The slurry pressed his chest when he got one arm flat and pushed. He came upright with the bog releasing his knee in a wet suction pull, then pushed south from the palisade line into the dark under the canopy.
He pulled the healer's kit from his belt, fighting the brass catch with one hand. The linen inside was soaked through from the bog plunge. He tore a strip free with his teeth, wrung it against his palm until the worst of the caustic water had gone, pressed the damp strip across his mouth and nose, and knotted the tails at the base of his skull. The wet cloth barely worked. What came through tasted acidic and thick, the bog-gas pooling at surface level under the windless canopy.
[ FILTER: INADEQUATE ]
[ SPORE EXPOSURE: MODERATE ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: PROPER FACE WRAP. OR A CLASS WITH LUNG RESISTANCE. LACKING BOTH, THEN.
He moved south along the root line in half-strides, his boot-toe reading the ridge below the slurry before each step. The locked knee ground through each push-off at its bad angle. The scabbard knocked his hip with every stride, and he'd long since stopped hearing it.
[ INQUISITION WAR-HOUNDS: ACTIVE ]
[ SCENT: BLOOD / IRON-WEED PASTE ]
MOVING HELPS. MARGINALLY.
The bog's load thickened with every hundred yards south of the palisade. The alkaline sharpened from a background burn to a persistent bite on his tongue with each draw through the wet cloth. His chest worked harder against the restriction, the muscles around the old rib fracture demanding he breathe shallow. He ignored them, forcing each full draw out against the resistance and taking the complaint that came with it.
He pressed two fingers against the outside of his coat over the inner pocket. The flat face of the Banker's Weight was there, and beside it the cartographer's disc, bone-carved, its calibration grooves worn almost to nothing at the rim. He'd been given it by a dying surveyor fourteen months ago in the wastes, and he kept it because he was superstitious about tools that had kept someone alive.
The surveyor had found him first, as it happened. Salt flats, deep winter, Vane three days without water and sitting down in a way that wasn't going to end with him standing up again. The old man had dragged him into the lee of a cairn, pushed a charcoal-lined waterskin into his hands, and talked at him all night about grooves and bearings and nothing at all, because a man being talked at kept answering, and a man answering stayed awake.
Six weeks they'd walked together after that. The surveyor checked the disc in the dark every hour, whether he needed a bearing or not. Fear's a bill, he'd said, the one time Vane asked why. Don't pay it early. Check the tool, count your steps, and let the bill wait.
Then the flats had opened under him one grey morning, and Vane had spent most of a day getting down to where he'd landed, and the old man had pressed the disc into his palm before the end like he'd been waiting for someone to give it to. Vane had never asked his name. By the time it mattered, there'd been nobody left to ask.
He left both where they were and moved his hand to the root ahead.
[ STRESS ASSET: QUEUED ]
[ ARCHIVE: DRAGO. FACE. BLISTERED. ]
READY WHEN YOU ARE.
The dead canopy sealed tight overhead, branches locked into a flat mat with no gap for the grey morning. He navigated by the pale columns of the trunks and the root ridges his boots found below the slurry. Between the trunks the bog ran dark and featureless, sap ticking down from the timber above.
[ SUMP-BLIGHT TERRITORY: CONFIRMED ]
[ DROP RANGE: ESTIMATED 8 FEET ]
[ ADVISORY: DO NOT BLEED ON THINGS ]
YOU ARE CURRENTLY BLEEDING. THIS IS NOTED.
The opened suture had settled into a slow, steady weep, blood tracking through the linen and into his coat sleeve with a warmth that stood out against everything else. He kept the arm pressed at his ribs and forced the next stride south.
Something shifted in the canopy twenty feet overhead, weight settling into the dead timber above the root line. He slowed his half-stride without stopping, and the weight tracked south with him for thirty yards before settling in the branches ahead and going still. He moved under it and past it, bog-condensation dropping onto the back of his neck at cold intervals.
[ LUNG EXPOSURE: HIGH ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 44% ]
LUNGS. BLOOD. SUTURES. PICK ONE. OR KEEP GOING.
His lungs were failing the full pull now. The air came in full but landed wrong, each breath doing less than the one before. He pressed the damp cloth tighter with two fingers and took another stride south.
South was where the hounds' scent line would hit the bog-gas and lose itself before it reached him. He adjusted the cloth's knot until it sat flush at both sides, then let his hand drop and pushed on.
The hiss reached him at the right heel. Thin, persistent, running just under the bog's background note, too distinct to ignore. He stopped on the root ridge.
[ BOOT INTEGRITY: POOR ]
[ CAUSTIC SATURATION: ACTIVE ]
THAT SOUND IS YOUR SOLES.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The slurry ran black past both ankles, flat and showing nothing. The boots were below the surface, but the sole's geometry had already changed under his weight. The stitched welt that had held across fourteen months of bog and frozen road now carried a give in it, a softness before collapse. The caustic had worked through the outer grain of the leather, and the outer grain was all that had stood between the slurry and the stitching.
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 49% ]
[ BOOT STATUS: ACTIVELY DEGRADING ]
FOURTEEN MONTHS. IMPRESSIVE, GIVEN THE PRICE.
Four coppers at Oresfall's market stall for a mismatched pair. The right boot was cobbler-cut. The left sole was deep-wastes cobbling, replaced by hand out in the salt flats by whoever owned it before him. Copper, because silver brought questions. The stall owner had taken the coin with the silence of someone well paid for not asking where the leather came from, and Vane hadn't asked either. The boots had done everything asked of them on a budget that never had room for better.
He pulled his right foot up onto the root's spine, lifting the sole clear of the caustic bath. The hiss stopped. The reprieve lasted exactly as long as it took his weight to redistribute. The left boot dropped back into the slurry and the hiss resumed on that side. The right foot descended again to restore his balance on the narrow ridge.
[ ADVISORY: ROOT-RIDGE WALKING REQUIRED ]
[ MARGIN: MINIMAL ]
NARROW ROOT. BAD KNEE. DISSOLVING BOOTS. NOTED.
Root-ridge walking meant each foot landing on the spine of bark above the waterline, two inches of clearance over the caustic. His locked knee turned every precise landing into a slow, committed act, and the half-stride pattern he'd used since the palisade drop was gone. The half-stride had used the slurry's resistance for balance. There was none left that his soles could afford.
A fresh burn arrived at the right heel, working up through the leather at a thin line along the inner edge. The caustic had reached stitching depth, pushing through the welt where the thread had gone soft with moisture. He was burning through his boots from the ground up, one stride at a time, with nowhere to stop for cobbling in the Slag-Roots at any hour.
[ BOOT INTEGRITY: FAILING ]
[ PRIMARY THREAT: CAUSTIC - LEFT FOOT ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 52% ]
YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARM. SAME PROCESS. JUST LOWER.
The left sole gave out at the ball of the foot, the deep-wastes resole worn thin by fourteen months of other bogs. Not the thin, building hiss of the heel but something immediate: caustic finding skin in one clean edge, the leather below it gone to nothing, the bog pressing up through the gap with no regard for what he'd paid for those boots or how far they'd carried him.
[ SKIN CONTACT: LEFT FOOT ]
[ CAUSTIC BURN: ACTIVE ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 57% ]
THERE IT IS.
He stood on the root ridge with the burn established and the bog a paper's thickness from the skin. His right hand pressed to his coat pocket, not for any reason he could have named, just because his hand needed to be somewhere that wasn't the boot situation.
The scrape came from directly overhead. A single dry rasp against petrified bark, in a canopy otherwise silent. Then a second, faster, tracking south along the branch line toward the ridge he stood on.
The locked knee had already reached its verdict on the next two seconds.
[ SUMP-BLIGHT: ABOVE ]
[ DROP: IMMINENT ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: MOVE. FASTER THAN YOUR KNEE ALLOWS. STRONGLY RECOMMEND ANYWAY.
He threw himself sideways, and the knee delivered half the distance that mattered before the canopy split. Dead branches cracked outward from a single descending point and the creature came through the gap. Its weight caught him across the upper back and knocked him off the ridge into the slurry, the bog taking him chest-deep in one cold swallow.
[ IMPACT: LOGGED ]
[ SUMP-BLIGHT: ENGAGED ]
YES. THAT.
He hit face-first, the mud swallowing his forehead and eyes, the face wrap soaking through on contact. Caustic pressed through every layer of cloth against his lips and the bridge of his nose. The bog-gas reached his sinuses at full concentration with nothing to filter it. He got his palms onto the bog bed and pushed up through both elbows.
[ CAUSTIC EXPOSURE: FACE ]
[ FACE WRAP: FAILED ]
THAT WAS THE ONE THING KEEPING THE BOG OUT OF YOUR LUNGS. NOTED.
His face burned where the slurry had touched it, a bright, shallow scald across the brow and the bridge of his nose that the cold numbed almost as fast as it arrived. It would peel. It wouldn't kill him. On the list, it went near the bottom.
The creature's weight rode his back, one set of claws hooked into the coat at the shoulder blades, its mass driving him flat each time his elbows gained an inch. The slurry sat at his collarbone. Close to his right ear the creature made a sound he had no name for, low and wet, running through the slurry into his jaw as vibration.
Of course it makes noise. Of course it does.
The screech came from close enough that its force hit the skin of his right cheek before the sound hit his ear. It went through the slurry and bone together, and his palms skidded off the bog bed, the creature's weight driving him flat on the rebound.
[ SCREECH: REGISTERED ]
[ INNER EAR: COMPROMISED ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: A PLAN. ANY PLAN. WE ARE OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS.
His right ear had gone to a high, thin whine and stayed there. He'd be doing his listening with the left for a while.
The smell came at the same instant as the hiss. Sharp acid over the bog's alkaline base. The wool of his coat was already burning through where the Sump-Blight's spittle had scattered in drops during the screech, the weave separating at each impact point, the holes widening outward as the acid worked through the fiber.
[ SUMP-BLIGHT SPITTLE: ACTIVE ]
[ COAT: DISSOLVING ]
[ POCKET CONTENTS: COMPROMISED ]
YOUR ILLEGAL GOODS ARE ALSO IN A CAUSTIC BOG. FOR CONTEXT.
He jammed his right elbow into the bog bed and twisted, getting his right hand over the inner pocket. The creature's claws dragged across his back with the movement, finding new purchase but not letting go. The acid kept hissing on the coat's outer face, the damage tracking inward from each drop.
[ ASSETS: FURTHER COMPROMISED ]
THREE PROBLEMS. NONE RESOLVED. THE CREATURE IS STILL ON YOU. IN CASE THAT NEEDED STATING.
He got the pocket clear of the spray, rolling to pin that side of his chest against the bog bed. The water had reached his collarbone from below. The acid holes in the upper wool were still widening. Above him the creature adjusted its grip, finding purchase deeper in the lining, and made no move to go anywhere.