Rose Seven Recipes for Revolution

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83784-065-6
Verlag: Daphne Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 480 Seiten

The Bear meets Attack on Titan in this exhilarating, food-based epic fantasy filled with high stakes and monster steaks, perfect for fans of Pierce Brown and Jay Kristoff. Paprick is a common butcher, carving slabs of meat from gargantuan monsters so elite chefs can prepare magic-granting meals for the rich. But Paprick's true passion is cooking, and if he can learn the secret art, his dreams of liberating his people and sharing the monsters' magic with the world could come true. He steals the precious ingredients needed to practise recipes at home, but if he's caught, he'll be executed. As his desperation grows, he ventures into the black market and uncovers a spice imported from unknown lands. Combining it with the last of his stolen meat, he cooks a dish the world has never tasted before, with side-effects he couldn't have foreseen. The dish's magic grows Paprick to kaiju-size, and legends of his powers spread among the people. Immediately, the rulers arrest him, but Paprick convinces them to make him a chef's apprentice-if they ever want to learn his Recipe. However, his exposure to the world of high cuisine reveals the rot at its centre, and with his new power, rebellion is only a few recipes away...

After escaping his hometown in Central Florida, Ryan began studying to become a chemical engineer. He was sure he would one day be an asteroid miner. Since then, he's worked in tabletop game design, Broadway musical production, and even taught English to middle schoolers. These days, Ryan lives in Oakland with his partner and their dog, which may be a demon. He now works to defend democracy at UC Berkeley, which still doesn't involve chemical engineering. You can find Ryan on the good socials, assuming there are any at the time of this printing.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rose, Ryan

Leseproben

1

THE KING’S FACTORY

THE GARGANTUAN MONSTROSITIES the Rare call bull emphon and the common call carnephon produce seven main cuts of meat living, and eight dead.

As an apprentice butcher, I was stuck with the shank. A terrible, tough cut in front of the brisket. Dry. Sinewy. Barely edible outside a stew. But the master butchers didn’t post me there because it cut like tree bark and I was good with an ax. The glory of carving the shank was mine because our bull was a forty-ton carnivore, twenty meters from scaled claw to feathered shoulder, and slicing off its forearm didn’t please its sword-length fangs much. Better the wiry sixteen-year-old common with a fresh indenture gets eaten than someone who knew the fine cut of sirloin.

The day Meg quit, I climbed the ladder anchored into the carnephon’s bones, drudging my cleaversaw, a slicing tool as long as my leg that weighed twice as much, behind me. Not an elegant cooking knife but an unholy marriage of sword and ax, only faintly reminiscent of a butcher’s cleaver due to its rectangular blade. Its length kept the sheathed blade far from the saw’s handle in my hand, but my long torso meant the block knocked into my calf with each rung of the ladder. After a season on the job, the bruises ached endlessly as I bore my weight upward, but better them than the whip on my back—large target that it was—or worse, penalties on my indenture for laziness.

My work platform sat above the forward loop of the suspension harness, which held the bull off the ground with leather tanned from one of its long-dead ancestors. By the time I reached it, my labored breath fogged through the mouth slit of my head-to-toe butcher suit, the temperature frigid as imported ice slowly melted along the factory’s walls. I sucked air through my nose, inhaling the stench of iron and offal without notice. Months had numbed it, but those first few weeks had been a constant battle against rising bile.

The well-liked apprentices were carving into the brisket off to my left, a stone’s throw below me, splattering the ground with gore. Bessa—yes, I named her—trembled with pain as they bit into her with their saws. It was early yet, so her roars were faint, stored deep in the pit of her lungs, but my place at the shank exposed me especially to her hurt, so close to her terrified heartbeat.

“Sorry, girl,” I whispered, laying my free hand against her scales as I caught my breath.

If I leaped up, I could run my fingers over the pink and green feathers that fluttered and twitched where they remained on the scales of her shoulder, but the pluckers had removed the feathers from her hide so that butchers could find the grain of her scales easily. Plucked, she looked more bovine than reptilian, though the reality was neither. While she might have the same general shape as the cows of Olearth, her milk secreted out of sacs above her sharp canines rather than udders. My grandmama said cows didn’t have man-sized long claws on their forelegs, only hooves like Bessa had on her hind legs.

A hand tapped my foot, and I made room for my mentor to join me on the scaffold. In her butcher suit, Meg was a featureless rubber doll. Shorter than me by two heads but broad in shoulder and hip, she carried a strength that barely registered the weight of her flatsaw—similar to my cleaversaw, but thinner and angled more like a paring knife. Perfect for getting beneath the inedible scales and slicing them cleanly from the muscle. By all accounts, she was the best butcher in the Panchon Kingdom for her age, but that only made the overseers hate her more, which is why she was stuck with me.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked.

I scowled, knowing she couldn’t see my expression. Cutting into Bessa wasn’t something I did lightly. Blasphemous, I know, but I didn’t want the emphon to think I was hurting her in spite. I always shared a moment with her, to thank her for the meat she was providing first. “I know you like the first cut,” I joked.

“Just get in position before we get a deduction.”

I didn’t have time to move before Meg hefted the flatsaw and placed it perpendicular to the scale’s grain. With a grunt, she began serrating between the scale and the muscle. Blood splattered across my mouth slit, filling my mouth.

“Starving rookie,” Meg cursed as I cleared the blood from my mouth.

The last few weeks, my mentor had been less and less the friend I’d grown up idolizing. Angrier each day as she approached her eighteenth birthday and all that brought. But to intentionally splatter me wasn’t like her.

“What’s wrong?” I encouraged her as I got into position, gripping the scale she was cutting so that I could pull it away from Bessa as Meg cut deeper. When she’d gotten halfway down the scale, I’d support its weight so that it didn’t peel off and damage the meat beneath.

“What’s wrong?” Sarcasm edged her voice as her blade cut deeper and faster. Protocol dictated that she slice slowly rather than saw coarsely into the scale, removing it gently. Then I’d replace her with the cleaversaw to get deep into the tissue from the outside, cleaving to the bone so that we could both edge around it to remove the lean, working muscle cleanly, preserving as much flavoring from the tendons as we could.

Cleanly, as if it didn’t involve draining a living thing of liters of blood.

But Meg was mad, and she didn’t stick to protocol.

Meg shouldered through the hard clot of Bessa’s epidermis scales and sank into the dermis flesh beneath it. Fresh arterial blood sprinkled the air, raining down on us, the platform, and a dozen more butchers cutting the length and breadth of Bessa’s enormous body. The liters spraying from her at any given moment were little more than the bites of parasites. What would have killed any of us in moments barely registered. But enough blood loss would collapse even a twenty-meter-tall demigod, if the loss wasn’t properly regulated by the cocktail of alchemics being pumped into her spine, stomach, and kidneys by the masters.

Meg’s cut tipped the delicate balance, and Bessa’s whole body quaked, straining the platforms anchored into her bones. Wood cracked below us. I grasped at the railing, but slipped on slick blood underfoot, wrenching my knee. Meg’s hand snatched out and caught me by the forearm before I fell.

Suddenly, Bessa stilled, alchemics readjusted for the mishap. One of the overseers shined a spotlight on the geyser from the platform twenty meters above, drawn to blood like a vulture.

“Artery damage!” called the overseer. “Deduction levied to butcher Meg and apprentice Paprick.”

“Confirmed, three percent!” replied another.

Black sludge splashed over the wound. An instant later, a gout of flames set the sludge aflame, cauterizing the wound and proving that the Enduring Defense Branch, the king’s secret police, had a carver among the overseers to channel Endurance.

“Look what you’ve done now!” Meg shouted over Bessa’s pained roar.

“Me? I didn’t do a starving thing.”

“You never do! Do you know what that three percent cost me?”

I did. But I wasn’t in the mood to apologize, not for something I hadn’t done. “I’m not the one holding the saw.” I punctuated the words by wrestling control of the cut away from her, forcing her blade to the proper angle by heaving my weight into the scale and tilting it up.

The flatsaw sank the final meter toward my ankle. Meg yanked it away in a huff so that I could drop the severed scale away into the offal and waste below. With the scale removed, about a third of Bessa’s forearm shank glistened sanguine under the factory’s dull red chandeliers. Individual muscle fibers thick as my arm interweaved as capillaries beat.

The first time I saw it, Bessa’s exposed muscle mesmerized me. The enormous pressure of her heart moving all that blood. How it rushed then stopped and rushed then stopped. Then a master had cut a small artery no bigger than my hand and sprayed all of us with blood. I vomited into my suit. That had been near the sirloin though, where the muscle was tender and marbled with lack of work. The forearm shank, even strung up in the enormous contraption of leather the factory suspended her in, was tight working muscle.

We had five more scales to remove before we could remove the shank. The total portion would feed the army for a day or two if butchered properly. Which I would be sure to do. We’d already had a deduction. If we wanted any chance of making a dent in the debt we earned at birth, the shank would have to come away clean and whole.

“Cleaversaw’s covered in blood,” I complained, noticing gore stuck in the grooves of its handle. I was no knifehead, obsessed with having the cleanest saw and using it for precisely the right cut, but I knew better than to hold a giant slicing instrument when it was wet with blood. By the time I had it clean, Meg had produced a small pocketknife and cut three slices of shank from the greater mass. None was longer or wider than my hand, but each was worth a few hundred gold knuckles on the black market. More if you knew how to get it to the rebels.

“I said I wasn’t down for this!” I whispered, hurrying to block any overseers—or worse, the EDB carver—that might see her. “How’d you even get that in here?”

Meg ignored me as she shoved a fourth slice into her apron pocket.

“They’ll notice!” My hand snapped to her wrist, but she leveled the knife at my gut, low and out of sight.

“Meg,” I said cautiously. “Walk me through this. Those...