Chapter 336 - 327 — The Road Eats Travellers II

Chapter 336: Chapter 327 — The Road Eats Travellers II

Maeve got a fresh dressing onto Halden’s side while the wagon was moving, which took her four attempts and a great deal of swearing from both of them.

"How bad was it originally?"

"Bad enough that I stopped and shouldn’t have." He held the board with one hand and let her work with the other. "Two days ago. Four of us out of Redwater. I’m the one with the satchel so I’m the one that ran."

"And the other three?"

"On this road somewhere," said Halden. "Wearing something else by now."

Nobody said anything to that.

"What’s ahead?" said Finn, from the front.

"Road drops into the old river." Halden nodded east. "Big dry bed, half a mile across, banks up both sides. There’s a crossing in the middle of it, stone, old. Past that there’s a caravan station nobody’s used in years, and then the road climbs into the narrows and the narrows take you to the gatehouse."

"Is the crossing the only way over?"

"It’s the only way over for *that*," said Halden, thumping the side of the wagon with the flat of his hand.

---

They got four kilometres out of the next twenty minutes, which was the best stretch of the floor.

It was not quiet — it was the opposite of quiet, two horses and a heavy wagon on stone with four sets of boots and an undead escort — but nothing tried to kill them, and the formation settled into something that felt less like people standing near a wagon and more like a shape.

Ronan by the board, permanently, left side.

Maeve level with the front wheel, right side, watching Halden and the road behind in alternation.

Finn forward, and this time genuinely only twenty metres, because James had said it twice.

Cillian off the back right corner on his angle, which he mentioned four separate times.

Three skeletons at the rear and the nearside and in front of the horses, walking.

And Fossor out ahead, under the hardpan, sixty to ninety metres up the road, coming back in whenever James felt the leash start to pull.

The badlands went past. The gullies went past. Another set of wheel ruts left the road at an angle and went up over a rise and did not come back.

---

At the seven-kilometre mark a man stood up out of the scrub a hundred and fifty metres ahead and started waving one arm.

Finn’s head came round.

"There’s—"

"I know," said James. "There’s six of them in the rocks behind him. Two on the left of the road, four on the right."

Finn looked at him. Then he looked forward. Then he put both axes back into his hands rather than reaching for them later.

"Grand," he said. "So we’re not doing that again."

"We’re not doing that again."

*"Everyone hold the shape,"* Maeve called. *"Nobody goes to him. Nobody *looks* at him."*

Halden did not slow down.

---

The second ambush was bigger and it was built properly.

Four of them came up onto the road in front, right out in the open, with their arms wide and their mouths going — noise for the first time, a high broken yelping that went off the rocks on both sides and came back, and it was enough to make Finn’s whole body turn toward it.

That was the point of them.

The other ten came up the gully behind.

"*Rear*," Maeve shouted. "James, rear—"

He did not go back.

That was the thing he had spent a fortnight learning and it went against every instinct he had ever had. He did not turn round and run twenty metres to the back of a moving wagon.

He sent the skeletons.

Three of them, already walking at the rear and the flank, already in position, and all James did was tell them to close — and ten ghouls that had come up out of a gully expecting canvas and a wounded man got three hooved things in the way instead.

They were not good. They lost immediately and they lost badly.

They also lasted eleven seconds, which was eleven seconds that ten ghouls spent not touching the wagon, and in that eleven seconds Cillian came round, found his angle, and took four of them off the ground.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

One skeleton came apart under two of them.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`

And the hole that opened was on the nearside, behind the front wheel, low down where a thing could get under the bed and up the far side — and Ronan was on the driver’s board side with two of them on his shield and could not cross without leaving Halden open.

"*James.*"

He was already moving.

Not to the gap. Two strides to the nearest dead ghoul, which was four metres away and had been alive nine seconds ago, and his hand on its sternum.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,750 / 3,100]`

It came up inside the gap instead of having to run to it.

The ghoul that had got under the wagon bed came out the other side into it, and did not get any further, and Finn arrived three seconds later and finished both of them.

---

Then Maeve saw the other thing.

"They’re going for the *horses*."

Two of them had given up entirely on the man behind the canvas and gone for the traces instead — one at the bay’s hindquarters, one trying to get its long arms into the harness leather itself.

"Cillian—"

"I can’t, I’ll hit the horse—"

"Then *move*—"

He moved. He took four paces forward and up onto the crown of the road to change his line and got one of them across the back and dropped it.

The second one got a hand in.

It raked the bay along the flank, shallow, a hand’s width of open skin above the girth — and Cillian killed it about a second and a half later, and by then the damage was done.

The horse went mad.

It tried to bolt in a harness attached to another horse and a loaded wagon, which meant it pulled sideways instead of forward. The traces snapped taut on one side. The whole wagon came round about twenty degrees off the line of the road, the offside front dropped into a rut, and the entire bed pitched hard.

Inside, Halden went off the board and into the frame of the cover with his wounded side leading, and made a sound James heard from ten metres back.

"HOLD HER—"

Maeve got to the bay’s head. Ronan got a shoulder against the swinging front corner of the wagon and stopped it going over. Finn got both hands on the harness and leaned.

It took eleven seconds to get them straight and moving again, and a further forty for the bay to stop shaking.

Nothing failed. Nothing on any panel changed.

Maeve got Halden back onto the board and got the shirt up and swore at what was underneath it.

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 5.1 KM]`

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:58:03]`

---

She worked on him for the next four minutes with the wagon going at half pace, because half pace was what he could sit through.

She did not fix it. She was never going to fix it — she got the bleeding stopped and the dressing packed and strapped and the shirt back down over it, and the man was still a fifty-year-old with a two-day-old hole in him who had just been thrown into a wagon frame.

"Can you hold the reins?"

"I can hold the reins."

"Can you hold the reins if that happens again?"

Halden looked at her.

"I’ll hold the reins," he said.

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one I’ve got, love."