The road had run out somewhere in the blizzard's white. He'd angled west to cut the worst of the wind and found the Slag-Roots' border instead. The ground came up past the top of his boot with each step, the gray slurry of the old alchemical bogs, different from road mud in weight, dragging at his heel when it gave and releasing with a wet click.
[ TOXICITY LEVEL: HIGH ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: RISING ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: DO NOT BREATHE DEEPLY. ALSO: LEAVE.
He had his good arm out in front, fingertips reading trunks before his face did. The canopy was complete overhead, dead branches sealed together with no sky showing between them, killing the wind.
The air reached the back of his palate with each draw, alkaline, the bog-gas rising off centuries of peat-forge runoff. His raw throat caught the worst of it. The burning stayed whether his mouth was open or closed.
[ LUNG EXPOSURE: MODERATE ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 31% ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: A FACE WRAP. OR A DIFFERENT CLASS.
The petrified trees' roots ran just under the slurry in long ridges, and the only ground that held weight was directly on top of them. He moved in half-strides, his boot tapping forward to find the root before each step, the locked knee setting what pace he managed. The silver pouch knocked against his side with every stride. He pressed his bound forearm over it and the ringing dropped to something quieter that still carried in the silence of the bog.
[ STAMINA: LOW ]
AT CURRENT PACE: ORESFALL GATE IN 40 MINUTES. AT CURRENT STAMINA, YOU HAVE 12.
PICK ONE.
Something shifted in the branches above him. The canopy was too dense for wind to reach, so whatever settled and resettled its weight in the dead timber above his path wasn't wind. The creak of it tracked south along the branch line at roughly his pace. He kept still, his boot planted on the root beneath him, the slurry undisturbed around his heel.
[ SUMP-BLIGHT TERRITORY: CONFIRMED ]
[ DROP RANGE: ESTIMATED 8 FEET ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: VERY SLOW MOVEMENTS. OR NONE.
The weight tracked south another twenty yards and stopped. He counted forty seconds of nothing. Sap dripped from the branches in slow intervals, each drop landing in the slurry with a tick, and where it hit, the surface went briefly iridescent in the System's blue glow before going dark. A drop landed on the petrified bark beside his palm and he pulled his hand back. He gave it a few more seconds, then set his boot forward.
[ STAMINA: VERY LOW ]
[ CHEMICAL SEPSIS PROBABILITY: 38% ]
NOTED: CURRENTLY BOTH POISONED AND EXHAUSTED.
EFFICIENT.
The burned smell deepened as he pushed south. His left knee ground through each stride, the cold having worked into it over the last hour, and he forced it forward because stopping was the other option.
His boot caught something hard at toe level. He crouched, grudgingly, worked his hand into the slurry beside the obstruction, and brought up the top of a carved stone post, its face covered in bog-slick but the cut edges of the marking still legible by touch. A border post. He ran his thumb across the grooves. The face was oriented west, toward the Slag-Roots' interior, away from Oresfall. East, then. He stayed crouched against the stone with his hand on the marker, the burn in the back of his throat working deeper with every slow draw of bog air.
[ STAMINA: CRITICAL ]
[ IMMINENT COLLAPSE: 10 MINUTES ]
THE GATE IS EAST. JUST SO YOU KNOW.
He pushed off the post with his good hand and turned east, the root line running beneath the slurry in the direction he needed.
Twenty yards out, the first one hit.
A twig snap. Directly to his left, sharp and clean and close, no more than eight feet off in the dark between the petrified trunks. His boot stopped on the root, the slurry holding still around his heel. He scanned the gap between the nearest trunks and the dark gave him nothing. No second sound. Nothing moved in the slurry. He counted thirty seconds he couldn't afford, then pushed east.
[ STRESS METRIC: 6/10 ]
NOTED.
The growl came from his right. Low and wet, with nothing quiet about how it arrived. He spun on the root, the left knee locking through its bad angle, the dagger out and slick with condensation in his fist before he'd finished turning. The space between the trunks to his right held nothing but dead bark and slurry. His chest was moving faster than the exertion required. He stood there until that stopped, then sheathed the dagger with his free hand, fighting the catch twice in the wet before it stayed.
[ STRESS METRIC: 7/10 ]
THERE'S NOTHING THERE. JUST SO YOU KNOW.
Just so he knew. Right.
He pushed east again. The root ran narrow under his boot and he tracked it by weight, the slurry shifting around his heel with each half-stride. The twig snap came again. Same direction from his left, same pitch, same duration as the first, at the same interval from the previous snap, down to the second. Sound didn't work that way. He stopped, counted ten heartbeats, and got back nothing but the sap-drip and the bog air working at the raw tissue of his throat.
[ STRESS METRIC: 8/10 ]
GETTING INTERESTING.
[ PHANTOM AUDIO: ACTIVE ]
YOU'RE WELCOME.
He pushed east again, the text sitting cold in the corner of his vision. The next sound came mid-stride, his boot already committed to the forward root. The growl was right beside his ear, close enough to be a muzzle at his shoulder, and his body answered before he could think. His boot came off the root and into the slurry, gray muck taking his foot past the ankle, his good arm shooting out to catch the nearest trunk. Bark came away in a wet strip under his palm. He got his boot back onto the root with the knee grinding and the bound arm wrenching in its wrap.
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
[ STRESS METRIC: 8/10 ]
CAREFUL. FALLING IN THE SLAG COSTS MORE THAN STAMINA.
The slurry settled back around the root. The canopy dripped on, the Oresfall gate still somewhere east in the dark. The System had shown him the trick. Knowing its name hadn't stopped his boot from leaving the root.
[ STRESS METRIC: 9/10 ]
ALMOST THERE.
The palisade came out of the snow at fifteen yards. Sharpened stakes of petrified wood, each post driven deep into bog-clay at its base, the gaps between them chinked with pressed peat brick gone loose at the joints. No gate on this approach, apparently. The torch posts stood there, but the torches had long gone out.
He moved along the wall's base with his bandaged arm pressed against his chest. Some distance east of the nearest post the ground dropped sharply where the bog had consumed the foundation over however many years it had taken. One section of peat brick had cracked horizontally at ground level, the gap just wide enough for a man pressed flat. Dark water pooled still in the hollow at the entrance, sour-smelling, where the original drain had been cut.
[ ALERT: CAUSTIC WATER - DETECTED ]
[ WOUND STATUS: BANDAGED. FOR NOW. ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: THE GATE. OH WAIT.
He got down and pushed his arms into the dark.
The sword came off first. He unhooked the scabbard, laid it along his side, and pushed it ahead of him by the pommel, an extra length of awkward in a gap with no spare room.
The caustic water found the bandaged forearm the moment he went forward, soaking through the grey linen within seconds and opening a deep, searing burn along the wound's length. His elbows found gravel on the drain floor and he pushed on into the gap.
[ CHEMICAL EXPOSURE: ACTIVE ]
[ BANDAGE: SOAKED THROUGH ]
YOU KNEW THIS.
The cracked brick at the break's edge caught the top of his shoulder on the first push, stone teeth dragging a hard line before he angled sideways and cleared it. The overhead brick settled in from both sides until the clearance was almost nothing, and he turned his face into the gravel and pushed forward with his boots.
Two body-lengths in, the collapsed section dropped the ceiling to his head, leaving no room to tilt it at all. Black water pressed at both ears and the peat brick above rolled against the back of his collar, the whole palisade foundation bearing down through it. Behind him the entry gap had gone dark, too tight to reverse through. Forward was all he had, and forward meant moving his arms in half-lengths, stone grinding against his coat with each pull, the stink of the drain water filling the inches of air above his face.
He got one palm against the overhead brick and shoved upward. The section gave a little room and stayed. He dropped his weight onto his elbows in the drain water, got purchase on the gravel, and hauled himself forward until the tight section released him into slightly wider ground. The caustic water had worked deep into the elbow joint now.
[ CAUSTIC SATURATION: HIGH ]
[ SEPSIS PROBABILITY: CLIMBING ]
VERY EFFICIENTLY DONE. I GUESS.
His fingers found packed clay at the far end. He worked them in, pulling chunks free until the upper portion gave outward and cold air came through above the waterline. He got his forearm over the exit lip and walked his boots up the drain wall until he could drive his hips through. The stone edges caught his coat on both sides and stripped it halfway up his back before he cleared them, and he came out face-first onto wet ground inside the palisade. He dragged the scabbard out after him by the chape and hooked it back on.
No wind. The peat-smoke smell of the settlement was heavy in the still air, the blizzard entirely behind the sharpened stakes. Beneath the wind-silence was the slow creak of the posts taking the storm's weight, and beneath that, the drain still running behind him, threading along the gravel it had carved over years of use.
[ LOCATION: INSIDE ORESFALL ]
[ WOUND: RE-OPENED ]
[ SEPSIS PROBABILITY: HIGH ]
CONGRATULATIONS. SURGEON RECOMMENDED. YOU CANNOT AFFORD ONE.
The silver pouch had stopped ringing sometime in the drain. He pressed his hand against it. Still there.
The inner wall was stone-set, old quarry blocks mortared with lime that had gone soft at the joints, standing perhaps eight feet above a narrow drainage channel that ran along its base. The channel had frozen overnight. He got his boots onto the ice and pressed his palms into the stone.
[ STAMINA: CRITICAL ]
WALLS ARE TALL. JUST NOTING.
The first handhold was a gap two feet up, wide enough for three fingers. His left hand found it and stayed. He braced the bandaged forearm against the stone and pushed, using the whole forearm as a lever instead of the fingers, because the fingers weren't worth the gamble. The locked knee ground through the first push-off, and he'd cleared two feet before his right boot lost the ice shelf and he came back down hard onto the frozen channel.
Second attempt. He found a higher gap for his right hand and worked his boot into the first seam. Then he drove up through the left knee before it could object. His chest hit the top course of stone. He got his right forearm over, then his elbow, and hung there across the wall's width with his legs dangling and his coat riding up his back.
[ VITALITY: CRITICAL ]
ALMOST. SORT OF. NOT REALLY.
His left leg found nothing and his right boot scraped at the stone below. He pulled with the right arm and pushed with the forearm against the far side of the wall's top, dragging his torso over the lip by inches. His bruised ribs hit the stone, then his hips, and then he was over the balance point and falling.
The alley caught him shoulder-first. Ice-glazed cobbles, hard and uneven, the impact running straight through the joint before his body had time to brace. He lay on his back in the narrow dark between two tenement walls, the breath knocked out of him, staring up at a strip of blizzard-white sky between the eaves.
The first full breath came back in a long, ragged pull.
Then someone moved. Ten feet south in the alley. A crouched shape under a canvas overhang, knees pulled to the chest, eyes catching what little light the gap between the eaves admitted. The eyes were already on him. They had been on him since before the drop, from the look of it.
Bram.
He knew the face. Two winters back, coming through Oresfall with a full load, Vane had paid Bram a copper to carry for a day, and Bram had sold his route to a Boyar tax-rider by nightfall for a bowl of soup. Vane had lost the load on the drove road, and two teeth with it. He had never collected on that. Bram had never stopped looking like a man who expected him to.
[ STRESS METRIC: 7/10 ]
[ WITNESS: DETECTED ]
HELLO, BRAM.
He was everything the last four hours had been trying to make Vane. Soaked through his coat, beard full of ice crystals. The canvas above him had given up keeping rain out sometime in the autumn, and the fold of it above his head had turned to a grey, rigid sag. His eyes had not left Vane since Vane had come over the wall.
Vane's coat was halfway up his back. His bound arm had bled through the linen again, a dark seam showing in the grey wrapping. The bulge of the silver pouch showed at his pocket, the shape of it unmistakable. The Banker's Weight was in the same pocket.
Bram's eyes had found the bulge and stayed there.
Neither of them moved. The blizzard ran overhead, its sound a long flat note above the eaves. Somewhere in the tenement behind Bram's shoulder a dog shifted its weight, claws on board floor, then went still.
Vane liked dogs. He had never trusted a man who kicked one, and he had never met a dog that sold anyone for soup.
[ SILVER: VISIBLE ]
[ WITNESS: KNOWN DEBTOR ]
[ STRESS METRIC: 8/10 ]
PAY INFORMANT.
Bram's mouth had opened slightly, like he had several options and hadn't committed to any of them. His gaze went from Vane's face to the silver pouch, then back. He swallowed.
Vane's right hand was on the cobbles at his side. He had not moved it.
[ STATUS: COMPROMISED ]
[ STATUS: SEEN ]
[ RECOMMEND: ...SOMETHING. ]