Black ichor hissed against the flagstones, boiling the stagnant rainwater into plumes of foul-smelling steam. The front rank of the pack struck the wooden barricade with the force of an uncoupled locomotive.
"Brace the timbers, you miserable sods!" roared the watch captain, his iron-plated boots sliding across the slick stones as he thrust his halberd through a gap in the splintering crates. A mass of squirming, soot-black tentacles severed the spearhead like parchment.
Next to him, a scar-faced docksman known only as Skirk spat a mouthful of blood and swung a rusted boat-hook directly into the maw of an encroaching hound. "Don't tell me what to do, brass-belly! Push!"
Bramwell Finch was screaming. It was not a battle cry. It was the high-pitched, indignant screech of an artist watching his tools desecrated. Brandishing a massive, twice-seasoned cast-iron skillet like an executioner’s axe, the former culinary prodigy brought the rim down on the snout of a leaping ghoul. The blow echoed off the brick walls with an ear-splitting ring.
"Get your filthy, unrefined muzzles away from the stockpot!" Finch bellowed, veins bulging across his grease-streaked neck. He wiped a dollop of gray soot from his cheek with a tattered towel. "That tallow was rendered for twelve hours, you uncouth bilge-rats! I scrubbed the copper five times! Five!"
Behind them, Hester ignored the cacophony of shattering wood, snapping bones, and wet, tearing flesh. Her attention remained riveted to the small iron steamer perched over the cauldron. The dough had risen; the pleated skins were translucent, swollen with minced shallot, braised pork neck, and peppered marrow.
"Look out!" Skirk barked.
A monstrosity with limbs like inverted mantis scythes sheared through the wooden support beam to the left. The docksman crumpled, his shoulder opened from clavicle to rib, dark crimson washing over his rough canvas coat. The beast lunged forward, jaws distending until its throat gaped wide to swallow him whole.
Hester moved on instinct.
She reached for neither cleaver nor the safety of the brick alcove. With a ceramic ladle in her left hand and a steaming bun cradled in a scrap of wax paper in her right, she threw herself across the muddy divide, sliding on both knees directly between the fiend's barbed forelegs.
"Hester, are you insane?" Finch shrieked, swinging his pan wildly into the shoulder of another fiend. "Retreat to the cart! Let the vermin die!"
She ignored his screams, shoving the piping-hot parcel against Skirk’s trembling lips. "Chew it!" she pleaded, her voice cracking over the clamor. "Please, Mr. Skirk, don't talk, just swallow it down. It has ginger and preserved scallion. It cleanses the rot!"
The dockworker blinked, dazed by the loss of blood, but the buttery, rich perfume of pork fat overcame his shock. He clamped his jaws down. The reaction was instantaneous: a radiant, gold-tinted vapor billowed from his nostrils, his torn flesh knitting together in thick, scar-laced ropes beneath his shirt with a sharp, sickening crunch of mending bone.
Above them, the mantis-beast hissed, frustrated by the sudden burst of life, and brought its razor-edged claw down in a butcher's arc aimed directly at Hester’s exposed neck.
A heavy body collided with her, shoving her violently into the puddle.
Baron Osgood Fenwick stood over her. His fine silk coat was torn to shreds, his powdered wig long lost, and thick tendrils of black smog poured from his nostrils, but his aristocratic carriage remained unnervingly rigid. With a sneer that defied both hell and mortality, the nobleman caught the serrated talon bare-handed.
"Insolent whelp," Fenwick rasped, his voice bubbling with black fluid. "You dare interrupt dinner in my district?"
The beast’s second scythe punched through Fenwick’s sternum with a wet, hollow crunch.
The metal-hard tip burst out of his spine, dripping with blackened, smoking blood. Fenwick never flinched. Instead, he gripped the stalk-like neck, digging his manicured nails into its shadowy hide, and used his remaining body weight to snap its head sideways until the spine gave way with a dry pop. Both the beast and the aristocrat collapsed into the mire together.
"My Lord!" the captain yelled, attempting to push through the melee, but three more horrors drove the guards back with whipping tails.
Hester scrambled on her hands and knees through the gore, reaching the Baron’s side. Fenwick was convulsing. Through the gaping, fist-sized hole in his chest, a strange, pulsating orb of crimson flame flickered amidst the encroaching black smog—the dying core of his alchemically warped vitality, fighting against the final corruption.
His pale hand reached out, muddy and trembling, clutching Hester’s flour-dusted wrist. There was no arrogance left in his gaze. Only the raw, humiliating terror of a starving dog.
"The taste..." he whispered, coughing up thick, inky curd. "Dawes... was it... real? The salt... the fat? Not an alchemist’s trick?"
"It was real," Hester cried softly, pressing a clean cloth against the terrible wound, though she knew it was useless. "It was just beef tripe and garlic, My Lord. Just real food."
Fenwick smiled, a grotesque, tragic sight on his ruined face. "I spent... fifty years... dining on illusions. Tell Finch... his foam... was an abomination."
A sharp chime echoed inside Hester’s skull, cold enough to freeze the water in her eyes.
[Hearth-Keeper's Ledger: CRITICAL WARNING]
[Patient Zero reaching terminal threshold.]
[Cure component detected: Distilled Heart-Fire of the High-Born.]
[Countdown until Host Cardiac Freeze: 00:01:00]
[59...]
[58...]
Frost crept across Hester’s knuckles, sharp crystals blooming over her skin and biting deep into the bone. The bitter cold radiated inward, seizing her lungs, slowing her pulse to a sluggish, painful thud.
"The broth..." Fenwick wheezed, his eyes rolling back as the red light in his chest burned with blinding intensity, fighting the suffocating fog. "Take it. Take the fire... before the shadows claim it. Feed them, Dawes. Finish... the meal."
To finish the cure, to save the wretches dying at the barricades, she had to plunge her bare hand into the dying nobleman's ribcage and tear out his very soul.
[45 seconds remaining.]
Hester raised her trembling, ice-covered fingers above the baron's glowing chest.