The Golden Fool
Chapter 17: What Bleeds, Runs

Chapter 17: What Bleeds, Runs

Apollo numbly wiped his hands, then Thorin’s shoulder, then the table, but the blood kept coming, no matter where he looked.

He fought the urge to retch, focusing instead on the line in the grain of the table, the flick of Lyra’s hands as she scrubbed down surfaces with salt and water and a stain of blue that would not come out, no matter how she tried.

By the time the room was clean enough to fake innocence, Thorin had levered himself upright, cradling his arm as if it were a new, sullen animal.

The wound seemed to be clotting; Apollo would check it again at dusk, if they lasted that long.

Nik had dragged Cassian’s body to the rear, swaddled in a tarp and wedged behind a pile of kiln bricks.

The others, Lyra’s blue-tumor corpse, the two crossbowmen, heaved out the back and into the sopping salt marsh, where they would feed the rats and the crows.

Lyra stripped off her shirt, ragged now and dyed from blood to a bruised purple.

She changed into a new one without shame, then found a bottle of something clear and bitter at the bench. She poured three shots, Apollo, Nik, and herself.

None for Thorin, who shook his head, already hating the taste of the healing spirits Apollo would be pouring into him next.

"There’s no time," Lyra said, voice low, barely above the hiss of wind against the patched glass. "Cassian came too quick. There’s a leak."

Nik leaned back, arms slung over the bench, as if the violence had been a kind of massage.

"So we run. Old roads, like before. Shift south. We can cut past the marsh, take the fishers’ path, nobody sane will look for us there. Give it time, the stink of Cassian will bring more trouble to the Blackhearts than to us."

Thorin glared at the floor. "We can’t just run. Not unless we torch the shop first. Too many eyes know this place. If they’re hunting a healer and his friends, they’ll check every dead drop on this side of the city."

Apollo listened, the map Othra had given him unrolling behind his eyelids.

The city beyond the marsh was a web of ruin, old fortress towns and tangled, half-collapsed aqueducts.

To the east: more marsh, then the river, then a blank, fever-stained wilderness said to be haunted by the remnants of the old empire, heretics and fanatics, and things that even hunger would not chase.

He tried to picture running. It didn’t feel like survival. It felt like deferral.

"We can’t keep moving," he said. "Not forever. They’ll catch us, or the world will eat us, or both. We need...." He trailed off, unable to name what he needed. Rest? Pastoral peace? A point?

Lyra’s laugh was abrupt. "You sound like a child. The world never lets you stop moving. Unless you prefer to be hunted."

Apollo studied her. The line of her jaw, the practiced stillness. Was that what he looked like, to Othra? To Liska? Just a cutout, learning to pass as alive for as long as necessary.

He pressed the heel of his palm to his eye and waited for the ache to subside. It didn’t.

"What did Cassian mean about the buyer not caring if I’m in one piece?" he asked. "You seemed to know."

Nik shrugged, studied his own battered knuckles. "They like their healers, the syndicates. Not for healing people, mind. For breaking them."

He drummed his fingers, as if unsure how much to say. "Half the torturers in the city are failed medics. The rest were just good learners."

Apollo let his breath out through his teeth. "I’ve never killed such a....man," he said, surprised at the absence of shame in the admission whilst having trouble finding the correct word. "But I’m starting to think there’s a first time for everything."

"Not always a choice," Lyra replied. In the morning light, her face looked bleached, almost translucent. "Sometimes you’re just the only one left who can hold a blade."

Thorin grunted, then spoke without looking up. "City’s falling apart, faster than even the rats can eat it. If you want to be buried in one piece, you leave before sundown. If you don’t—" He shrugged, left the rest for silence.

Apollo stood, the movement pulling at the half-healed scars on his chest. "I need five minutes," he said, voice gone quiet. "Then we go."

He stepped into the glassworks’ side room, where the world was a haze of blue bottles and the dust of a thousand broken attempts at alchemy.

The dog followed, paws silent on the tile. Apollo went to the window, peeled back the paper shade, and looked out at the marsh.

The towers of Marrowgate already wavered in the thin heat; later, the city would be a hallucination, shimmering in the east as if only hunger and violence could hold it together.

’No prophecies,’ he told himself. ’Just the next morning, and the one after.’ The thought was less comforting than he’d hoped.

He knelt, scratched the dog behind the ears. "If you have a name," he said, "now would be a good time to share it."

The dog licked his hand once, then lay down, head resting on its own paws. Maybe it understood. Maybe it was just tired.

He packed what he could: the ointments from Lyra’s shelf, a coil of bandage, the half-bottle of clear spirits. His hands were steadier than he’d expected.

He paused at the door, and for a moment he just listened, wind in the reeds, the distant snap of a kiln cooling, the shuffle of his own breath in the hollow of his chest.

Back in the main room, Nik and Lyra had loaded Thorin into a barrow and covered him with a tarp.

The wound had stopped bleeding for now, but a red patch was blooming at the shoulder again, like the memory of fire refusing to be snuffed.

Nik grabbed the heavy end; Lyra manned the front. "We follow the canal," she said. "After a mile, there’s a breach in the marsh-wall. We’ll lose anyone tailing us in the bog."

Thorin, burrowed under the tarp, muttered, "If you stop for my sake, I’ll haunt your children."

Lyra gripped the handles tighter. "We’ll be lucky if any of us see a sunrise, let alone breed," she muttered, but she jerked her head at Apollo, and he fell in at the rear.

They kept to the canal as instructed, hugging the banks where the reeds grew shoulder-high and the mud stank of sulfur and old fish.

Apollo’s legs ached in a way that felt ancient, as if the weight of every backwards glance had re-settled in his bones. His breath steamed in front of him, and the dog padded behind, tongue lolling, ears flat to the wind.

Within minutes the glassworks was a memory, a faint cough of smoke, then nothing but the bulge of city wall and the long, low moan of wind over water.

At a shallow bend, Lyra slowed the cart and scanned the horizon, then plunged off the main path onto a barely visible trail, more water than land.

Every step was a wager; sometimes the earth held, sometimes his boot sank to the ankle in cold, black silt.

They pushed until the city was a blur behind them, until the only sound was the ragged churn of the barrow’s wheel and the wet, tired curse of those who had nothing left but running.

Thorin’s breathing, already rough, went ragged and shallow before they’d made half a mile.

The color had drained out of his lips, his fists balled and unballed under the tarp. Apollo said nothing, but kept one hand on the barrow’s rim, counting the heartbeats and the slow, bad thrum of heat coming off the wound.

At the first stunted willow that looked like it might stand a wind, Lyra called a halt. "He’s leaking again," she said, and didn’t wait for argument.

Nik and Apollo wrestled Thorin out and onto the grass.

The dwarf batted at their hands, then tried to sit up, but the left arm hung useless and the right only mopped sweat from his brow.

"Didn’t think it’d be the marsh," he managed, voice slurred by blood and something worse, "but I suppose there’s poetry in it."

Apollo knelt and pulled the tarp back.

The bandage was soaked through, the blood now almost black in the morning light.

He peeled it away, gently, but not slow enough for sentiment, and found the wound had gone septic at the edges, the flesh ragged and hot. He looked up at Nik, who wiped his face on his sleeve and said, "We need to burn it deeper. No time for finesse."

Lyra produced a flask with a skull etched on the side. "It’s a caustic," she said, and popped the stopper. "Stole it from the glassworks’ back room. If it doesn’t fix you, it’ll at least kill whatever’s living in there."

Apollo steadied Thorin’s shoulder with both hands, and Nik poured a fat, yellow slug of the caustic straight into the wound.

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