Chapter 340 - 331 — The Last Spare Wheel I

Chapter 340: Chapter 331 — The Last Spare Wheel I

Nobody looked at the wheel.

That was the first thing, and James did not have to say it. Maeve was already inside the cover with Halden. Ronan had both horses by the cheekpieces and was walking them forward the eighteen inches the collapsed corner would allow, to take the harness off their shoulders. Finn had gone to the frames at the back of the yard. Cillian had gone the other way, to the arched doorways along the northern block.

The broken wheel lay in four pieces under the axle and would still be lying there in ten minutes.

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

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 1.6 KM]`

---

The station was not a ruin so much as a building nobody had come back to.

It was a caravanserai, and once James stopped looking at it as scenery he could see exactly what it had been built to do. One entrance — the wide gate they had come through on the eastern road, the only break in the outer wall anywhere. Everything else was blank stone, two and a half metres of it, running the full rectangle.

Inside that, an open courtyard, about thirty metres by twenty, with a dry well head in the middle of it that had been capped with a slab.

Along the northern side, a run of arched doorways: storerooms, most with the doors gone, one with a door hanging off a single hinge. At the eastern end of that block, a wider opening with a soot-black wall inside it — a forge, or something that had been one.

Along the southern side, stables. Open-fronted, divided into bays by low stone walls, with iron rings still set into the back wall at chest height. The floor of them was six inches of old straw and dry dung that had gone to dust, and it lifted in a cloud when Ronan walked the horses in.

And at the western end, where the light came in through the gate, the work area — a flat stretch of hard-packed yard with four abandoned wagon frames on it.

It was hot in there. The stone had been taking sun all day and was giving it back. Dust hung in the shafts of light coming through the storeroom doorways and did not move at all.

---

"Stations kept parts," Halden said, from inside the cover. He had his eyes shut and his hand on his side and he was talking because talking was the only work left to him. "Every one of them did. A caravan that loses a wheel in the wastes is a caravan that never comes back, and a station that can’t fix a wheel is a station nobody stops at. There’ll be a jack in here somewhere. Look for the work room, west end, near the forge."

"Rooms or wagons?" said Finn, from the back of the yard.

"Both. Tools in the rooms. Wheels on the wagons."

---

James did the assignments in about nine seconds.

"Maeve, him. I want to know if the crossing opened it up again."

"Already on it."

"Ronan, horses and the wagon. Don’t leave this end of the yard."

"Right."

"Finn, Cillian — wagons and the work room. Shout if anything matches."

He put his hand flat on the yard.

`[UNEARTH ACTIVATED]`

Fossor went down under the packed dirt and out, and James walked it along the inside of the outer wall in a slow circuit, the whole rectangle, and then out under the gate and thirty metres up the road in each direction.

Nothing.

He left it circling.

---

Maeve got Halden’s shirt up in the cover and said something short and unpleasant.

"It’s open again."

"How open?"

"Open enough that I’ve used most of what I’ve got, and I’m not doing anything clever with it in a wagon in this heat." She got a knee under herself. "Halden. Straight answer. Can you sit up for another twenty minutes?"

"I can sit up for another twenty minutes."

"You’re lying."

"I’m lying," he agreed. "But I can."

---

The search was not a treasure hunt, which James had half expected the Tower to make it.

It was a scrapyard.

Finn came back off the four frames in about ninety seconds with a report nobody wanted.

"Right. Two of them are stripped, no wheels at all, somebody’s had those years ago. The one on its side has got two on the up side and they’re both gone — the felloes have split all the way round from sitting in the sun, you’d put your thumb through them." He wiped his mouth. "Fourth one’s got three wheels still on it and one of them’s rear."

"Rears are bigger," said Halden, without opening his eyes. "Rear won’t sit on a front axle. You’d have the whole wagon standing crooked and the first stone you hit, that’s the end of it."

"So one of the front two."

"So look at the front two."

Cillian’s shout came out of the storeroom at the western end.

"I’ve got tools! I’ve got — actually I don’t know what most of this is."

---

What he had was a work room that had been picked over and still had the heavy things in it, because heavy things are what looters leave.

A wagon jack, cast iron and wood, sitting on its side against the wall with the screw thread rusted into an orange crust. A long-handled wrench. A hammer with a head the size of a fist and a handle that had gone grey and dry. A stone jar with something black in the bottom of it that had once been axle grease and had mostly gone hard.

And on the floor, in a wooden tray, about forty pieces of assorted iron: pins, nuts, washers, split rings, most of them rusted together into lumps.

"Jack," said Halden, when Cillian carried it out and held it up. "That’s the one. That takes the axle. Bring the wrench and bring that jar, and *bring the pins*, all of them, because the one off ours will be bent."

--

Finn found the wheel on the fourth frame.

He got it off by hitting the hub with the hammer for about thirty seconds while swearing steadily, and then rolled it across the yard and stood it up against the side of their own wagon, and the two of them together made the problem obvious.

It was close. It was not the same.

Same rough build — nine spokes, iron-rimmed, a hand’s width across the felloe. Maybe an inch shorter in the diameter and the hub bore looked a fraction wide.

"That’s not ours," said Cillian.

"It’s not," said Halden. "It’s the same kind of wagon, different maker, same road. It’ll go on. It’ll sit a bit lower on that corner and you’ll feel it every stone from here to the gate, and it will not come off." He nodded at the tray. "Long as one of those pins fits."

"And if none of them fit?"

"Then one of you holds the wheel on with your hands for a kilometre and a half," said Halden.