The patrol's last hoof-fall had faded into the ditch floor some time back. Five minutes past the final impact, maybe more. The cold had taken the ability to count the interval long before the column finished crossing.
The reed's bore had given out well before the patrol cleared. The crack had widened under the bog's weight until each draw was more slurry than air, and at some point he'd stopped drawing and the old rib fracture had kept its schedule anyway, running its complaint on each expansion without him. He gave his right hand a command. Four seconds went by. The fingers closed on their own schedule, a slow contracture with no relationship to the instruction's timing.
Right.
[ TECHNIQUE LOGGED: SUBMERSION - SCENT BREAK ]
[ COMPOUNDING HYPOTHERMIA - STAGE 4: ACTIVE ]
[ PRIMARY THREAT: HYPOTHERMIA ]
[ VITALITY: 14% ]
[ MUSCLE FUNCTION: SEVERELY IMPAIRED ]
THE PATROL HAS PASSED. THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU GET OUT. YOU ARE NOT GETTING OUT.
He dug both elbows toward the ditch floor. The left arrived. The right came in two seconds behind, canting sideways before it corrected. He spread both palms across the gravel below the waterline and shoved.
His chest cleared the slurry by two inches before the suction hit. The ditch floor pulled at his coat and boots in a grip that had been setting itself all the minutes he'd lain against it, each added pound of upward force met by the same patient claim from below, and the two inches dropped back to one.
[ VITALITY: 13% ]
[ SUCTION: ACTIVE ]
INTERESTING PHYSICS. YOU ARE LOSING THIS.
He got his right knee up. It locked out at the worst point on the first two attempts, and on the third he heaved hard off the hip with whatever remained there and the knee completed the bend, foot planting in the gravel. He leaned everything onto it. The suction redistributed, concentrating on his lower half as the upper began separating from the ditch floor, and he pushed upward off the planted foot with his full remaining weight.
The bog released his back and coat in one lurching give, a deep suction-break that carried in the canopy's sealed silence. The slurry took his face on the way up. It caught the ruined face wrap hanging around his neck and stripped it off, tearing the knotted tails free, and he broke the surface with his mouth already open.
The air reached his airways unfiltered, the burn spreading inward with each draw. He hauled himself over the root-mass lip and held clear of the waterline.
[ FACE WRAP: GONE ]
[ LUNG EXPOSURE: ACUTE ]
[ VITALITY: 12% ]
YOU'RE UP. STILL IN THE BOG. BOTH TRUE.
[ ORGAN FAILURE PROBABILITY: 41% - ESCALATING ]
THE BOG IS STILL ARGUING ITS CASE. WE ARE KEEPING TRACK.
The shivering had stopped sometime while he was under. He'd been shivering since the Slag-Roots' border, through the alley and Grygori's table and the palisade squeeze, and now the whole frame was still. Not resting. Still. The coat was soaked through, the Banker's Weight cold against his sternum, and the arm wrap had gone dark along the suture line again, bleeding through.
[ SHIVER REFLEX: ABSENT ]
STILL IS NOT BETTER. THE MUSCLES CANNOT GENERATE HEAT. THAT IS WHAT STILL MEANS.
He slapped both palms onto the root bark and got his hips over the lip. His left boot found the root spine and held. The right came up sideways off the ridge before he corrected it, and he ended up crouched over the root mass with both hands pressing bark he couldn't feel, run-off from his coat threading back into the slurry in dark rivulets. The canopy ran lightless above the System's blue in all directions.
South. The Slag-Roots were still south and still the Slag-Roots. His lips had gone the pale blue of deep cold, tasting of iron-weed and peat in equal parts, which was a fair summary of the last four hours.
[ VITALITY: 12% ]
[ BEAR-FAT FROST SALVE: NOT APPLIED ]
[ CALISTHENICS: REQUIRED ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: MOVEMENT. THE STILL BODY LOSES FASTER THAN THE MOVING ONE. YOU HAVE KNOWN THIS SINCE THE FIRST DITCH.
He had known it. The question was whether knowing it and moving on it were going to turn out to be the same thing.
The first attempt at standing began at the hips and came apart below them. His quads fired but not together, one leg pushing a beat behind the other, and the uncoordinated double signal sent him sideways off the root mass in a short lurch that only the nearest trunk stopped.
[ MUSCLE COORDINATION: SEVERELY IMPAIRED ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: STANDING UP. FIRST. THEN WALKING. IN THAT ORDER.
He got his left foot flat on the root spine. The locked knee ground through its arc on the push-off, a sound that traveled through cartilage and bone both. Two inches of clearance off the root mass. Three. He came upright in stages, each a separate negotiation with a different joint, and arrived standing in the slurry with his hands braced against the trunk. First item on the System's list.
A tremor hit from the left without warning. Not shivering. Coarser, deeper, a single hard wave from shoulder through torso that snapped his head sideways and locked his teeth mid-clench. His left hand dragged down the trunk's bark in a short, involuntary pull before the wave passed. He noted the jaw ache and nothing else, because the list was long and his accounting would have to stay selective.
[ MUSCLE SPASM: ACTIVE ]
[ NOTE: INVOLUNTARY. WILL CONTINUE. ]
EACH SPASM BURNS ENERGY YOU DO NOT HAVE. STANDING COSTS LESS THAN LYING DOWN. PICK THE CHEAPER OPTION.
South.
He sent the first stride south and his right boot cleared the slurry by nothing, catching the root spine at the ball of the foot, the heel dragging through the bog before the step committed. The left boot followed with a different decision in it, the locked knee's bad range written across every degree of the arc. The step landed short, nowhere near a full stride, but the root spine was underfoot and the direction was south, and those two facts were going to have to be enough.
[ VITALITY: 11% ]
[ STAMINA: ZERO ]
[ MOVEMENT: ACTIVE ]
THAT COUNTS. TECHNICALLY. KEEP GOING.
The second spasm came midway through the next stride, catching the right side, the shoulder dropping hard and the whole torso twisting in a percussive contraction. His left elbow cracked into the nearest trunk. He pressed it to the bark while three seconds of unordered muscle-work ran their course with no voluntary signal behind them, the bog surface still around his boots. Then he pushed off the trunk and kept south.
[ SPASM FREQUENCY: INCREASING ]
[ VITALITY: 11% ]
MOVING SLOWS THE VITALITY DROP. THE SPASMS COST IT BACK. THIS IS A RACE BETWEEN TWO BAD THINGS. YOU ARE INVOLVED.
The root line ran south under the slurry and he tracked it by weight, tapping each root before committing the step. The tap needed a foot that responded to the command, and the left boot was running on a delayed signal, the command chain having lost something in the ditch. It tapped anyway, two beats late. The root confirmed itself, and he stepped onto it. The suture line had gone warm under the linen, the blood a degree above frozen at the wound's center.
[ WOUND STATUS: WEEPING ]
[ IRON-WEED: CONTINUOUS EMISSION ]
STILL EMITTING. DISTANCE UNKNOWN. THEY ARE STILL THERE.
The fourth stride brought a spasm from both sides at once, the whole trunk seizing and locking him rigid with one foot in the air. He came down on the wrong part of the root spine and went into the slurry to the knee. He caught the trunk with both palms. Not all the way down. The slurry took his left boot to mid-calf and the caustic found the exposed skin at the ball of the foot, the sole having given up its last thickness sometime in the previous four strides, a sharp burn a level above the background edge it had held since the sole first gave.
Three problems. Boot, hound scent, joints. Same as four steps ago. Keep counting if it helps.
He dragged the left boot free and got it back on the root spine. The contraction had run its cycle. His body had been the location for it, not the decision-maker. The same would be true of the next one.
[ CAUSTIC BURN: LEFT FOOT - WORSENING ]
[ VITALITY: 10% ]
10%. A ROUND NUMBER. NOTED.
He kept south. The spasms came at their own intervals, and on each one he pressed against the nearest trunk, held until it ran out, then pushed off the bark and moved again. Seven strides. Eight. The bog-gas reached his airways unfiltered on each draw, the lung burn an established fact, each breath adding to what was already there. Ten strides from the ditch, the canopy began to thin.
The dead timber broke apart, the mat of locked branches giving way to gaps of grey, churning sky. The silence of the bog ended there. A second front had come off the Crags while he was under. It drove through the broken tree line and hit the slurry, tearing the bog-gas away in one violent sweep.
The wind took him chest-first. The frozen outer layer of his soaked coat cracked under it. Open ground lay ahead, a mile of unprotected salt flats under a whiteout that would freeze him solid in three minutes. The Slag-Roots were killing him, but the open wastes would finish it faster.
The root line he was tracking heaved upward where an ancient trunk had fallen and dragged its petrified mass half out of the slurry. Beneath it, a dark gap sat between the wood and the frozen mud of the shoreline. A hollow. Not a shelter, just a void where the bog hadn't filled the space yet.
He dropped to his elbows and crawled in.
The hollow ran maybe six feet deep and four wide, the ceiling of petrified roots pressing flat against his back. He shoved himself backward until the crown of his head hit the far wall, boots pointing at the entrance. The wind screamed through the wood above, a low hum of three centuries of frozen peat and timber taking the storm's weight.
[ VITALITY: 10% ]
[ MOVEMENT: HALTED ]
STILL LOSING. THE MARGIN IS GONE.
The howl arrived at the entrance gap with no ramp to it.
Full register. It came through the opening and hit the bark above his skull in the same instant it entered, the sealed hollow giving it nowhere to go, the note bouncing off every face of root and bark and compressed peat and landing back on itself in a resonance the blizzard in the wood above couldn't compete with. The howl simply went through it.
[ INQUISITION WAR-HOUNDS: CLOSING ]
[ IRON-WEED PASTE: SEEPING - CONTINUOUS ]
[ VITALITY: 9% ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: MOVING. WE ARE AWARE OF THE SPACE. STRONGLY RECOMMEND ANYWAY.
The spasm that had been cycling through him since the open shelf fired across the full trunk, both shoulders seizing and jamming his upper chest against the root ceiling hard enough that the frozen outer coat cracked along the collar seam. The ceiling gave nothing. Wood and frost and the full load of frozen peat above it, three centuries of bog settling its weight into the roots with no interest in anything underneath.
A second howl came in from slightly south of the first, half a beat behind, closer by a gap that was readable even through the blizzard's roar. Two animals, working in offset. The iron barding followed immediately, a flat clang against petrified timber just beyond the gap, conducting into the root mass overhead and spreading in a short metallic ring.
[ HOUND: BARDING - 5 YARDS ]
[ SCENT TRAIL: WOUND SEEP - ACTIVE ]
[ HOLLOW: ONE ENTRANCE ]
[ YOU: FAR END OF IT ]
THESE NUMBERS DO NOT REQUIRE ELABORATION.
He sent the command to his legs. The right knee came in, the foot dragging across the bog floor. The left stalled at its bad angle and delivered the bend in a grinding three-second delay, the cold having taken over the scheduling long before the open shelf.
Six feet between him and the entrance gap. Six generations of Inquisition breeding, and his final countermeasure was a hole in the dirt.
The opened suture in his forearm had been warm at its center since the canopy edge. It was warmer now. The iron-weed kept seeping into the hollow's enclosed air with no bog-gas to dilute it and no wind through the gap to carry it out, each breath cycling through the same sealed feet of space and coming back thicker than it left. The hollow had been the one thing standing between him and the blizzard. It was also a container for the exact compound three iron-muzzled animals had been bred to find.
[ IRON-WEED: CONCENTRATING - ENCLOSED SPACE ]
[ SCENT DENSITY: RISING ]
[ NOTE: SEALED SPACES WORK BOTH WAYS ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: OPEN GROUND. ALSO RECOMMENDED AGAINST THIS HOLLOW. SAME RECOMMENDATION. DIFFERENT DIRECTION. VERY AWARE YOU CANNOT ACT ON EITHER.
The third howl came from directly outside the gap.
The distance the first two had carried was gone entirely. This arrived at the entrance with its full force, a deep chest-driven note at the register where bone responds before ear does, and the bark above his skull took it as a continuous vibration that ran from the threshold to the far wall without losing anything. His jaw locked from the conduction alone. The blizzard had been sitting in the root mass as a low hum since he'd cleared the entrance; the howl occupied that same space and simply displaced it, the sealed hollow amplifying what came in past any reasonable threshold.
[ HOUND: ENTRANCE - 3 YARDS ]
[ VITALITY: 9% ]
[ MUSCLE FUNCTION: SEVERE IMPAIRMENT ]
WE HAVE BEEN LOGGING THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CONSECUTIVE READINGS. THE DIRECTION IS NOT AMBIGUOUS.
His thumb found the sheath catch by touch, arriving at the brass two full seconds behind the intent to find it. Not a fighting position. Flat on his back at the hollow's far wall, the frozen coat cracking across the shoulders with each chest expansion, the arm wrap warm at its center. Every input to the situation had been registered and nothing in them pointed toward a good outcome. He pressed his shoulders into the bark and kept the thumb on the catch.
Iron scraped the bark above the entrance threshold. A long, deliberate pull from outside, the rusted muzzle working at the gap's upper edge, the sound running the full length of the hollow's ceiling and ending directly above his head.
He got the dagger clear of the sheath and held it flat against his ribs, the grip cold against his palm.
[ VITALITY: 9% ]
[ DAGGER: DRAWN ]
[ HOUND: AT ENTRANCE ]
WE REVIEWED THE NUMBERS. WE HAVE NO RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS CONFIGURATION.