Chapter 341 - 332 — The Last Spare Wheel II

Chapter 341: Chapter 332 — The Last Spare Wheel II

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:21:40]`

"Jack under the axle," Halden said. "Not the frame, the *axle*, outside the spring mount — there, where the wood’s thickest. Turn it slow and keep your fingers out of the thread."

Ronan got the front corner up on his back while Finn worked the jack in under it, and then let it down onto the iron by degrees, and the whole wagon groaned above them in a long series of separate complaints as the weight went over.

Cillian got the wrench onto the retaining nut of the destroyed wheel.

It did not move.

"It’s seized."

"It’s not seized, it’s *tight*—"

"It’s seized, Halden."

"Then hit it and turn it at the same time," said Halden, "and mind your knuckles on the hub."

The dead wheel came off in pieces, most of it already off, the last quarter of the rim dropping into the dirt as the hub came free.

James got his fingers into the axle grease jar and worked what was left of it soft between his palms and onto the spindle, and it went under his nails and into the creases of his hands and was still there hours later.

Above them, in the stable bay, both horses started moving.

---

Fossor found them at a hundred and ten metres out.

Not on the road. In the broken ground north of it, coming in along the line of the low rocks — and then, forty seconds later, another group south of the road doing exactly the same thing.

They stopped at about sixty metres.

James walked to the gate and looked out.

They were sitting in the rocks. Standing, some of them, with their heads up over the stone. Thirty or forty of them out there in the heat, spread across both sides of the road, not moving in and not going away, watching a wide dark gateway in a stone wall with one broken wagon inside it.

They did not like the gate. That was the whole of it. Three floors of watching them come at a moving target in the open, and they had followed that target into a building with one door and had stopped outside it.

"How long’ll they sit there?" said Cillian, from the wheel.

"Until they work out we’re not coming out."

---

James did the arithmetic in about four seconds and it was not close.

They could go out and fight them. Five Challengers and an open road and forty ghouls — they would win it, and it would cost them eight or nine minutes and put them out in the open with a wagon on a jack behind them.

Or they could fix the wheel, and the gate would hold long enough, because the gate was four metres wide and everything about that station had been built by people who expected this exact problem.

"We finish the wheel," he said. "Nobody goes outside that wall."

He walked the three skeletons over and put them across the gateway, shoulder to shoulder, a row of hooved things filling three of the four metres, and left the last metre open on the northern side because he wanted the ghouls to use it.

"Cillian. When they come, they’ll funnel to the left of that. Can you hold that?"

Cillian looked at the gate, and at the line, and at the gap.

"That’s a corridor."

"That’s the idea."

"I can hold a corridor all day," said Cillian, and went back to the wheel for another forty seconds, because the wheel was still the job.

---

They came at about `[0:18:10]`.

Something out in the rocks decided the wagon was not leaving, and forty ghouls came off the broken ground in one movement and crossed sixty metres of open road at a flat run with that high yelping going the whole way.

They hit the gate.

The first six went into the skeleton line and the skeleton line held for about four seconds, which was four seconds of forty creatures piling into a four-metre hole.

Then they found the gap, exactly where James had left it, and came through in single file.

Cillian did not even have to move his feet.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]` ×4

James stood eight metres inside the gate with Durendal and took the ones that got past the light, one at a time, in a space where only one at a time could reach him.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,170 / 3,100]`

`[GHOULS SLAIN ×3]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +90]`

`[MANA: 2,260 / 3,100]`

And outside the wall, where they were bunching up six deep waiting to get through a gap a metre wide, Fossor came up underneath them twice and took the middle out of the queue both times.

It was the easiest fighting they had done on Floor 32 and it was entirely because of a wall built three hundred years ago by somebody who had never heard of any of them.

---

`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED] ×2`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`

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

He raised the replacements out of bodies lying inside the gateway and put them straight back into the line, and did not raise a single one more than he had lost, because there were nineteen usable corpses in that gate mouth and three hundred and twenty mana was three hundred and twenty mana.

"*JAMES.*"

Finn, from the wagon, with both hands on the hub.

"Old one’s off — I need the new one *now*, I’m not carrying it on my own—"

---

That was the problem with the whole afternoon in one sentence.

James looked at the gate. There were eleven ghouls between the line and Cillian and more coming through the gap, and the skeletons were down to five seconds a piece.

"Cillian. Gate’s yours."

"It’s *what*—"

"It’s yours. Two minutes."

"*JAMES*—"

James was already running across the courtyard.

The wheel was heavier than it looked. It came up between the two of them off the wagon side, and it was about as awkward a shape as existed, and they walked it twelve metres across a yard with a fight going on behind them.

"Ronan—"

Ronan came off the horses and got underneath it, and between the three of them they got it onto the spindle, and then it stopped going on.

"It’s not—"

"Turn it," said Halden. He had got himself up onto one elbow to see. "Turn it a quarter and try it again. The bore’s oval where it’s worn, you have to find the flat."

They turned it. It went on about half an inch and stopped again.

"Again."

"*Halden*—"

"*Again.*"

They turned it again, and it slid the whole way onto the spindle and seated with a knock.

---

Then the pin.

The one out of their own hub came out bent, exactly as Halden had said it would, and Cillian’s tray of forty rusted lumps went onto the dirt beside the wheel and James went through it on his knees with grease on both hands while eleven ghouls came through a gap in a gateway behind him.

The first three pins were fused into other things.

The fourth was straight and too short.

The fifth went in, and went through, and stuck two-thirds of the way with about a centimetre of it showing on the far side.

"That’s not seated—"

"Hit it," said Halden.

Finn hit it with the hammer and it went through, and Ronan got the split ring on the end of it and closed it with his thumb.

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:12:55]`

---

The skeleton line broke three seconds later.

James felt two of them go at once and the third one about a heartbeat after, and then there was nothing across the gateway at all and a lot of things coming through it.

Cillian dropped four more and then had to give ground.

"*Ronan,*" Maeve shouted — she was between the wagon and the stable bay with both arms out, keeping Halden’s side of the world clear and not one step further forward than that. "Ronan, they’re *in*—"

Ronan left the wagon for the first time since they had come through the gate.

He met them in the middle of the yard, eleven metres from the wheel they had just fitted, and he did not try to kill any of them. He stood across the open ground between the gate and the wagon with the shield up and did not let one single thing past his shoulders, and Finn came off the hub with both axes and cleaned up behind him.

"Jack," said Halden.

"What—"

"Take the *jack* out, you can’t move on a jack—"

James got down and turned the screw the wrong way six times fast and the axle came down off the iron, and the wagon dropped the last two inches onto four wheels.

It sat crooked. The new corner was visibly lower than the other three.

It sat on four wheels.

---

"*Everyone up. Now.*"

Nobody argued and nobody finished anything.

Ronan backed the whole way to the wagon without turning round. Finn threw the jack and the wrench into the back of the cover because leaving tools in a place you might have to come back to is how people die on roads like that one. Maeve went up onto the board beside Halden. Cillian came off the gate in a straight line and did not look at the nine or ten ghouls still upright in the courtyard.

James raised nothing. There were twenty-six bodies in that yard and he did not touch one of them.

The horses hit the harness and the wagon came round in a tight ugly circle in the middle of the courtyard, and the new wheel took the turn with a lurch that made Halden grunt, and they went out through the gate at a trot with ghouls still coming out of the storeroom side of the yard behind them.

`[GHOULS SLAIN ×31]`

`[EXP GAINED: 8,680]`

`[LEVEL UP]`

`[LEVEL: 43 → 44]`

`[ALL STATS +1]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS GAINED: 5]`

`[EXP: 4,865 / 75,000]`

It went off across the middle of James’s vision while he was running for the tailboard of a moving wagon with grease on both hands, and he swiped the whole thing away without reading the second line of it.

Forty-four. Grand.

Five more points in a box, to go with the nothing he currently had time to think about them.

---

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:11:20]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 1.6 KM]`

"That’s not enough," said Finn.

"It’s enough if nothing happens," said James.

"It’s *never* enough if nothing happens, that’s not a thing that’s ever—"

"Finn."

"Right. Yeah."

---

The replacement wheel was a bad wheel and it announced itself inside forty metres.

It was fractionally smaller, so the front nearside corner of the wagon rode low, and the whole vehicle leaned about two degrees toward the ditch for the rest of the floor. It picked up a rhythm on the road — not a knock this time, a soft irregular *thud-thud* as the slightly out-of-round rim came down, which changed pitch whenever the surface changed and never once went away.

It held.

"It’ll hold," said Halden, who had been asked nothing.

---

The road began to climb about six hundred metres past the station.

The badlands closed in on both sides without any obvious moment where it happened. The open country and the gullies gave way to walls of rock, and then the walls got higher, and the road stopped being a road across a plain and became a road at the bottom of something.

The pass.

It was maybe fifteen metres wide at the floor and it wound — proper bends, one about every two hundred metres, so that nobody could see more than a stretch at a time. The cliffs went up thirty or forty metres on both sides, ochre and cracked and undercut, with ledges and shelves running along them at various heights where the stone had weathered out in layers.

The temperature dropped. Where the western wall cut the sun, the road went into shadow, and the shadow was cold enough after two hours of open badlands to raise the hair on James’s forearms.

And the sound changed completely.

Out on the flats, a wagon had simply made noise and the noise had gone away. In here, every wheel turn came back off the rock a half-second later, doubled — the *thud-thud* of the bad wheel arriving twice, hooves arriving twice, and Cillian’s boots on the gravel arriving twice.

Through a break in the western wall, for about four seconds, the Eastern Gatehouse went past on their left: square, close now, solid, with actual detail on it.

"Out the far end of this," said Halden, "and it’s a straight run. Six hundred metres, no bends. You’ll see the gate the whole way."

---

They got four minutes of quiet.

James kept Fossor a hundred metres ahead under the road, because there was no such thing as a sightline in there and the summon was the only scouting anybody had.

It found nothing.

That should have been the best news of the floor, and it was not, because about two minutes in James started noticing what was along the sides of the pass.

A wagon, on its side against the eastern wall, with the canvas rotted off the hoops.

Two hundred metres later, another one, and a pile of packs beside it that had been opened and gone through.

Then a draft horse — dead a long time, dried rather than rotted in that air, still in a broken harness, lying where it had gone down.

Then another.

Then four together, in the middle of the road, which the horses would not walk through and had to be taken round.

"Halden," said Maeve.

"I see it."

"Where are the people?"

The courier did not answer for a moment.

"There should be more here," he said, instead. "This end. People make it this far — you can see the *gate* from here, they make it this far and then they run for it. There should be more of them on this road than anywhere."

There were packs, and wagons, and dead animals, and forty years of abandoned gear.

There was not one single body of a person anywhere in the pass.

---

"Tighten up," said James.

Nobody asked why.

Finn came back off the front to within four metres of the tailboard, because there was no forward space worth ranging into in a corridor fifteen metres wide. Ronan stayed at the board. Maeve moved to the horses’ heads rather than the wheel. Cillian stopped watching the road entirely and started watching the tops of the walls.

James walked in the middle with his eyes half shut and Fossor a hundred metres out.

And Fossor found nothing.

Ahead: nothing. Under the road: nothing. Along the base of both walls: nothing.

*So why is the road covered in wagons.*

---

Then he felt the first one, and it was in the wrong place.

It was not in the ground and it was not on the road. It was at the very edge of what the summon could feel through stone, and it was *above* — thirty metres up, in the western wall, inside the rock.

Then another, further along.

Then three more.

James looked up.

The cliff face was a broken mess of shelf and undercut and shadow and had been since they entered the pass, and for a few seconds he could not see anything in it at all.

Then a silhouette came along a ledge forty metres up and went behind an outcrop, moving fast, and did not come out the other side.

A handful of loose stones came down about twenty metres ahead of the wagon and rattled across the road.

A shadow went over the canvas — quick, edge-on, gone before any of them got their heads up.

Cillian’s hand came up with the light already on it.

"I saw that."

"Where."

"Above. *Above*, they’re—"

---

"Keep going," said James. "Halden, do not stop in here. Whatever happens, do not stop the wagon in the narrow part."

"Understood."

"Maeve, stay on the heads. It’s not going to be the fighting that spooks them in here, it’s the noise coming off the rock."

"On the heads."

"Finn, you’ve nowhere to go, so don’t go anywhere."

"Wasn’t planning on it."

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:08:45]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 1.1 KM]`

The Eastern Gatehouse went past another break in the western wall and this time it stayed in view for a good ten seconds, square and close and sitting in daylight at the end of everything.

Then a stone came down.

Not a handful. One, about the size of a man’s head, and it hit the road four metres in front of the lead horse and burst.

Both animals went straight up.

The wagon slewed and stopped dead with the traces snapping taut and Maeve hanging off the bay’s headpiece with both feet off the ground, and thirty metres above them, on the eastern wall, something very large came out from under a shelf and stood on the edge of it.

James got his head back and looked up into the sun.

It came off the cliff.