No more than a league into the swamp, he noted.  A small distance straight, a week's work cutting for sign without their guidance.  This dead city, this remnant, must be a like a beacon for them.  It must hold their fates, might make a suitable tomb.<br/><br/>'Not yet, at least,' Marius thinks, his jaw setting easily and the lashes of one brown eye fluttering half-closed.  He'd been trained not to shoot with one eye-- clearly.  He doesn't use the sight-- would not know how-- he draws down, easing the arrow back, steadied with its slick white fletching.  The bow, the white tips, the gracefully stretching blades and their dull-glittering armor-- none of it fits among the fetid, bristling tar-slick of the swamp, its bubbling, reeking mass of decay, of life gone mad with love of death.<br/><br/>In profile, the massive bow is like a mouth, the horn-like tips drawn in like corners of kissing lips.  Marius has seen bows like this in the hands of mercenaries, hire-scouts from the north.  He'd seen a contest between a plains-reaver and one of the Northman mercenaries, where one of these Hyrkanian bows-- some of the rivermen he'd served with nicknamed them boat-bows, pike's eyes, or 'harkers' for ease of speech-- had been used to punch an armor-biter through a young sapling from what must have been a quarter of a mile...   He still remembered the mauled, soft steel tip's warped shape, still clinging to the iron core of the arrowtip, a stubby, dull protrusion from the side opposite the bowman.<br/><br/>He would make no such attempt at spectacle.  The youth, he notes, are good shots-- country boys, but too eager.  They hit their targets as they would small game-- center-mass.  The boglings don't even slow down, and charge into the sludge, their strides slinging muck behind them in fantails.<br/><br/>The redhead warrior's arrow finds its path with carefully-laid precision like an artist's chisel into a knotted bulge at one splotched, rot-fruit neck.  A broadhead-- serrations laid into the blade-edges while they were hot enough to glow, it bites through like a spear, nestles in the bog-dweller's vital artery as if with a sigh of contentment.  The beast's blood pressure spikes for a moment at the agony and shock, producing a mist, like an eruption of flies from the wound-- another, another before its nervous system shuts down in confusion and it collapses into a filthy heap of meat, bone, metal.<br/><br/>Marius' arrow is behind hers, aimed less expertly for the core of the chest, somewhere between the chin and rib-junction.  Marius's target, its glittering black eyes like pyrite buttons as it snarls behind a flopping nose, drops its head and enlongates its jaw in a long-mouthed roar.  The subtle shift drops its head into the path of the arrow, which seats itself assuredly between the palate and eyes-- the mass and velocity of the arrow cause it to duck back its punctured head like a turtle before is knees give and it splashes into the murk, still staring past the triangle of fletchings at the base of the arrow as its vision filled with erupting fluids.<br/><br/>Seeing no bows crossbows, or means of ranged retaliation, he doesn't look for the rest to fall.  Marius nocks another arrow as quickly as he can, begins to scan for stragglers, other ranks... if there are more, they'll have heard... he looks back to the skirmishers, readying to fire again.  Still watching for more.