Chapter 339 - 330 — The Man-Eater at the Ford II

Chapter 339: Chapter 330 — The Man-Eater at the Ford II

A ghoul ran into the middle of it.

It had come down the near bank and gone for the wagon, and its route took it inside four metres of the manticore’s hindquarters, and it did not even slow down.

The manticore killed it without turning its head.

The paw came back and took the ghoul across the spine and put it into the gravel, and the manticore did not look at what it had done and went straight back to trying to get around Finn.

James stopped moving for about a second.

*They’re not together.*

He had been treating the riverbed as two groups of enemies with one plan. It was not. It was two predators that had both come to the same caravan for the same reason.

He tested it once, because he was not going to build anything on one dead ghoul.

He moved the rear skeleton six metres wide on the eastern side — not to fight anything, just to stand in the way — and the four ghouls coming up that flank had to bend their approach around it, and the bend took them across the ground behind the manticore.

The manticore’s head came round.

It went at them. It took two of them in about a second and a half, and for four full seconds it was not thinking about Finn or the wagon or anything else.

"Right," said James.

---

He put the other skeleton out on the same line and started feeding the flank.

It was not elegant. It cost him a skeleton inside a minute and cost him another one thirty seconds later, and it did not do a single point of damage to anything.

What it did was buy four seconds at a time, over and over, out of an elite that could otherwise spend every one of those seconds trying to kill two horses.

And in those seconds, Fossor got under the ford.

James had sent it the moment the manticore charged, and the riverbed was the best ground he had been given all day — dry gravel over packed silt over stone, no water anywhere in it, soft enough to move through and deep enough to move under.

He brought it back down the bed underneath the fight, and waited, and watched Finn’s feet.

"Finn — *hold him there*—"

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,500 / 3,100]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 20,500 → 18,800]`

The blast went into its face and it reared to get away from it, and all its weight went onto the back legs.

Fossor came up underneath them.

---

The gravel gave out in a two-metre circle and the manticore’s whole back end dropped into it.

It did not go over. It was far too heavy for that and Fossor was not going to throw a thing that size anywhere. What it did was lose the ground it had just put every kilo of itself onto, and the rear legs scrabbled, and the enormous forward-curving tail that had been coming up over the shoulder for a volley swung wide and came down across the gravel instead.

Finn was on it before it hit.

Both axes, together, into the joint about two-thirds of the way along where the spines thinned.

`[MANTICORE — HP: 18,800 → 16,000]`

It did not come off.

It buckled. There was a wet crunching noise and the last third of the tail suddenly had a bend in it that had not been there before, and when the manticore hauled itself out of the hole and tried to bring the tail back over its shoulder, the tip did not come all the way round.

"*There,*" Maeve shouted. "James, *there* — that joint, that’s the—"

`[MAEVE CALLAHAN — HEXLIGHT BRAND APPLIED]`

The violet ring went onto the buckled joint and stayed there.

After that, nobody attacked anything else.

Cillian stopped shooting ghouls. Finn stopped going for the chest. James stopped putting blasts into its face.

Everything went into one bend in one tail.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 16,000 → 12,400]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 12,400 → 9,500]`

---

And it stopped trying to shoot anything.

That was when it got dangerous.

It gave up on the tail entirely, put its head down, and went straight through Finn at the wagon.

Not around. Through — it took a full axe stroke across the skull to do it and did not slow down, and Finn went off his feet, and there were nine metres of open gravel between a charging man-eater and two horses that were already past managing.

Ronan came off the driver’s board.

Three steps. Not more. He did not go out to meet it, because going out to meet it meant leaving the wagon, and the entire point of Ronan Cleary was that he understood that better than anyone alive.

He got his left foot planted, and his shoulder into the back of the shield, and his head down.

It hit him.

The noise was enormous. Ronan’s boots came off the gravel entirely for the first half-metre and then came down and dug in, and he went backwards — a metre, two metres, three — with both heels cutting parallel trenches through the loose stone and the whole of him shaking.

He stopped forty centimetres from the front wheel.

"*RONAN*—"

"I’ve got him." His voice came out through his teeth. "I’ve *got* him. Somebody do something about him."

---

At two metres, with a shield in its face and a Guardian it could not move, the manticore did the only thing left and fired at point-blank range.

The tail came round low, sideways, at the height of a horse’s chest — bent, ruined, and still capable — and six spines came out of it at four metres’ distance.

Ronan could not take them and hold the charge at the same time.

James did not hesitate over it.

He put both remaining skeletons into the flight path.

They were not fast enough to intercept anything and they did not need to be — they needed to be standing in the way, and they were, and four of the spines went into them and took them apart where they stood.

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`

One went past everything and into the gravel.

The last one hit the wheel.

It went into the same felloe two inches from the first crack and the split ran the rest of the way across the rim with a sound like a branch going.

The wheel kept turning.

Halden did not get touched.

---

"*NOW,*" Maeve shouted.

It was committed. All of it — every kilogram of the thing was leaning forward into a shield with its back legs braced and its tail low and empty.

Finn came up off the gravel and hit the branded joint from the outside.

`[MANTICORE — HP: 9,500 → 7,400]`

Cillian had the angle at last, because with the creature square on to Ronan there was nothing behind it but riverbed.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 7,400 → 4,800]`

Fossor came up under the rear right leg and took it out from under the animal for the second time, and this time it was already at full lean and it went down onto the shoulder.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,440 / 3,100]`

`[MANTICORE — HP: 4,800 → 3,000]`

Ronan stepped forward — one step, the first one he had taken toward anything all day — and put the top edge of the shield up under the human face and forced the head back.

James went in under it and put Durendal through the throat to the crossguard.

`[MANTICORE — HP: 3,000 → 0]`

`[ELITE HOSTILE SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 1,400]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

It came down on its side across the gravel and the last of the noise went out of it, and the bent tail slapped twice against the ground and stopped.

Nothing dropped. Nothing appeared. It was a dead animal at the edge of a ford.

---

The ghouls did not care that it was dead.

That took another four minutes and it was the least interesting four minutes of the floor — they came, and Finn and Cillian killed them, and Ronan went straight back to the driver’s board and did not chase one single thing.

James raised three more off the bodies going past and put them on the wheels and nowhere else.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×3`

`[MANA: 2,230 / 3,100]`

`[GHOULS SLAIN ×26]`

`[EXP GAINED: 7,280]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 68,185 / 72,000]`

Then the bed in front of them was clear, and the ramp was clear, and the wagon rolled up to the ford with a broken wheel and a courier who had gone grey.

---

The crossing was worse than the fight.

The ford was not a road. It was a place where the bank had collapsed thirty years ago and the caravans had used the wreckage ever since — which meant a descent at an angle across loose gravel, a stretch of bare uneven bedrock in the middle where the old river had scoured down, and then a climb up the fallen slope on the far side over broken slabs.

"Left of that stone," Halden said. He had the reins in both hands and was leaning forward off the board with his jaw set. "Not right. Right looks better and it isn’t, there’s a drop under the shale. *Left.*"

Finn went to the bay’s head. Maeve went to the brown one.

The wagon came down onto the bedrock and every joint in it complained.

The broken wheel hit the first proper edge of stone and the split opened wide enough to see through, and the whole front corner dipped and came back up, and inside the cover Halden slammed against the frame and made no noise at all this time, which was worse.

"It’s going," Maeve called.

"It’s not going yet—"

"James, it is *going*—"

Halfway up the far slope it very nearly went.

The wheel came onto a slab at the wrong angle and the crack ran another six inches and the rim flexed visibly, and the whole wagon started to lean.

Ronan got under the front corner with his back and his legs and simply held the thing up. Finn got a shoulder in beside him. Maeve got both hands on the harness and got the horses to pull rather than panic, and Halden, who could not stand up, leaned his whole weight across the board to the high side and shouted at them until it was over.

It came onto the flat at the top with the wheel wobbling visibly on every revolution.

Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

"Right," said Cillian. "That’s fine. That’s absolutely fine and we’re all fine."

---

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:38:20]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 2.8 KM]`

James looked at the two lines for a while.

Thirty-eight minutes. Two point eight kilometres. On the flat, on a road, a loaded wagon did that in about twenty-five — which was fine, and would have been comfortable, and assumed a wagon.

"It’ll hold," said Finn.

"It won’t."

"It might."

"Finn."

"...It won’t," Finn agreed.

Halden spoke from the board with his eyes shut.

"Station," he said. "Kilometre up the road, bit more. Old caravan stop. There’ll be nothing worth stealing left in it but there might be a wheel."

"Might?"

"People die on this road in wagons," said Halden. "The wagons don’t walk home."

---

The road climbed out of the river valley and became a road again, and the badlands came back — ochre, flat, hot, with the gullies running along both sides.

And out ahead, in the notch between the two cliffs, the Eastern Gatehouse came back into view.

They went the next kilometre slowly, because slowly was all the wheel would take.

It knocked. That was the thing that got into all of them. Every single revolution it went *knock* against the axle housing at the same point, and the sound of it changed about once a minute as the split opened a bit more, and by the end it was not a knock so much as a slap.

The horses were tiring. The bay had a crust of dried blood down the flank where the ghoul had raked it and was favouring that side without quite limping.

Halden’s breathing had gone shallow and quick and he had stopped talking except to point.

Dust settled on all of them and stayed there. James had it in his eyelashes.

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:32:40]`

---

The station came up out of the heat shimmer about six hundred metres out.

It was low and stone-built and the colour of everything else. A long single-storey block along the northern side of the road with square window holes and no glass in any of them. An open courtyard in front of it, walled on two sides, with the gate posts still standing and no gate between them. Along the western edge of the courtyard, a run of collapsed awnings — timber frames that had gone down in a line, canvas long gone, leaving the uprights standing at angles like a fence somebody had driven through.

And at the back of the yard, against the wall, four abandoned wagon frames.

Stripped. Axles up on blocks on two of them. One lying on its side.

"There," said Maeve. "There’s four of them."

"They’ll all be rotten," said Cillian.

"They won’t all be rotten."

---

They came in through the gate posts with the wheel slapping.

It failed eleven metres into the courtyard.

There was no warning that any of them could have used. The crack had been running the whole way from the ford, and it reached the hub, and the felloe simply came apart — the rim split, the outer section peeled away and went under the wagon, and the spokes on that quarter folded.

The front corner dropped.

It went down about forty centimetres, hard, and the axle end hit the dirt and dug in and stopped the whole wagon dead, and the horses hit the end of the harness and screamed.

Inside, Halden came off the board.

Finn caught the front corner with both arms and his back under it. Ronan got the shield down and his shoulder into the frame from the other side. Maeve was over the board and into the cover before the wagon had finished moving and got both hands on the courier’s chest and stopped him going into the hoops.

It held.

The wagon sat at an angle in the middle of an empty courtyard with one corner in the dirt and a wheel in four pieces underneath it.

---

The dust came down slowly.

The horses were still moving and still in harness and neither of them was hurt beyond the flank. Halden was alive, on his back inside the cover, breathing in a way Maeve did not like at all.

James stood and looked at the wheel.

He had a Fallen Divinity on another continent and a burrowing summon under the yard and a legendary sword and thirty-one floors of experience, and a man in his fifties who could not walk a kilometre and a half was sitting in a broken wagon with about ten minutes’ worth of slack on a clock.

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:26:20]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 1.6 KM]`

Behind him, Finn and Ronan were already walking toward the four stripped frames at the back of the yard.