Chapter 21: Blackbleed!!
Kael woke with his left hand buried under Vaela’s knife. The blade was not cutting him. Not yet. Its edge rested against the black line burned across his palm, steady enough to split skin if he twitched wrong. A strip of furnace cloth was wrapped around her other hand. Her eyes were half closed from lack of sleep, but the knife did not shake.
Orrek sat against a cracked wall three steps away, breathing through his teeth. His ruined shoulder had swollen under Renn’s dirty binding until the cloth looked ready to burst. Renn crouched beside two sleeping workers, counting ribs by sight and muttering numbers like curses. The dead cart they had stolen stood in the corner of the abandoned ash stable.
Its wheels were packed with old meat. Its boards still smelled like rot, pressure oil, and the sour liquid used to keep corpses from stiffening before sale.
Kael lifted his head.
Vaela pressed the knife a hair closer.
"Do not move fast."
The warning carried no softness. That made it easier to trust. Vaela did not pretend fear was friendship, and she did not pretend the knife was mercy.
Kael looked at his palm.
Black fluid leaked from the Hollow Court mark. It did not run like blood. It crawled like law ichor pretending to be oil. Thick, glossy, and cold, it pushed itself out of the cracked brand in slow beads before flattening into thin lines across his skin.
Each line tried to form a shape. A circle. A hook. A little open mouth.
Kael curled his fingers.
The fluid pushed back.
His tendons tightened. Pain climbed through his wrist and bit into his elbow. The mark was not only burned into skin. It had sunk deeper, wrapped around nerves, and found something under the flesh it wanted to claim. Even Court law needed a wet place to grip.
"That thing moved while you slept," Vaela said.
"How long?"
"Long enough for me to decide whether cutting the hand off was smart."
Orrek opened one eye.
"Was it?"
"No," Vaela said. "But only because I do not know if the mark would crawl to his stump and laugh at us."
Renn looked up from the workers.
"It pointed north twice. Then down. Then it started dripping."
Kael sat up slowly. His ribs ground against each other under the skin. The allocation from the Lower Court intake had made him stronger, but it had not made him whole. Strength sat inside broken meat like a heated nail. Every breath reminded him that he had been dragged, bitten, crushed, hooked, and claimed by people who kept failing to keep him down.
The black fluid gathered near the base of his thumb.
It rose.
A thin needle of pressure pushed from his palm, no longer than a fingernail. It angled toward the stable door. Vaela’s face tightened.
"Tracking claim."
Kael looked at her.
"You know it?"
"Corpse market used weaker versions. Body owners marked debt runners and dead stock. This is lower Court branchwork. Higher than market. Cleaner. Meaner."
"Can it hear?"
"Maybe. Can it smell? Probably. Can it lead hunters? Absolutely."
The needle pulsed.
THUD!
Something answered far away.
Not a sound in the air. A pressure knock under the floor. The ash stable’s old boards trembled once. Dust shook from the wall and fell over Orrek’s boots.
The sleeping workers jolted awake.
One of them, a narrow boy with a split lip, clapped both hands over his mouth before he could cry out.
Renn stood too fast and nearly fell.
"That was not close."
Vaela swallowed.
"No. That is worse. Close hunters make noise. Court things announce ownership from a distance. They want the marked body to panic first."
Kael stared at the mark.
The black fluid slowly sank back into his palm. He felt the urge to spend shards like a fist trying to punch through his own chest. Twenty five unallocated shards sat inside the Sovereign Root, waiting for command. He could push more into resistance.
Into density. Into speed. He could make the pain smaller and the next impact easier to survive.
But the last time he had spent, it had been under an intake pull that tried to drag his existence into the Hollow Court’s mouth. That had been a real threat. This was anger. This was fear with teeth.
He would not feed the system with panic.
"No allocation," he said.
The words cost more than the pain. Vaela had the knife. Orrek had blood in his teeth. Renn had two workers breathing because Kael had not become a system reflex every time fear touched him.
Vaela stared at him like he had insulted mathematics.
"That hand is leaking Court filth and you are saving strength?"
"I do not know what they are sending."
"Exactly why you spend."
"Exactly why I wait."
Orrek gave a rough laugh that turned into a cough.
"Hate that he makes sense."
Renn moved to Kael and reached for the hand. He stopped before touching it.
"Does it hurt?"
Kael flexed his fingers. The mark pulled back like a hook tied to a wall.
"Yes."
"Can you fight?"
Kael stood.
His knees wanted to buckle. They did not. His feet spread on the warped boards and the ground answered with a small pressure creak. The mark pulsed again, but the rest of him held.
"I can break what reaches us."
The narrow boy began to shake.
"They will take us back."
Nobody answered him quickly. That was the ugly part. Everybody in the room knew the Hollow Court did not only take bodies. It took claims. It took names off ledgers and wrote them onto skin. It turned hunger into property and called the result order.
Vaela wiped her knife on her sleeve.
"We cannot stay. The mark points too clean. If it has a line, hunters will follow the line."
"Where?" Renn asked.
Vaela took the map bone from her belt and laid it on an overturned feed box. The bone was yellow black, etched with route cuts and tiny Court symbols. One end had cracked after the pulse. The crack now matched Kael’s palm mark, line for line.
Orrek leaned forward, grimacing.
"Dead road."
Vaela nodded.
"Old corpse route under the intake levels. Used to move bodies that owed tax after death. Nobody sane takes it unless they are already marked, wanted, or too poor for living roads."
"So us," Renn said.
"So us."
Kael looked at the map bone.
The dead road did not lead straight to the Hollow Court. It curved beneath it, through old toll throats and abandoned marrow counters, then split toward lower service gates. A bad road. A cruel road. A road meant for cargo that could not complain.
The mark on his hand pulsed toward it.
THUD!
This time the knock came stronger.
One of the dead cart wheels cracked.
CRACK!
The workers flinched. Orrek dragged himself up with his uninjured arm, teeth bared at the pain. Vaela slid the map bone away and kicked ash over the feed box to hide the shape.
Kael stepped to the stable door.
Outside, Furnace Sink Nine breathed in layers of smoke. Pressure rain hissed from pipes overhead. Far down the alley, a black lantern swung where no person stood.
It blinked once.
Then it went out.
Renn whispered, "Court scout?"
Vaela shook her head.
"No. A notice."
Kael’s palm opened without his permission. Black fluid rose from the mark and shaped itself into three tiny hooks pointing toward the dark.
The air tasted like rust and old law.
Kael closed his fist until the skin split around the brand.
DRIP!
Black pressure and red blood fell together onto the stable floor. The mark tried to pull his hand open again.
Kael pulled back harder.
The boards under his feet groaned.
"Tell the workers," he said. "Anyone who comes with us walks now. Anyone who stays hides deep and forgets our faces."
Vaela studied him.
"And if the mark drags hunters straight through them?"
Kael looked into the alley where the black lantern had vanished.
"Then we stop being easy to follow."
Orrek smiled with blood on his teeth.
"That sounds like a bad plan."
"It is."
Kael stepped out into the pressure rain.
Vaela made them test the mark before leaving. Not with courage. With caution. She took a rusted nail from the stable wall, tied it to a strip of cloth, and lowered it toward Kael’s palm as if feeding a sleeping insect. The black pressure did not move until the nail touched the edge of the bandage.
Then the mark opened.
The nail bent without sound. Its tip twisted toward the same direction as the black needle, north and down, before the metal collapsed into flakes.
PFFT!
Renn stared at the dust.
"It is not only following a road. It is changing things that touch the claim."
"Then it will make its mark," Orrek said. "We needed worse."
Vaela picked up a splinter of cart wood and repeated the test. The wood did not rot. It stiffened, darkened, and tried to point. Kael watched every piece of it.
The mark did not bite everything the same way. Metal folded. Wood obeyed. Cloth drank the black pressure and became a little colder.
Skin hurt. The road wanted a living carrier, but it could use dead things as signs. That meant any blood trail, bandage scrap, broken nail, or torn cloth from him could become a finger for the Court.
"Burn what I leave behind," Kael said.
Renn looked at the workers.
"With what fire?"
Kael took the bent nail dust, closed it in his fist, and ground it into the floor until red blood mixed with black pressure.
"Then bury it under worse filth. Make the road work for every inch."
The Hollow Court mark burned cold in his fist, pointing the way like a chain that had mistaken itself for a command. Above the dead stable, somewhere beyond stone, pipe, and old ownership law, something knocked back.
The workers heard it and looked at Kael as if the sound had come from inside his bones. Maybe it had. He did not correct them. Fear needed a direction, and tonight he was cruel enough to give it one.
THUD!