At a full run we make the marshes in no time. A red fog’s gnawed at my vision twice during the ride, but I haven’t blacked out and the pain echoes are fading to dull aches. As the gray gallops down the stretch of Chain where we left the kid, the pony comes into view, grazing forlornly at the side of the road with no sign of its rider. The boy is gone.

I can tell by how the pony is ambling that it’s sore but not lame. Unsurprising now that I know what I know. The kid's lied about its condition so that he has an excuse to stop and hide, to delay his return to Barrows until I was well gone. I rein in my horse and sit in the saddle as the gray blows beneath me, taking a long, slow look at the land around us. This is bog area. A shitty place to try and cut and run, unless that was the point - unless the mire is his attempt at dissuading pursuit. I hold one nostril closed and blow what I hope is the last of the drying blood out of the other. Dumb little murderous fuck. If a marsh wyrm or a bleeder has beat me to him, I’m going to be upset.

I swing myself down from the saddle and catch my breath as I land. I feel stiff and sore and the muscles deep in my back ache. I take shrug Nail down off my back and spend a nice moment unwrapping the gun from its oilskin covering. I load it, letting the bullets click and clack together and snap the rifle closed more loudly than I need to. There’s no real cover out here which means that the boy is hiding flat somewhere out in the marsh trying to blend into the deadly landscape in the fog and the rain, trusting to the dangerous ground to stop anyone from looking too hard or long. It also means he can probably see me, or the vague outline of me at least, so I let him look real hard at Nail as I rest Pandion’s long rifle onto a shoulder and start walking back up the road, one finger on the trigger.

It’s autumn up here. Near winter. It’s been raining and the ground is bare and wet. There are ways to move that don’t leave tracks but the boy doesn’t know them and after a few minutes I find where he left the road and struck out for the marsh. The thistles at the edge of the Chain are flattened and crushed and I follow them down in his exact path to where they fade and are replaced by marsh vegetation. The ground becomes mire and it sucks and squelches beneath my boots. There is dark, cold, muddy water everywhere, in standing pannes and in deep sinks that are hidden beneath rafts of dead reeds. It stinks of decay.

This is where things become trickier. This is where the bleeders start becoming a threat and where I have to watch where I step. But the signs are still there. Trampled marsh grass, the print of a boot on the edge of a bottomless puddle, the disturbed surface of a sink where someone has gone in and forced the floating scum to the sides. I glance down into the depths of that watery hole as I pick my way around it but I don’t see a body floating there. Not a human one anyway - something icthyian uncoils from the darkness when my shadow falls across the surface but I don’t stay to look.

I keep going, following the killer’s trail further away from the Chain. There’s nothing in front of me but more swamp and nowhere to go but deeper into it or under it. I’m much more careful navigating than he had been but even so I slip and sink several times, once splashing my way into a deep puddle up to my hip. Back muscles screaming with phantom pain, I pull myself free and squelch onward, keeping Nail on my shoulder, safe and dry and primed.

The fog comes up and now I have to start looking for the glow of Gallows Lanterns in the mist. If I see one, I’m shooting, but I think this is far enough. I’m willing to bet I’m close. So I stop. And I make a show of taking Nail down from my shoulder and bringing it around in front of me and I raise it up unhurriedly to my eyes.

I’m aiming at nothing. Yet. But the little fuck doesn’t know that. Nail’s barrel is pointing right where his trail led and he’s been watching me approach for the last quarter hour, tracking him through the bog. I don’t even say anything. I just raise the rifle and as my fingers curl around the trigger, he jumps up from a depression in the ground thirty feet away and flushes in a panicked spray of mud and water. I take actual aim this time.

Run rabbit, run.

I fire and he drops.    


(8/13/2016)