CHAPTER 30: ASHMEAD PASS

The cold had teeth. It chewed their ears and the webs between their fingers as they picked their way along the broken flagstones to Ashmead Pass.

Even the dog, which had grown a husk of gray fur since the city, kept its snout low and refused to whimper. The mountain above was a god’s jaw, every cusp and precipice stark in the brittle dawn.

Apollo walked point, not because he was the bravest or the strongest, but because the others trusted his need to keep moving forward, an optimist’s compulsion, Lyra had once called it, and meant as an insult.

The carved arch of Ashmead at first looked like little more than two fallen slabs, but as they closed on it Apollo saw the concavity in the keystone: a basin, scorched black with old fire, brimming now with a snowmelt slurry that stank of rotten kelp.

Nik spat into the bowl as they passed, muttering, "Offer your libation, see if the Bastard answers."

But he cast a glance upward all the same, as if the ghost of the old war might drop a stone just for spite.

Lyra, close behind, tested every step, eyes always on the cracks, the switchbacks, the places a body could hunker down and wait with a crossbow or a blessing. She kept a knife palmed, the blade’s edge wrapped in a rag to hide its flash.

Thorin, bringing up the rear, made a show of disinterest, but Apollo could hear the way his boots scuffed and paused at every patch of shadow.

The dwarf’s arm was healed, Apollo had made sure of that, burning his own reserves to knit flesh and mend bone, but the ordeal had hollowed something else in Thorin, left a new space for hate or hope or both.

At the first switchback, Nik pointed out the kill holes set into the cliff face, a geometry of violence so precise it mocked the randomness of the war.

"Ardent campaign," Nik said, tapping a finger to the blackened rim of one aperture. "They say the first three companies through were all turned to glass. Only the bones stayed brittle. Rest of the Watch didn’t even stop to clean up."

Lyra grunted, unimpressed. She’d seen worse, or at least believed she had. The dog circled her boots, then bolted a few steps up the trail, nose working the wind. It stopped at a shallow ditch, tail stiff.

Apollo caught up, crouched, and found the grave: a pit not even chest-deep, ringed with stones, the body inside no more than gristle and a clump of yellow hair, all frosted over. The teeth had been pulled, and the left boot was gone.

"Recent," Apollo said, not expecting anyone to answer. He moved on, pushing the others with the nervous energy of a man who knew that the pass was never truly empty.

The climb steepened. The switchbacks narrowed until Lyra and Nik had to walk single file. The cut in the mountain was not natural, but no engineer had cared to gift it symmetry. Snow sat in uneven shelves where the wind lost its nerve.

On the third shelf, Nik paused and cocked his head. "Hear that?" he whispered. Apollo heard nothing, the wind, a distant thrum of falling rock, the tick of his own heart. Then, as if conjured by the memory, a faint clicking, not unlike the sound at the well in the basin.

The dog stiffened, then slunk back, ears down.

Lyra dropped to one knee and scanned ahead. Apollo did the same, he found himself behind a fan of broken stone, the grooves scored with something sharp and recent. He peered around the edge.

Half a dozen men, poorly hidden, clustered against the lee of a crumbling bunker. Not Watch, cultists, maybe, but with none of the religious rags or makeshift paint Apollo had learned to fear.

No banners, no insignia, only mismatched coats and a desperation that made even their silence hurt. Two held rifles, but the others clutched iron bars or hatchets.

Apollo ducked, blinking away the pulse in his vision. ’We don’t have enough blood or anything for a stand.’

He felt for the aether inside him, the gold line that had lately begun to itch under his skin the way the old wound in his thigh used to. It was low, always low now, but it was something.

He edged closer to Lyra, spoke so only she could hear. "Never seen them before. Not Watch, not Blackhearts."

She nodded, then signaled with two fingers, hold, wait.

Nik was already sliding back, careful, ready to run. Thorin just set his jaw and looked for a rock heavy enough to turn into a hammer.

They waited. The sun crept up another finger-width, painting the switchback in a color between jaundice and new cheese.

The men ahead shifted, one stamping his feet, another picking his nose with a finger black with frostbite. Apollo wondered if they even wanted to fight, or if this was just where the world had left them, exiled into violence for lack of anything else.

Then the dog, as if resentful of the tension, barked.

Everything happened at once: the men ahead raised their weapons, the bows coughed, and the dog vanished behind a drift. Lyra hurled a knife, pegged the nose-picker through the cheek, and Nik, instead of running, launched himself over the ridge and came down on the nearest bowman with both knees. The arrow went wide, ricocheted off the stone and sizzled the air past Apollo’s ear.

He moved without thinking, the way he might move in a memory, down, across, eyes locked on the one with the hatchet.

He caught the swing on his forearm, felt the numbing crack of bone, but with the same motion drove his other hand into the man’s throat. There was a soft, wet crunch, and the man went down, hatchet spinning end over end into the snow.

Thorin, true to form, found his rock and lobbed it underhand. It struck one of the last two men square in the shin, dropping him to his knees. The other, holding the remaining bow, fumbled the load and only managed to shoot himself in the foot..

Nik and Lyra finished the job, no theatrics. By the time the echoes stilled, three of the men were dead, one was crawling for the edge, and the last two just lay in the snow, waiting to see if death would bother with them.

Apollo checked his forearm: the bone wasn’t broken, just bruised, but the pain was an absolute, something pure in a world of counterfeits.

He bound it with a rag, then scanned the bodies, looking for insignia, messages, anything to pin a reason to this.

He found it on the throatless man, tucked under his shirt: a note in the old tongue, a list of names. Apollo recognized none of them. The date was today. The place: Ashmead Pass.

He passed it to Lyra, who read it, then grunted. "Bounty," she said. "But not for us. Target is... ’the White Physician.’" She looked up, green eyes cutting through the haze. "That mean you?"

He nodded, and for a moment it was like the world had stopped bleeding, just to focus in on that fact. ’Not just a runaway now. Not even a heretic. Something worse.’ He tried to remember when he’d last been anyone else.

They spent the next hour burying the bodies, because Apollo insisted, and because the gods of Ashmead were too old to care about hygiene. Thorin used the dead man’s hatchet to break up the frozen ground, and Nik found a flask of something sickly sweet on one of the corpses, which he shared with the others in lieu of a eulogy.

Afterward, Apollo climbed to the top of the old bunker and looked out. The pass zigzagged down into a valley tangled in fog, but he could see, just barely, the next ring of defense works: another killing ground, another set of bunkers, another place where men became stories or stains.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment he let the aether rise; it made a light behind his eyelids, a memory of warmth that felt like the promise of a new muscle in the heart. He wondered if he’d ever have enough to use it again, and what it would cost next time.

The others joined him, their silhouettes jagged against the pale sky. Lyra, arms folded, hair a flag in the wind. Nik, stripping the last useful gear from one of the corpses. Thorin, already starting down the next switchback, because a mountain didn’t care if you were tired or missing half a soul.

Apollo thought of the city, the bowl, the word scratched into its heart: Finish. He had no idea what it meant, or whether the world would let him do it. But he found himself, for the first time, wanting to try.

He started down the path, the dog at his heels. The frost bit, but he let it. The hurt was real, and for now, real was enough.