The Seventh Ward foundries were running at emergency capacity, choked with the acrid reek of boiling pyrites, molten iron grease, and white-hot steam.
High along the soot-crusted brick high window row, massive overhead crane pulleys shrieked as apprentices hauled ladle-troughs of red-hot spirit alloy across the tapping floor. Every forge worker was stripped to the waist, slick with sweat and powdered graphite, racing to finish the quota manifests before the Imperial Inquest officially sealed the outer gates.
In the open yard outside the sick room, Apothecary He was already barking at two apprentices as he bound a fire tender’s third-degree steam scald with a thick layer of cold sheep grease.
“Hold the splint steady, you clumsy whelp!” the old physician snarled, tapping an iron bone-setting mallet against a fractured collarbone. “If you let the bone shift while the marrow is knitting, the man won’t lift a coal shovel for six months! Bandage him tight, scrape away the dead blisters, and pack the sulfur animal fat into the burn before black flesh-rot takes the shoulder!”
Then the grinding sound came from deep inside Meng Shan’s forearms.
It wasn’t the sound of cracking bone. It was the dry, gritty scraping of unpolished gravel grinding inside an iron pipe.
