They walked under boughs thick enough to hang a man from. They followed a slipshod trail through the woods, two days or more behind their prey. Grymes strained to match the Clairvoyant’s marching step and he wondered just what hateful thoughts impelled him to move at such a pace. Whenever he felt himself lagging, his resolve weakening, fearing the ever-greater distance he was putting between himself and home, he thought of Frey. He thought of his greasy-haired head, his miserable, droopy-eyed, harrowed face and he would feel his veins stand just under his skin, burgeoning with hot blood. He remembered the look on Frey’s face after Grymes had knocked three of his teeth out with a stone and he longed to see the same look again before he killed him.

In consideration of such ends, Grymes did not yet regret taking up with the Clairvoyant. He was grateful, in some twisted sense of the word, for having crossed paths with what seemed a living instrument of vengeful calamity. Grymes thought himself clever, bending this man with glass eyes and murderous inclinations to meet his own ends. In due time, however, he would find out that contracts of fate are not so easily voided and the cost they demand is a heavy one.

In the meantime, he began to think himself of the same kind as the Clairvoyant. He even tried to converse with him as if entire worlds did not separate their viewpoints.

“What’s in that bag you carry on your back?” asked Grymes.

The wide-brimmed hat ahead of him turned a quarter-way around so that Grymes could just barely see one side of a glass bauble. Then the hat returned to its original position. “Necessaries. Trophies.”

“What kind of trophies?”

“The kind you earn.”

Grymes twisted his mouth. He eyed a pouch that bounced on its drawstring at the Clairvoyant’s hip. “What about that sack? What’s in that?”

“Ammunition.”

“Lead? Ain’t that heavy?”

“You won’t find a pouchful of lead for as long you live.” He patted the pouch with his left hand. “You have to use what you can find out here.”

“We had plenty of lead. That man you killed, he had a pouch of it. I seen him carry it around all my life.”

“That so?” said the Clairvoyant. “You should have grabbed it, then.”

“I thought you’d have noticed it.”

The Clairvoyant shook his head. “I don’t see what I don’t need.”

“You’d rather use fucking splinters and pebbles, then?”

The Clairvoyant walked in silence, as if he hadn’t heard Grymes. Then he said, “I don’t shoot to cure.”

Grymes felt uneasy, but he pressed on. “So you got no lead at all?”

“Just the soles of my boots.”

“What for?”

“Keep my feet on the ground.”

Grymes looked at the Clairvoyant’s boots and frowned. He squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. “Seems you hate soldiers.” There was a crunch, a sensation of disembodiment, and a whirling sky seen sparsely between mold-coloured branches. An explosion of pain centered on his nose and a moan that must have been his own. He brought a hand to his nose and when he took it away his fingers were daubed with blood. A haloed figure stood over him.

“I hate talkers too.”

The next day, they walked through a field of barley, both noticing that it had been recently trodden and parted before them. On the other side of a split-pine fence, they came into the hamlet proper and saw, strewn about, the aftermath of some violent calamity. Engorged buzzards sat on eaves, sunning their wings and shading the dead like considerate undertakers. The buzzing of flies was so constant and so thick that they soon took it for the ambiance that always was and had been.

Grymes walked over to a corpse, having to breathe through his mouth because his nose was swollen. Unable to bear it, he tried to hold his breath against the ubiquitous stench but couldn’t help sucking in a shocked lungful when he saw a chitinous, plated worm, its hundred spindly legs sprawled and curled about its trunk, half emerged from the body of a man who had nearly been split in two at the neck. It was too much, even for him, and he ran over to a maggot filled slop-trough and emptied his stomach.

“That was some hard-earned tack you just spilled,” said the Clairvoyant, eyeing Grymes with more repulsion than at the gutted and festering corpses all around him. “You had best build up your guts ‘cause you’ll see worse than this if you keep on with me.”

Grymes let a viscous thread of bile droop from his lower lip until it snapped under its own tension. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “What is that thing?”

“What? This?” The Clairvoyant took a step and crushed the chitinous mass under his lead-soled heel. He ground his foot and it made sickening popping sounds as it was crushed to mush. “Some kind of worm.”

Grymes dry-heaved.

“Quit that, now,” snapped the Clairvoyant.

Out of sight, its source hidden in the shadow of a tipped cart, a weak groan bubbled through the buzzing of flies. “Water.”

The Clairvoyant heard it clearly and made haste to cross the corpse-strewn yard toward the cart. He stood, one hand on the hilt of his knife, looking down at something obscured by the bed of the cart. He looked over at Grymes and smiled. “Come here.”

There were dark, wormlike lines on the periphery of Grymes’s perception. He pushed himself from the trough and walked entranced among the bodies, cringing at the seemingly writhing ground beneath his feet. Coming up on the Clairvoyant’s right, he saw the bottom of a leather boot attached to a bloodied leg which belong to a bearded man, swooning with lack of water and blood. He apprised Grymes with hopeless eyes and rasped, “Water.”

Grymes swallowed instinctively.

“You see this?” said the Clairvoyant, turning on Grymes, smiling.

“I see it,” said Grymes in a hollow voice.

“What’re you going to do?”

Paling, unsteady with nausea and anxiety, Grymes’s face showed blank as a cobblestone. “I don’t know where to get water around here.”

The smile dropped from the Clairvoyant’s face. He took a step toward Grymes so that he shaded his feathery head with the brim of his hat. “You get that man water and I will stuff your corpse in that trough with the meat you just wasted.”

In the glass baubles, catching the grimy light, Grymes saw his own green complexion, distorted and thin.

“You know what you’re going to do,” said the Clairvoyant.

“I don’t have any ammo.”

“Find some.” The Clairvoyant took a step back. “I’ll spare you the powder.”

Watching the back of the Clairvoyant, who had turned to look down at the death-delirious man, Grymes, with a sweat-soaked, shaking hand, reached behind him and grabbed the dragoon pistol he had taken from the Administrator and had tucked into the waist of his trousers. He drew it and looked in the soot-caked bore and felt he held a bottomless pit right there in his hand.

The man begged for water.

“Some loose nails in this cart,” said the Clairvoyant. “Take a rock and bend one round and use that.”

Grymes stumbled over to the cart and put his free hand on its splintered side to steady himself. His vision was disintegrating, and he could not tell a nail from a knot in the wood. Running his hand along the boards, he suffered a few splinters until he finally felt something cold. Getting his fingers under its head, Grymes pried away a loose nail and held it in his palm. He did as the Clairvoyant suggested, standing it point up on the ground and hitting it with a flat stone until it curled like a tadpole and would fit snugly in the barrel of his gun.

He came around the cart and stood adjacent to the Clairvoyant. “I have it.”

Breaking his fragile reverie, the Clairvoyant looked down at Grymes and at the curled nail he held in one hand and at the gun he held in the other. “Tip it up,” he said, reaching for his powder horn. He uncapped it and poured the charge down the barrel of Grymes’ gun. “Drop it in there.”

Grymes put the nail in the bore of the flintlock. He took the ramrod from its nook under the barrel and stuffed the nail until it was fast against the powder.

The man whispered for water.

Smiling, the Clairvoyant said, “So you know some of the motions. Cock the hammer and turn the pan this way.” He sprinkled powder on the pan for Grymes and then stoppered the horn and tucked it away under his coat. “Push the frizzen down snug and you’re primed.”

Grymes did so and took a step past the Clairvoyant and stood near the man. He pointed the barrel at his head but it swerved and jerked so badly that Grymes was obliged to take step closer. He couldn’t handle it if he missed.

“Not going to ask him his name?”

Grymes swallowed bile, and it moved like a slug down his throat. “I don’t want to know his name,” he said without turning.

A buzzing interval passed. The barrel of the gun swam in front of the man’s sunken eyes. His bottom lip, seen through his beard, was cracked and split. It was clear he could not tell what was about to happen.

“Ask him his name.” There was no bargain in the Clairvoyant’s voice.

Grymes shut his eyes tight and then opened them wide. “What’s your name?” He hoped with all his being the man would not answer.

Rolling his head so that it fell on his left shoulder, the dying man looked up at Grymes from eyes white with supplication and whispered, “Marston.”

Grymes pulled the trigger.

When the smoke blew away, and the man slumped still and dead, the Clairvoyant clapped a hand on Grymes’s shoulder. “You did the right thing.”

Grymes didn’t take his eyes off the man he had killed.

The Clairvoyant removed his hand. “But you could have done no wrong, anyway.” He turned coldly away and walked among the slaughtered, waving away the smoke like it were a cloud of bothersome insects. Standing a distance removed, he noticed a panicked route carved through the barley field, leading up to a hill. His glass orbs rolled along the trace, and he tilted his head so that the brim of his hat touched his left shoulder. He whipped around suddenly and looked back at Grymes. In the uncertain, horrified way the young man picked a path among the obstacles of ruin and the putrefying dead, his pistol dangling in his hand like a broken flower, the Clairvoyant saw a waking remnant of something he, too, had lived through.

A memory. He was a battered young man of no more than sixteen. His father had nearly beaten him to death for making what he took to be a choice to be something he considered abominable. There was a war at home that he knew could not win. So, he turned to war abroad, taking on the colours and the raiment of men like-minded in the value of violence and the glory in risking one’s life to take another’s. He learned to pass as one of them, though he was, in truth, a refugee from the state of war and abhorred it in the privacy of his mind.

On his first march, equipped with a gun he didn’t know how to use, a saber that he’d sooner cut himself with than the enemy, he took in with the rearguard, brightly clothed in faction colours, bedazzled at the column of high-hued soldiers with their banner staffs and their polearms waving above their heads extending far ahead of him like a rippling pendant. Through fields and moors and valleys, he kept with that glory-seeking company, campaigning for a cause that none stopped to consider too long for fear that it would be seen through and rob them of their pleasant delusions. With cheers and marching songs and revelry at night at the certain victories soon to be had in fair and equal combat, the Clairvoyant began to think himself suited the life of a soldier.

Noontime, a week on the march, the light harsh and blinding from where it bounced off the gleaming steel of a gun barrel or a tin canteen, the column flowed like a complacent river heading for a merciless fall. Exposed on an open field, a wide arc of particulate grapeshot fired from an unseen mounted gun peppered the column broadside and men went down like chaff before the swish of the scythe and others clasped their faces or their limbs and writhed and rolled on the ground in agony and fear. A glint of the brass culverin that had levelled so many caught the Clairvoyant’s eye from where it was camouflaged among the shrubs to his leeside, and he screamed until his voice broke though no one paid his small and lonely voice any heed in the pandemonium that had infested that green-boughed rank of men and boys pretending to be something they were not.

The culverins and cannons pounded the air, and all about was the stink of powder and brimstone. Men scrambled to load their rifles and pistols, spinning to sight the cavernous maws that spat lethal lead into the bodies of their friends. In a matter of minutes, the field was little more than a charnel pit. Hundreds of folly-filled youths lied dead, stacked one upon the other. The survivors scattered to the winds if they could run or walk, fanning across the open field in their colourful uniforms, unarmed, routed, at the mercy now of cold nights and worse things than men with guns. The maimed who could not flee rolled and crawled over each other like desperate, broken animals. Eventually, grim soldiers in the enemy’s colours would come up out of the shrubs, cross the field, and end their lives unceremoniously.

When all had died down, and it was near dusk now, the Clairvoyant crawled out of the human wreckage. Using the bodies of the indiscriminate fallen, he had burrowed into the carnage like a worm and had played dead as men howled in agony all around him and gunshots stoppered their raw lungs for good. The Clairvoyant was more lead than bone and his skin was pocked and cratered and bleeding. Out of the bodies he had emerged like some horrible imago to take off on wicked wing and bedevil the night and there ended his inglorious career as a soldier.

Grymes was standing before him now, looking up into his face, glassy eyed, seemingly as dazed as the Clairvoyant felt. He didn’t know how long Grymes had been standing there. “Any of these him?” he asked in a far-off voice.

Grymes looked back at the bodies he had carefully been ignoring. He turned to face the Clairvoyant and shook his head.

“Then this is the trail.” He turned and took to the trampled barley, the chaff crushed beneath his lead-soled boots. Behind him, the tottering footfalls of Grymes followed.

–––––

Nell and Frey could hear the crows calling for most of the morning. In some more discerning part of them, they knew better than to head in their direction. But they were starving. Hunger veiled their judgment like an oiled shroud. Their heads felt filled with air, their stomachs with fire. They had left the brook behind with its bobbing bodies and cut a difficult way through the undergrowth.

Eventually, they stumbled out onto a dirt road. They looked both ways and then turned their eyes on each other.

“We’re lost,” said Nell.

“We were never found,” said Frey, scowling.

“No, I meant, ‘We’re as good as dead’.”

“If only,” said Frey, deadpan.

Nell sat down on the road, tucked her legs in, and curled over to relive the pain in her stomach. Her mother’s book was on the ground beside her.

Frey looked down at her. “You’re just gonna sit there?”

Without raising her head, Nell said, “Yes.”

“You gonna let them come and cut you up, too?”

“Cut me up for what?” She lifted her head and sneered. “There’s nothing in me anyone wants.” She let her head drop again.

Frey rubbed his bullet scar and looked up and down the road. Empty, both ways. He looked down on Nell and she curled a bit tighter and grimaced. “There’s nothing to eat down there.”

Nell lifted her head and glared at him. “I know that.”

“Then get up.”

Nell didn’t move. “Make me.”

A nexus of starving ire buoyed halfway between their glowering faces. Finally, Frey had to look away. He looked down the path and saw that it was as it had been. He looked up and saw movement. Dropping low, he scuttled over to Nell and grabbed her by the arm.

“What?” snarled Nell, twisting to break his grasp.

“Get off the road. There’s people coming.”

The colour drained from Nell’s face and she flipped over and scampered off the path back into the underbrush. Frey followed her in and together they waited behind a mossy log, peeking over its breadth at the partially concealed road. An angular, dark object sat in the middle of the sand-coloured path. Nell made a pneumatic wheezing sound.

“My book,” she whimpered. She half-clambered over the log, but Frey caught her by the ankle and held her back. She kicked at him, but he held on. “Let me go,” she said through her gnashing teeth.

“Leave it,” hissed Frey.

“My mother gave it to me.”

“So? She left you behind.”

Nell poised on the log, tense. Then she coiled her leg and released it backward as hard as she could. The dusty bottom of her boot caught Frey clean on the nose and the sharp, eye-watering pain made him let go of her ankle. Casting a vindictive glare back, she saw his crumpled face, the dark red blood bathing his lips, dripping from his chin, holding his hand palm up to catch the precious drops.

She broke through the lean foliage and leapt out onto the path. In a few desperate strides she was at her book. Up the path, she saw four men, the foremost of which stopped dead in his tracks and held out a hand, stopping the others. They stood as if frozen in amber. Then Nell bent and scooped up her book and turned and ran back into the woods.

She leapt the log, hearing over the pumping of blood in her ears the roar and bustle of men running down the path after her. Frey was not where he had been. On the forest floor, glistening drops of uncoagulated blood made a telltale trail. She followed it as if fate itself had lent her its length of crimson yarn.

Ferns folded beneath her feet. Twigs snapped in twain and were sent flying and flipping through the air under the force of her footfalls. She bounced off of naked trunks, tearing away the placid moss and lichen that had lived in quiet for years and years in the northern shade. Shoulders bruised, toes blunted, scratches running over her cheeks, her breath tearing her lungs with its harsh passage, Nell ran over the land that seemed hostile to her very hope of survival. A hooked, vile root snared her foot and she fell and skidded across the mulchy ground, turning up the dark loam, leaving a haggard trail where her body peeled away the skin of the earth.

She spat out pine needles and gritty earth and heaved herself to her feet, holding on to her mother’s book to the very last. In the woods behind her she could hooting and hollering and depraved howling mixed with panting predatory promises of men who carved the lead from the living and the dead. But Nell had more to fear than that.

“They’s one down in the gulch!” howled a voice.

“Trapped like a rat in a bucket, isn’t he?”

“How’d you get down there, little mouse? Tell us, so we can get to you.”

A despair more benumbing than her terror coated Nell where she crouched listening. She knew they had found Frey. She turned her eyes to the patchwork sky that broke through the dark interlacing pine boughs above her as if imploring the unseen, cloud-dwelling watchers to spectate what she was about to do.

–––––

Frey, in his panic, had slid down the sheer side of a gulch, carved deep by a river that had dried up and died a long, long time ago. He hit the level bottom running, his mouth slathered in blood from his nose. He realized his mistake before he even tried to scale the far side. It towered above him. It was not scalable without a rope fastened to the top. He spun around and looked at the severe slope he had just slid down. Yipping and cackling voices spilled over the edge of the far side of the gully. Vivid remembrances of the carved corpse Nell had pulled from the brook floated into his pounding head. His reason gave up and died right then and there and he tried climbing the impossible wall, getting some feet off the ground before losing his handhold and falling flat on his back on the soft, spongy ground.

He scrambled like an upturned beetle. Pushing himself to his feet, he cast a maddened glance up at the far side of the gulch. Four men had come up to its rim and were watching him struggle.

“They’s one down in the gulch!”

“Trapped like a rat in a bucket, isn’t he?”

“How’d you get down there, little mouse? Tell us, so we can get to you.”

They roved about the lip of the gully, searching for a safe path down. They bounced blackjacks in their hands, licked the steel of their sharpened knives, made obscene and threatening gestures, and voiced worse vows yet.

“You leaded, boy?” called one. “Let us know. Save us the trouble of gutting you after we kill you.”

Frey backed into the wall.

“Can’t you talk?” hollered a second.

“Course he can’t talk. He’s a filthy rat.” A third crouched at the edge and lowered one leg over. “Watch this, boys. They don’t call me ‘Ratslayer’ for nothing.” He threw his shillelagh into the gully. Then he rode down the side adroitly and stood a stone’s throw away from Frey. He picked up his weapon and strode towards Frey, neck thrust out. “Oh, you’re a filthy rat. I can smell you from here. Filthy, filthy vermin. You got any lead in you? Do you? You better make this worth it, you filthy fucking rat.”

A dead look had come across Frey’s face. He watched Ratslayer approach with much the same expression he would stare at a bowl of gruel.

“Not gonna bite?” sneered Ratslayer. “I don’t blame you. You know what? I’ll make this quick since you’re such a kind little rat.” He stood about an arm’s length away from Frey. “Close your eyes.”

Frey held a half-lidded gaze upon his face.

“Close your eyes,” spat Ratslayer.

Frey kept his eyes open.

Without another word, Ratslayer coiled up with his shillelagh, teeth bared. The knotted club made a turgid ripping sound as it tore apart the air above Frey’s head after he had ducked. Swiftly, Frey grabbed the pointed handle of his knife from his boot, flipped it keen-side-up, and stuck it to the hilt into Ratslayer’s gut, just below the navel. With two hands on the grip, Frey heaved upwards and the blade unseamed Ratslayer until it caught on the bottom of his sternum.

Screeching, scrabbling, Ratslayer dropped his club, stumbled back, the blade sliding out of his body, and fell flat on his back. In a veiny, purple and red swell, his viscera erupted from his slit flesh. He grabbed it instinctively and held the glistening glob as if he could push it back in. He looked past his spilled guts and stared up at Frey with childlike, fearful eyes. His lips trembled and he had become suddenly very pale.

Hands slick with warm, sticky blood, mouth crusted with red flakes from his stoppered nose, Frey looked down at him without expression. “Close your eyes,” he said, tone neutral.

Up on the far rim, the other men, who had been hollering and cheering, brought near to ecstasy by the impending execution of Frey, now stood still and silent. The only sound was Ratslayer jabbering and taking in air with a sickly sucking noise.

By some murderous and silent compact, the men all moved to slide down the gully. But only one committed to the descent. The other two turned to look behind them. One of them caught a whirling, black, angular projectile in the teeth, and the crack echoed like a gunshot. He fell backwards down the gully, rolling and twisting and hitting the earth and not moving. The other man, half over the edge, scrambling to get back on firm ground at the top, dropped his knife and raised his hands over his face. A length of deadfall crashed over his head, smashing his hands and all, and he bit the dirt and rebounded backwards off the rim and down the gulch, coming to a rest near his broken comrade.

The man at the bottom, watching his friends fall destroyed, stared up at the rim like an insect seeing the ever-descending boot that would crush him. A green-eyed, bronze-haired head poked over the edge. He dropped his club and backed up, slack-jawed. He backed up until he felt a sticky, iron-smelling hand close around his mouth and a keen, cold edge set snug against his throat.

A voice whispered into his ear. “Got any food?”