The bearskin was still burning in the road rut, the alchemist's fluid working through the fur in green patches that threw a sourceless light across the mud. Drago came forward through that light with the short broadsword already extended. The left side of his jaw was blistering raw where the fire had caught him before he'd thrown the bearskin cloak free.
Vane scrambled to unsheathe his sword, backing toward the root hollow and fighting to secure his footing in it as his numb fingers wrestled the stiff leather of the scabbard. He dragged the notched blade free seconds before Drago closed the distance, and barely turned the swing.
The Boyar steel came down across the notch, and the shock hammered up through the grip into his elbow, sudden and total, the arm wrenching sideways at the joint before the blow had finished landing. He kept hold. His guard dropped half a foot out of position and he stepped back to buy a second, then pressed his thumb along the blade to find the notch's new shape. The crack had spread further toward the center. One more solid catch on that point and the steel was done.
[ WEAPON INTEGRITY: POOR ]
RECOMMEND: NOT PARRYING AGAIN.
Drago reset on the frozen shoulder of the road where the crust bore weight. Both boots found grip, and he angled to cut off the rut. Vane circled right and his boot punched straight through the surface ice into the slurry beneath, the cold suction sealing around his ankle before he could correct. He dragged the foot free and tried left instead, and the crust gave in exactly the same place with exactly the same result. The frozen shoulder was Drago's ground, and the ruts ran the whole length of the road.
The third blow came in fast. He threw himself sideways off the rut's edge and the blade cut the frozen mud at the lip, close enough that the sound of the impact arrived before he'd finished moving. He got the flat of the blade up for the follow-through, his left palm braced against the spine, and the force went through his shoulders in one shove. The notched blade didn't break. Just.
He went down on his left knee in the same motion, the frozen lip of the rut catching the kneecap square, and was back up two seconds later with the guard raised, doing everything he could to hold onto the sword.
[ COMPOUNDING HYPOTHERMIA - STAGE 2 ]
[ CLASS TAG: UNREMARKABLE. PASSIVE RESISTANCE UNAVAILABLE ]
[ FINE MOTOR: FAILING ]
GRIPPING IS A FINE MOTOR SKILL. JUST NOTING.
Both boots were in the ruts now, the freezing muck at mid-calf, and there was no footwork to be had from that. Drago had the frozen shoulder and the good steel. His sword arm still worked at full range. Vane had a cracked blade and a kneecap that had recently been introduced to the road at some speed.
He drove the pommel back under his left arm and reversed his grip, letting the sword's weight tip point-down toward the mud. Drago watched him change his grip like he'd seen that move before. The green fire was burning lower, down to ash in the fur. At the road's edges the dark was coming back in.
Vane planted the point in the mud and lunged off the sword, ramming his shoulder into Drago's sternum with everything the frozen road gave him for momentum. His arms went around the man's midsection and found mostly the lacing at the back of the boiled leather, no real grip, but he kept what he had. Drago took two hard steps backward, each boot churning the road shoulder, and on the third the ground ran out and the rut took them both.
The freezing mud came up over Vane's collar and sealed around his skull, and the whole world of sound stopped. Drago's shout, the creak of the burned bearskin still settling in the road, gone. Just the wet press of mud against both ears. He kept both fists knotted in the back lacing. Drago was the only fixed object in reach.
[ COMPOUNDING HYPOTHERMIA - STAGE 3 ]
[ FINE MOTOR: FAILING FAST ]
YOU ARE UNDERWATER. IN MUD. THIS IS BAD.
Drago's knee came up into Vane's left ribs, square on the old fracture, which complained exactly as it had in the road an hour ago. A big man thrashing for footing in six inches of freezing muck. The grip slipped on the wet lacing, and in that half-second Drago got enough purchase to roll his weight sideways. Vane went with the slurry as it closed around him. Drago came up face-down, forearm across Vane's throat and the man's full bulk pressed along his chest.
[ STAMINA: HEAVY DRAIN ]
BEING CRUSHED SPEEDS THIS UP. NOTING THAT.
The surface was close above his nose, grey and murky, shot through with faint green from the alchemist's residue bleeding down into the muck. A slow thread of it ran into his right eye. He turned his face into the peat, ear against the road bed, and felt Drago's weight shifting through the clay as one long vibration. The cold had been climbing his arms for two minutes. Whatever coordination he had left in them, it wasn't much.
His right hand was still in there somewhere. He worked the wrist upward through the slurry and kept pushing until his fingers cleared the peat and found the underside of Drago's jaw by feel alone. They closed and held.
Everything above the surface became wet, shapeless noise. His left arm was pinned under Drago's hip. He stopped fighting it. His hand dropped from the chin and went for his belt, fingers crawling along the leather until they found the brass ring on the sheath-strap. The cold had finally taken sensation out past the second knuckle, but the ring was there, and the strap. Past that, nothing. The sheath had twisted in the fall and the grip wasn't where it should be.
[ INVENTORYING ESSENTIALS ]
EQUIPMENT: DAGGER. GONE. THIS IS GOING BADLY. NOT ESSENTIAL ANYWAY.
He dragged the strap around by blind feel, the packed slurry fighting his wrist every inch. The pommel had jammed against the gravel bed behind his spine, and freeing it meant bridging upward with Drago's full weight on his chest. He dug his heels into the mud and arched. The pommel shifted twice before three fingers closed around it. Drago's knee came down in the dark water and caught his thigh hard. Vane yanked the dagger out of the gap between his back and the ground before the second blow could land.
[ ALERT: COMMIT OR SUFFOCATE ]
[ CLASS TAG: UNREMARKABLE. JUST GIVE IN ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: NOW WOULD BE GOOD.
Drago had dragged one knee up alongside Vane's hip for leverage, and the calf was right there. Vane got a hand around the man's calf and worked his thumb up behind the knee, finding the hamstring. A hard, thick cord under the wool hose, bunched taut with the effort of staying upright. The iron dagger was a crude, top-heavy thing and there was no angle for finesse. He set the point against the tendon and drove it up, bracing his elbow against the ground when the first resistance met him, and shoved through wool and into the meat, past the first stiffening of muscle and into the real resistance beneath that-
The pop traveled up the grip. Wet and sudden, the hamstring going against the guard. The sound that came out of Drago had no words in it, just raw volume, carried through the water into the bones of Vane's jaw.
The weight on his chest pitched sideways. He got his face out of the slurry, pulled a mouthful of cold air through his teeth, and spat. In the water beside him, pale ribbons of green floated where the bearskin's fire had bled into the mud.
The knee Vane had his weight on was in the slurry, the cold filling back in through the joint, the same chill it had been building toward the whole time he'd been in the mud.
Drago rolled onto his side in the soft mud, the wounded leg folding crookedly beneath him, and the noise out of his throat was low and hoarse. Saints' names in order, then reversed, a reckoning delivered at speed to several dead ancestors. One hand dug at the gravel beneath the mud and found nothing to anchor to. The cursing only sharpened when it found Vane specifically.
Vane dragged himself upright on one knee, water sheeting off him. Drago's face was turned sideways against the ground, the skin along his jaw and throat gone loose and wet where the Alchemist's Fire had worked through it, the blisters dense at the hinge, the softer tissue below sliding off the structure underneath. The mud along his cheek carried the dark outline of where the fluid had spread in the fall. He was still cursing, the volume dropping toward something hoarser and more deliberate as the blood found the slurry.
The dagger was still in Vane's right fist. His whole arm shook, a fine, continuous tremor from shoulder to wrist, cold or otherwise.
[ TECHNIQUE LOGGED: TERRAIN AMBUSH ]
THE MUD DID MOST OF IT. WE ARE CREDITING YOU ANYWAY.
[ ADRENALINE NOTED ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: DO NOT LOOK AT HIS FACE.
Too late.
The blue text snapped red at every margin, and the wash across his vision wasn't a warning. A cold, squared border dropped around Drago's blistered jaw and glassy eyes, holding the image while Drago was still mid-curse, silent in the slurry.
[ ARCHIVING: FACE DATA ]
[ SUBJECT: BURNED GUARD. DYING. BLISTERED. ]
[ STRESS ASSET: STORED. ]
DON'T WORRY. HE'LL BE BACK.
The blue crept back in around the edges, steady and translucent, nothing written in it. Drago had stopped listing saints. The cursing had shrunk to something muttered into the mud with whatever air was left in him, rhythmic and low, barely distinguishable from the frost crust settling around his collar as he found his lowest point in the road.