone. The strike carried at least one hundred and eighty pounds of downward force, easily enough to shatter an ordinary man’s collar bone and drive splintered bone into the lung.
Lu Chen stayed where he was.
The alley was barely six feet wide. Leaping into the slime-coated timber walls would only compromise his balance against the second attacker. Instead, he shifted his left foot forward by three inches. He set his heel hard into the granite seam between two paving stones.
He tightened the muscular girdle of his belly and allowed his rib cage to expand by half a breath.
Inside his dantian, the dormant heat of the Ox-Demon Iron Skin flared to life.
The black melted rock waste-veins beneath the skin of his chest tightened like woven hemp cables dipped in boiling pitch. His flesh didn’t turn to metal—it simply hardened into a slate-gray thickness that defied mortal anatomy.
CLANG!
The sound was not the dull, wet thud of wood crushing mortal bone.
It was the ringing crash of a blacksmith’s sledgehammer striking an iron anvil in a closed forge.
The iron band at the tip of Zhao’s heavy club met Lu Chen’s upper chest muscle. The iron flattened instantly on impact, the cold metal buckling inward against the curve of his chest.
The blast wave didn’t push Lu Chen back an inch.
The force traveled straight up the length of the seasoned hickory staff. It sent a savage shudder through the wood and into Zhao’s palms. The skin between Zhao’s thumbs and index fingers tore open, spraying hot droplets of blood onto his own face.
Zhao’s wrists bent backward with a sickening crack.
The hickory shaft splintered along its grain, long white shards bursting out from beneath the twisted iron band like teeth through torn gums.
Zhao stood frozen in the alley mud, his eyes bulging until the whites were webbed with burst red tiny blood vessels. His mouth hung open, jaw working soundlessly, trying to formulate a scream that his numbed lungs couldn’t produce.
Lu Chen looked down at the dented iron ring pressed against his tunic.
The linen had torn, revealing the dark, stone-textured surface of his skin underneath. Not a single drop of blood welled from the impact. Only a faint curl of gray steam rose from where the cold iron had met his flesh.
“Your strike lacks penetration,” Lu Chen said quietly.
He didn’t wait for Zhao to recover his breath.
His right hand left the cleaver’s handle and moved forward in a straight, cold and exact vector.