The clatter of an iron counting frame was the sound of a debt being called in Red Mist Valley.
At the fourth hour of the afternoon, the front door of Old Cauldron Workshop was kicked open with enough violence to rattle the iron chimney pipe pipes overhead.
Three men stepped into the workshop, their shadows stretching across the flat stone slabs in the grey daylight.
In the lead walked Iron Vulture Li, a guard for Shopkeeper Qian Tong’s Rogue Mutual Aid trade ring. Li was a thickset Layer 3 fighter with shoulders like a blacksmith’s anvil. His forearms wrapped in was heavy boiled hide studded with iron pyramid spikes. At his right hip hung an iron mace. At his left walked Sun San, the freight clerk, holding his heavy iron-framed counting frame. Behind them stood a third rogue holding a notched iron crowbar.
The air in the workshop still carried the faint, lingering fragrance of roasted gazelle marrow.
Sun San’s nostrils flared. His small, rat-like eyes swept across the clean flat stone slabs, the neatly stacked honeycomb briquettes. The larder where the eighty-pound gazelle carcass hung from the ceiling beam.
“Well, well,” Sun San sneered, shaking the iron counting frame.
