The Golden Fool
Chapter 13: Bounty Paid In Full

Chapter 13: Bounty Paid In Full

Nik planted his feet, a brawler’s stance, shoulders loose, jaw relaxed, as if the violence were a second language he spoke better than his mother’s.

He met the hooded man’s eyes and, with a nimbleness that belied his bulk, whipped the brass-knuckled fist into the attacker’s temple. Bone crunched.

The garrote slackened, then spiraled to the floor alongside the man, who spasmed twice before curling up around his own blood.

Apollo had only an instant to marvel at the efficiency before the woman ducked in low, aiming a sap at Nik’s knee.

He lurched backward, swore, and caught the blow on his shin. The shock of it produced a sound halfway between laughter and a scream.

It was the masked man who came at Apollo, knife drawn, steps measured and precise. For a moment, Apollo expected the old terror, the hesitation, but what he felt was only boredom and a dull contempt.

He let the man close, let the blade come within an arm’s length, and then brought the walking stick up in a clean, classical arc, striking with the butt, not the head, so the impact rammed up through the assailant’s wrist and into the soft meat behind the jaw.

The mask fractured. Teeth snapped together with a clack like dice on a marble table.

A second, then a third strike, Apollo did not remember planning these, only the way they resolved themselves as if written in a libretto. The masked man collapsed, pawing at his ruined mouth.

The woman, momentarily off-balance, feinted at Nik again, then shifted her weight with a dancer’s discipline and thrust for Apollo’s gut.

He sidestepped, but her free hand caught him by the collar and jerked him forward. He felt the knife slide along his ribs, not quite breaking skin but close enough for the heat of it to register as pain.

He let himself be pulled, used the momentum to drive his skull into her face.

She reeled, bellowed something obscene, and staggered back into the doorframe, where Nik, already recovering, swept a leg and dropped her flat.

She hit the ground with a thud that scared the dog, the animal, situation fully grasped, lunged for the only exposed flesh: the soft inside of the woman’s thigh.

The scream that followed was robust, operatic.

Nik finished it with a pragmatic heel to the jaw.

The world went briefly quiet, save for the ringing in Apollo’s left ear and the wheeze of the dog as it savored its triumph.

The three attackers lay in a tangle, bleeding and insensate but breathing, at least for now.

"I was right," Nik said, breathless, grinning as he pried the garrote from the floor. "Not drunkards."

Apollo bent to examine the woman’s mask, then peeled it off. The features beneath were neat and flat, pale as curdled milk, the eyes a nondescript gray already glassing over with the shock.

No tattoos, no jewelry, nothing to say who she was or why she’d risked her life for this sack of rags and canned beans.

He turned her wrist, found a brand-bruise on the inside: the shape of a moth, or perhaps a serpent, burned in with the casual permanence of people who believed in neither regret nor discovery.

He rolled the woman over, ignoring the sobbing choke as air returned to her lungs. Her belt was a scavenged length of boat cord, but the buckle was custom, etched with a pattern, a lattice of barbed spirals.

He glanced at Nik, who had already stripped the mask off the first man and was rifling through his pockets with a thief’s indifference.

"Anything?" Apollo asked, voice hoarse.

Nik shook his head, but his eyes were sharp and hungry. "Too clean. No papers, no coin, not even a fucking ring." He spat, then checked the boots, the lining, even the soles. "Professional. They were paid to do it, but not to get caught."

The dog, having tasted blood, was now licking the woman’s face with a panting, half-mocking affection.

Apollo grabbed a rag from the shelf and wiped the blood from the woman’s mouth. She bit at his hand, missed, then glared up at him with a hatred so pure it was almost a relief to look at.

He leaned in, close enough to smell the copper and the cheap, acidic perfume she had smeared at her wrists. "Who sent you?" he asked, not expecting an answer.

Her lips twitched. "Does it matter?" The voice was accented, city but not local, something from the midlands, maybe, Nik would have recognized his own.

Nik had finished his search and now stood over the masked man, prodding at the ruined jaw. "You’re not from here," he said, and the certainty in his voice left no room for pretense.

"Which means you came through the south gate. Which means you’re working for the Blackhearts, or the temple, or the Wyrms. Which is it?"

The woman tried to spit, but her mouth was too dry. "We don’t have names. That’s the point."

Nik’s laugh was a single, cold bark. He knelt, knife at the woman’s throat, thumb pressed gentle as a lover to the blue pulse beneath her jaw.

"You’ll tell us, or you’ll go out with the trash. And if you think I’m bluffing, ask the crows on the field."

The woman’s jaw flexed once. "You’re wasting—" she began, but the words failed as Nik pressed harder.

The knife’s edge traced a red parenthesis beneath her chin.

"We were paid," she said at last, the bitterness cutting deeper than the blade.

"You humiliated men in the stew house. They said you’d cost them four weeks’ wage, broke one’s nose, shattered the other’s jaw. They pooled for a retaliation. The word came from the Blackhearts to make an example. That was all."

Apollo felt a faint, involuntary laugh ripple through him. "A barfight?"

Nik let up, just enough to let the woman suck in breath. "That’s how it is here. You shame a crew, they can’t just let it pass. I’m surprised it took until dawn."

The woman’s gaze flicked from Nik to Apollo. "They want you alive, healer. The rest is optional."

"Who wants me alive?" Apollo asked, and was surprised by the evenness in his voice.

In another life, such a threat would have been laughable, but here, stripped of both power and purpose, it was only the certainty that wounded him.

The woman hesitated, then shrugged against the pressure at her throat. "Your name’s on a list. They have a buyer in the city. You’re worth more than you know."

Nik’s laugh was low and almost admiring. "Well, Lio, seems you’ve got a bounty on your head. Welcome to Marrowgate."

The dog, sensing the tension ease, settled back into a wet, self-satisfied curl on the floor.

Apollo let the information settle, the edges of it fitting too neatly with the sense of being watched since arrival.

He knelt down beside the woman, saw the blood tracking from her temple into her ear, and wondered for a moment what she thought of as loyalty, or if it ran in her at all.

He took her hand, steady, deliberate, and pressed two fingers to the base of her palm. "You’ll live," he said, and meant it neither as a threat nor as comfort.

Nik wiped his blade on the woman’s sleeve, then stood and kicked the other two groaning forms into a pile near the wall.

"We can’t leave them here," he said. "If the Blackhearts find out we killed their hired trash, they’ll send worse."

Apollo nodded. "Do you have a plan?"

"Always," Nik said, and winked. "We dump them for the Watch to find. The Watch hates the Blackhearts. Nothing makes people forget a bounty like a nice, messy turf war."

He shouldered the first attacker, frail, dappled with sweat, unconscious but alive, and handed the second to Apollo, who hauled the man up with what grace he could muster.

The woman, still trembling, was left to Nik’s mercy, which turned out to be rough but not unkind. He bound her wrists, gagged her with a strip from her own shirt, and then, with a gentleness that made Apollo’s skin crawl, patted her cheek.

"You’re lucky," he said. "Some crews start with the knives."

They slipped out into the yar, avoiding the lamp-lit main road and instead threading through the frost-crusted alleys.

The city’s breath was close and wet, every shuffling step tracked by a thousand unseen eyes. Twice they ducked patrols, bands of Watchmen in dented steel, faces so young that Apollo wondered if they had ever seen a day without curfew.

Each time, Nik steered their cargo into abandoned stables or under the sagging arc of old aqueducts.

No one called after them; only the cat-quiet tread of those with more pressing deaths to attend.

They left the bodies facedown in the filth behind a tannery, with a brick tied to the hooded man’s legs and a note, scrawled in Nik’s gnarled handwriting, pinned to the woman’s jerkin: "Bounty paid in full."

The Watch would find them by daybreak, and if fortune favored, the Blackhearts and the law would busy themselves with mutual vengeance while Nik and Apollo found somewhere to vanish.

They returned to the lean-to just before the city’s last bells.

The dog, unsentimental, had already soiled the floor and eaten half its blanket in nervous hunger.

Nik fed it the trimmings from a charred ham, then wrapped his knuckles in boiled linen, humming what might have been a lullaby if sung by a man who had never once been a child.

Apollo sat, shaking, on the cot and forced himself to breathe. The blood on his hands was cold, clotted under his fingernails.

Nik stretched out on the floorboards, eyes open to the slats in the tin roof. "We’ll need to run at first light," he said. "Out the east gate, before word spreads. You’ll need a cloak, or something to hide your face. The bounty’s real, but the buyer’s likely worse than the cutthroats. If you want to live, you follow my lead."

Apollo nodded. "Understood. Where are we going?"

Nik closed his eyes, as if visualizing the map of the world beyond Marrowgate.

"Out past the marsh, there’s an old glassworks. Friend of mine keeps a safehouse there, well, safe enough for our purposes. She’s a touch strange, but reliable." He grinned. "You’ll like her. She’s got a thing for lost causes."

The dog, finished with its meal, circled once and flopped onto Apollo’s feet. He let the animal’s warmth seep into him, and when he closed his eyes, sleep arrived not as a luxury but as a blunt force.

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