CHAPTER 33: TERMS OF SERVICE

Varnwick was as ordinary as a wound, ugly with the business of healing.

They reached its outskirt at the cruel edge of sunrise, boots tacky with road mud and the dog’s fur clotted in burrs.

Apollo watched the humped silhouettes of barns and blockhouses inch closer through the mist, all rendered in the same washed-out ochre, as if the world had grown bored of inventing new shades for disappointment.

Lyra broke first, boots quickening as the flatness drew up around them, then she slackened pace, the careful economy of someone not eager to arrive so much as to see what the town would take from them.

Nik trudged with his hands in his pockets, the angle of his chin defiant, while Thorin lagged, shoulders set and mouth bracketed in pale irritation.

The dog did not run ahead, not here; it limped beside Apollo, occasionally glancing up as if to check that the world was still worth the trouble.

Varnwick’s main street ran the length of a half-dried canal, everything arranged in lines so straight it stung the eye.

There were no guards at the edge, only a pair of children with matching burn scars, one playing at shooting the other with a crossbow he’d fashioned from a splinter of chair leg.

The buildings were recent, built for holding rather than shelter: mudbrick and tar, roofs weighted against wind by dead stove parts and bundles of stone.

Only the lantern posts offered a nod to beauty, they curled in wrought iron spirals, painted with the old city’s badge: three silver fish, one missing its head.

Apollo caught the stink of sulfur, then the subtler reek of boiled mutton somewhere up the channel.

He reached for his coat’s collar and straightened it, not for warmth but because the habit of pretense was harder to shed than most.

They cut for the nearest hostel, a blockhouse whose sign, "The Iron Turnip", comically literal, the carving was of a root with rivets hammered through its skin, hung by the mercy of a single rope.

The common room was busy with the sort of men who did not argue with knives, and the proprietress was as gray and cold as the sod outside, her left hand ending bluntly in a stretch of leather thong.

She looked at Lyra, then at the dwarf, then at Apollo, her eyes lingering not on any wound, but on the way he did not bother to hide his limp.

"Room and board," she stated, not a question.

Nik grinned as if he liked her, which was the closest he came to honesty. "Just the room. We’ll handle our own food." He passed over a coin he’d soldered back together days ago.

The woman flipped it once, then tucked it into a steel box behind the bar. "Stairs up. You’ll share the floor with two other parties: wagoners on contract, and a party of Glassmar runners that lost their pass. Don’t expect quiet."

Nothing in her face said "welcome," but Apollo found the lack of curiosity preferable to the cultivated suspicion of the last three towns.

He followed Nik up, the stair creaking under their collective hunger. The room was little more than a shelf with mats, but it was dry, and the walls thick enough to make an argument with the neighbors unlikely.

They dropped packs and, by silent majority, ignored the thin woollen blankets stacked in the corner. The last time they’d trusted a hostel’s bedding, Lyra had spent two days digging out mites with the edge of a sewing needle.

Thorin sank to the mat, boots still on. "If I don’t get a drink, I’ll sleep until the world coughs up the sun," he mumbled. His breathing went raw and even before the words finished.

Apollo sat, legs extended, and took mental inventory: shoes wet but whole, nothing to eat that wasn’t dried to the density of horn, dog already curled at his feet. The gold itch under his skin had abated since the basin, but not enough to forget.

Nik did not bother to remove his coat, just lay back and stared up at the soot-stained beams. For a while, nobody said anything.

There was an unspoken hope that quiet would suffice as healing, or at least as penance for the trouble it had cost to reach this far.

Apollo spent the morning counting the town’s noises. There were none of the city’s bells or the ritual shouting of watchmen. Instead, every few minutes came the thump of something heavy hitting water.

Once, the muffled scream of a pig. By noon, most of the commerce under their window had resolved into the shuffling of ration crates and the scrape of boots on stone dust.

He tested the air: no trace of the cult’s haze, nor the perfumed sick of bounty runners. For a moment he let himself believe they had vanished, ghosted, as Nik liked to say. He knew better, but the luxury of wishing cost nothing here.

Lyra went out first, returning with a packet of orange root and a side-eye that said she’d found nothing but upcharged thread and rumor.

Nik took Thorin’s coin and spent the afternoon negotiating in the taproom. Apollo watched the dog, which had taken to sleeping with its nose jammed between the boards; he wondered if the animal could smell trouble before he could, or if it just liked the dark.

By evening, Lyra had patched the holes in Nik’s coat, and Nik had managed to return from the common room without new injuries or invitations to duel.

He sat on the mat facing Apollo and offered, as if in apology, a glass of something that looked like spit and tasted like the inside of an old pipe.

"They’re asking about us," Nik said, half closing his eyes. "They don’t care about the girl, and they think Thorin is dead. But there’s noise about a ’ghost-physician’ with a price on his head."

Apollo shrugged. "They want what we gave to the Broker, or what’s left of it."

Nik’s grin was mechanical. "Nobody asks *why* anymore. Just who, and how much." He leaned in. "They described your hair. Said if anyone brings it back attached, there’s a bonus."

Lyra snorted, but did not look up from the thread.

Later, as dusk thickened and the hostel took on the dull shine of a temporary cathedral, Apollo slipped out to find supplies. The town’s main shop was wedged between a livery and a public house.

The shelves glistened with jars of yellow fat, old preserves, and bottles of folk medicine: "Guaranteed to cure twelve fevers," said one, the label half-rotted.

The man at the counter wore a scarf to hide the ruins of his throat, but his eyes, blue, and uncomfortably patient, said he was not as helpless as he wished to seem.

Apollo bought dried bandage, two lengths of needles, and a cask of dog tallow, then, on impulse, asked for the "cleanest painkiller" available.

The shopkeep reached beneath the counter and brought up a glass vial, the stopper ringed in wax but the contents so clear they seemed to amplify the light. "This one’s dear," the man whispered, voice like wind behind a wall. "Last of the batch, but if you need less, you can pay in kind."

Apollo slid over the last of their silver, but the man caught his wrist and held it a second longer than necessary. The touch was clinical, but Apollo recognized the pressure: someone checking for a pulse, or for the current of something better.

"Do you know what’s coming?" the man asked, words so soft the air dampened them before they could carry.

Apollo met the stare. "I know what’s chasing."

The shopkeep let go, but not without a parting glance at the veins in Apollo’s wrist, where even now a trace of the gold shimmered beneath the skin.

Then he wrapped the bundle and handed it over, bowing slightly without lowering his gaze. Apollo took the package and left, the cold outside feeling almost like relief.

Back at the hostel, Lyra and Nik sat by the filthy window, splitting a heel of bread and watching the lanterns ignite across the far shore.

Thorin had not moved, except to turn his face to the wall. The dog’s tail thumped as Apollo entered, but only once.

They ate in silence, the new supplies dulling none of the fatigue.

The next morning, a thin layer of rime had iced over every window. Apollo woke to the sound of hissing below, followed by a rhythmic knocking on the stairwell.

He pressed his ear to the mat and listened: the steps were too careful for a bounty runner, too heavy for one of the town’s pages.

At the door, Lyra slid a knife from her sleeve and gestured for quiet. The knock came again, insistent now. Nik groaned, rolled to his feet, and opened the door just enough to peer out.

A woman stood on the threshold, shawl wound twice over her chin and mouth. Her eyes were mottled hazel, lid creased by old injury, the left side squinting as if the bone beneath had never set quite right.

She held a folder of parchment in her hands, the top page signed with a seal Apollo couldn’t identify.

She glanced at Nik, then at the others, and without warning pushed the folio into his chest. "For the one who calls himself Physician," she said, voice nasal, clear, and unimpressed. "And a warning: if you plan to leave, do it before the road unfreezes."

Nik accepted the package, shut the door, and offered it to Apollo with a little flourish. "Mail call."

The folio was light. Apollo cracked the seal, peeled back the top page. It was a sketch, well-made, the lines of his jaw and brow rendered with an artist’s affection for intimate hurt.

Below, a list of known associates, starting with Lira and "one injured dwarvish, possibly deceased." There was a clause at the bottom, inked in red: IF SALVAGEABLE, DELIVER TO MARKET UNINJURED.

"The reward’s doubled since last week," Nik said. "I checked."

Apollo folded the folio, creased it, and set it under his pack. "We leave in two days," he said, then hesitated, feeling the weight of something watching. "East."

That night, Apollo dreamed of the well in the city, of a bowl deep enough to hold the whole of the world’s memory. He saw hands reaching for him, sometimes Lyra’s, sometimes his own, the gold in his veins leaking from his skin and pooling at the bottom where it congealed into something bright and cold. He woke with a start, the dog’s head pressed to his throat.

On the last morning, Nik tested the air and declared the freeze had begun to lift. They packed their things. Apollo pulled the folio from his bag, tore out the portrait, and fed it to the coal stove in the corner. The paper smoked, then curled, then split into a blackened ring of ash.

They left Varnwick without looking back, the sun just a pale bruise on the eastern horizon. At the edge of town, Apollo saw a fresh notice nailed to the post: a blank page, stamped only in the bottom corner with three silver fish.

He kept walking, Lyra and Nik flanking him, the dog alert for whatever came next.

’Not an end,’ Apollo thought, not quite ready to admit it even as the morning lapped at his boots. ’Just a new set of rules.’

He walked east, always east, certain that—whatever waited—this time, he would not walk alone.