CHAPTER 31: THE BOUNTY LEDGER

First, there was the stink: a lungful of boiled leather, hot iron, and the damp, mineral sweat of men who had spent half their lives underground and the rest wishing they had.

Apollo had expected fear, maybe, or suspicion at the mouth of the Smokestone Hollow, but what he found instead was commerce, raw and unfiltered, same as the arteries of any old city, only here the blood was banditry and the bones belonged to no one.

By the time they reached the outpost, the sun was already a rumor behind the pass. The path wound through a drape of moss and shale, then spat them into an antechamber domed with black glass.

All the heat from the smithies below bled upward, mixing the taste of basalt with a tang of solder and stinging glue.

Every inch of this place was a palimpsest: old trade tunnel, slave barracks, quarantine ward, and now the favorite resort of men and women who preferred to buy their futures at a discount.

Nik went first, hauling their prisoner, still faintly bleeding from a trip down the ravine, by the collar.

Lyra flanked them, one hand on her bow despite the close quarters. Thorin limped behind, eyes rolling the ceiling for murder holes or hex slits, one hand deep in his battered coat as if he could forge a new weapon by pure force of will.

They had expected guards, and there were guards, but none of the theater: just ex-mercs in quilted coats, shuffling bones or dice, not even bothering to hide their knives.

The real power here was the mathematics of desperation; Apollo could see it in the lean of every shoulder, the way the hungry stared at the healthy, and the healthy at the wounded, measuring, always.

"A welcoming committee," Nik said, too loud, because if you acted like you owned the room, nobody asked who you’d stolen it from. "We’ve got business with the broker."

A tin whistle shrilled from somewhere unseen, and the crowd parted along a seam of mutual distrust.

A young man in a grease-spattered smock scuttled up and whispered close to Nik, a message, or maybe just a price.

Nik nodded, and the man led them inward, past a slow spiral of torches burning with a blue-green flame. Apollo caught the scent, arsenic, or a cousin to it. Not poison, but certainly a warning.

They wound down three flights, each hotter than the last, until they entered a rotunda braced with iron ribs.

Here, the currency changed: every bench was taken by men in debt and women with vendettas, their eyes dancing like candlelight in a draft.

At the far end, a pit was sunk into the floor, ringed with a grill of blackened steel. Heat rolled from it, carrying upward the low, steady sound of suffering.

Nik tilted the prisoner over the grill, so his feet just grazed the rungs. The man regained consciousness with a prayer, or a joke disguised as one. "Don’t drop me," he managed. "It won’t be the fire that kills you."

Nik only smiled, bland as unseasoned porridge. "You’ve got one job left, friend. Tell us who hired you, and maybe we let you keep your ears." He glanced at Apollo, who tried not to look interested.

The man struggled, but the smell of the pit was persuasive. "I never knew names. We drew marks off the wall in the old city. Gold for the first to bring a medic with the hair and the," He blinked, peering at Apollo. "the look. They said he’d be traveling with a woman and a cripple."

Was that what he looked like, Apollo wondered? Only the hair and the look?

Lyra stepped in, her voice as sharp as the knife she always kept behind her belt. "Who runs the wall in this hollow?"

The man fought to focus, sweat crawling down his forehead in pale sheets. "Velcris. Sometimes called the Broker, sometimes just ’the Night.’ He doesn’t leave the back office. He doesn’t have to."

Thorin grunted, a noise that could have meant anything.

Nik let the prisoner down, then dropped him hard. The man landed in a heap and tried to crawl for the shadows, but one of the guards pinned him in place with a boot and a nod that said: You are a favor owed and nothing more.

The page in the spattered smock gestured them onward, not bothering with words. Apollo followed, eyes fixed on the floor to avoid catching the attention of any more desperate men with a hunger for stories, or worse.

He noticed that the deeper they went, the less the place resembled a city or a fort, and the more it felt like a confession: every corridor a wound, every iron door an attempt to stave off decay.

At the terminus, a clerk waited. Not a glamour-boy, not a scarecrow draped in threats, but a stoop-shouldered man in wire-rim glasses, ink stains down to his wrists, hands too clean for a digger or a dealer.

His face was geometric, the bones squared and the skin drawn so tight that nothing could sneak up on it from behind. His eyes were the pale, limpid blue of a man who had seen every angle and found them all, ultimately, boring.

He did not look up as they entered. "State your commodity or purchase inquiry," he said, voice flat as slate.

Lyra spat on the ground, which was not so much a gesture as a punctuation. "We’re not selling," she said. "We want to know who’s buying."

The Broker did not sigh, but Apollo felt the weight of the almost-sigh. "Clarify transaction," said the Broker, shuffling a sheaf of blood-red notes from one stack to another. "If you have a product, please provide the relevant—"

Nik leaned over the desk, close enough that a less interesting man might have flinched. "We want to see the wall," he said. "All the marks. Especially runs with a blue flag and a premium on medics."

The Broker’s face did not move, but the hands paused. He nodded, once, as if confirming a suspicion that had just become mathematically necessary. "The wall is for closers only," he said. "But I suppose you’re entitled."

He stood and walked in a way that suggested every muscle in his body had been pre-calibrated to avoid conflict, then ushered them into a side room lined in black velvet and iron.

There, on one massive sheet of hammered copper, were the marks: names, faces, sigils, all arranged in a grid tight as the seating at some cruel opera. Lyra scanned it, eyes darting from row to row.

Apollo looked for his own name, or something like it. He found nothing, then, lower down, a sketch. Not even good art, just a pale face and a washed-out halo of hair, no pupils, jaw too narrow.

The mark beside it read: "To be delivered in condition standard or better. Payment at the clerk’s discretion." The bounty below it was not a number but an emblem he hadn’t seen in decades, maybe longer: a wheel of gold, circled in blue fire.

Something in his chest ticked over, a bad spark plug, but he kept it off his face.

Nik found the same sigil, two lines down, attached to a stick-figure with the caption "Healer. No bleed. Do not cut." He snorted. "They really want you alive," he said, managing to sound impressed and disgusted in equal measure.

Thorin spat, then asked, "Who sets a bounty like that?"

The Broker shrugged. "Anonymous mark. Usually a private client. Very rare for the premium to be left blank, means the buyer is expecting to stay private, or that the commodity is worth more than the number could ever mean."

Lyra jerked her thumb at the wall. "And where do you fit in?"

The Broker smiled thinly. "I only make sure the debts get paid. It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the economy running." He gestured at Apollo. "For what it’s worth, if I were you, I’d run to the fifth district. The buyers there are less... organized."

Apollo didn’t say thank you. He just stared at the Broker, long enough to see if the man would blink, then let it drop.

Nik took a sheet of paper from the wall and folded it, tucking it into his coat. "Just in case we need the terms," he said. He glanced at Apollo, then away, as if embarrassed for both of them.

The Broker returned to his desk, already shuffling new requests, already forgetting them. "If you leave now, you’ll beat the rain," he said, voice almost pleasant.

They left. Nik did not turn back, nor did Lyra. Thorin paused at the door, as if to memorize the Broker’s face.

They followed the smoke-and-leather passage back to the upper levels, the air changing from cauldron-hot to merely suffocating. The guards ignored them on the way out, too busy with their own calculus of violence and survival.

At the mouth of the hollow, the dog waited, nose twitching. Apollo stopped and scratched behind its ears. "You’re the only one with any sense," he said, softer than he intended.

Lyra led the way east, through a chute of rock and scrub. Apollo kept his eyes on the ground, the echo of the marks on the copper wall still burning behind his eyelids.

At the second switchback, Nik threw the paper at Apollo’s chest. "Might as well read your own eulogy," he said.

Apollo let the page unfurl. The sketch this time was sharper, the description chilling in its brevity: "White Physician, also answers to Lio, last seen traveling east. High probability of magic in use. Target known to survive wounds that should kill. Capture alive at all costs."

There was nothing else. No backstory, no allegory. Just the certainty of being hunted.

He folded the page and pocketed it.

Behind him, the dog scraped at something unseen in the dirt, unearthing a second prize, a silver chain, snapped at the clasp, the kind that might once have held a coin or a keepsake.

He didn’t want to see what was attached. Not now.

Apollo walked on, the memory of the Broker’s thin smile still scraping at the inside of his skull. He wondered if the old gods would even bother at this point, or if they’d just let the market decide.

In the east, the morning waited, silent and gold and uninterrupted.

It would not stay that way for long.