Copper in the Veins

Why would an eight-hundred-pound Scale-Hound begin to cough up boiling green foam on a dry stone road?

Hayes Carver caught the whiff of charred zinc and sulfur before he heard the harness rattle, and the smell told him his beast was drowning from the inside out. He needed the convoy halted, the drag-axle secured, and thirty ounces of caustic slag cleared from Brisket’s gullet before the creature’s digestive furnace melted through its own windpipe.

"Hold the line!" Hayes shouted down the column, throwing his weight against the heavy hemp reins. "Pike and trace! Pull up!"

The freight rig groaned under the sudden arrest. The iron-shod wheels slid three feet across dry slate, biting hard into the dead roadbed with a screech that vibrated through Hayes's boot soles. Behind the tailgate, where twelve links of cold-forged manganese chain anchored the hound to the heavy oak drag-axle, Brisket hit the earth like a sack of unrefined iron ore. The impact jarred the entire wagon bed, rattling the iron carriage bolts and scrap crates stored beneath the tarp.

Hayes dropped from the driver's box before the wheels stopped spinning. His boots hit the crushed limestone of the Barren Reach. In the cold dark past the frontier gate, without the highway’s hum to mask their noise, every scuff and clatter carried straight into the black scrubland.

Brisket lay curled on his left flank. The beast’s ribcage pumped in jagged spasms. Along his spine and shoulders, the manganese plates flared wide, clicking like iron shingles. A sickly turquoise froth bubbled from the corners of his black lips, hissing where it dripped onto the stone.

"Easy, boy," Hayes said, dropping to one knee in the grit. He kept his voice flat and low. "Keep your jaw down. Do not snap at the dark."

The hound let out a strangulated wheeze. His tail, a segmented club of solid bone and scale that could snap a draft horse's leg, thumped twice against the limestone before locking rigid. The skin around the beast’s throat was burning hot, radiating heat like an unbanked kiln.

Hayes pulled a heavy cowhide gauntlet over his right hand and leaned over the snout. Most men in the merchant trains looked at a Scale-Hound and saw a four-legged bomb waiting for a spark. Hayes saw the only creature on this border that never lied to him about what it wanted. Normal iron colic from eating rusted wagon hoops smelled like wet soot and sour vinegar. This stench was different: vitriol, scorched pitch, and the dry sting of refined antimony.

"Carver! Why in the Seven Hells are we stopped?"

Fiona Brackett marched back from the middle section of the caravan, her brass storm lantern swinging in wide, irritable arcs. The yellow beam cut through the floating dust, catching the tense faces of two teamsters behind her. Both men had already unhooked their heavy frontier crossbows from their wagon frames, scanning the black ridges of the Barren Reach for the eyes of gathering scrub-stalkers.

"Get that lantern down here," Hayes said without looking up. "Hold it by the lower ring. Keep the wick high."

Fiona stopped five feet short, holding the lamp at full extension. Her nose wrinkled the moment the chemical fumes hit her. "Merciful heavens, Carver. What did that beast swallow? It smells like a brass foundry on fire."

"He didn't touch your cargo," Hayes said, fingers working the cold brass buckles of Brisket's muzzle-cage. Five years of freight work had taught him merchants cared about crates, kings cared about tolls, and only the handler cared whether the engine lived to see dawn. "He was working the road shoulder three miles back. He picked up gravel to grind the scrap copper in his crop."

"Gravel doesn't boil green," Fiona countered, her voice dry with annoyance. "We have forty tons of trade goods sitting in an acoustic dead zone, four miles of canyon ahead, and drivers already seeing ghosts in the scrub. We cannot park across the highway while your hound sorts out an upset stomach."

"This isn't bad digestion," Hayes said, wrenching the heavy brass muzzle guard free and tossing it into the dirt. "Look at the froth eating into the slate. That is antimony-vitriol paste. Someone soaked the roadbed in military-grade solvent, and Brisket ground the tainted gravel against sixty pounds of raw copper turnings in his crop. The acid reaction is stripping his protective mucus lining. If I don't clear the slag obstruction in his throat within two minutes, his stomach wall will rupture, and the back half of your freight wagon will catch phosphorus fire."

Fiona’s irritation vanished on the spot. She stepped directly into the reeking wash of fumes, planting her riding boots in the gravel and lowering the lantern until the light pooled over the hound’s twitching snout.

"What do you need?" she asked cleanly.

"The brown chest beneath my driver's box," Hayes said. "The stone crock of slaked lime, the tub of mutton tallow, and the iron pry-bar with the notched tip. Move."

Fiona did not waste breath on an answer. She set the lantern on an overturned water keg and vaulted onto the wagon’s footboard with the lean agility of an experienced trail master. Within three heartbeats she dropped back into the dust, setting the heavy oak veterinary chest beside Hayes's knees.

Hayes flipped the iron latches. Inside lay the messy, indispensable kit of a licensed beast-handler: rolls of coarse linen, jars of bone meal, leather tourniquets, pouches of copper filings, and stone jars sealed with hard beeswax.

Brisket convulsed again, a violent, arching heave that lifted his three-hundred-pound front quarters clear of the stone. A wet, tearing rattle came from his windpipe. The hound's yellow eyes rolled back into his skull, and the inner eyelid—the thick, milky membrane that shielded his eyes during metal-feeding—slid halfway across his pupils.

"Take his crest," Hayes ordered Fiona. "Wrap your wool cloak around your forearms first. If he spasms, the dorsal plates will sever your tendons, but you have to keep his snout aligned with his spine."

"I have two hundred gold pieces tied up in that hound's rear defense contract," Fiona said through gritted teeth. She stripped off her heavy traveling mantle, wrapped the dense wool around both arms, and leaned her full weight over the beast’s neck, locking her elbows against the ridge of his cervical plates. "Clear his throat."

Hayes seized the notched iron pry-bar with his left hand. With his right, he scooped two massive handfuls of slaked whitewash lime and powdered bone meal from the stone crock, slamming them into a tin mixing basin alongside a thick block of chilled mutton tallow. He worked the mixture with raw, furious fingers, kneading the alkaline powder into the fat until it formed a dense, greasy paste the size of an iron shot.

"Open up, Brisket," Hayes murmured. He pressed the thick thumb of his handling glove into the soft nerve depression behind the beast's lower jaw hinge.

The hound’s jaws parted an inch, snapping shut with the violence of a sprung deadfall the second the pressure shifted. Hayes caught the gap, driving the notched iron bar between the creature's rear molars and wrenching it ninety degrees to lock the jaws wide. The iron ground against the hound's serrated tooth-plates with a high, vibrating shriek.

A wave of superheated gas poured out of the hound's gullet. Hayes held his ground, though the caustic vapor scalded his cheeks and filled his eyes with stinging tears. Deep in the beast's throat, wedged directly above the muscular flap of the primary crop valve, sat a dark, glowing lump of calcified slag, bubbling like hot tar.

"The crop valve is sealed shut," Hayes said, his voice strained. "The antimony solvent fused the copper turnings into a solid crust. The digestive acid has nowhere to go. It's backing up toward his lungs."

"Can you lever it out with the bar?" Fiona asked, her boots sliding in the loose grit as Brisket’s hind legs kicked against the wagon frame.

"No. The metal bar will crack his molars if I pry against the jaw. I have to pull it by hand."