Chapter 423 — No Ground to Give III

Chapter 423: Chapter 423 — No Ground to Give III

They went.

The British at the pumps had been shooting at the houses. Now there were three hundred kilos of bone coming at them round the corner of the petrol station at a gallop. They turned and fired at it. They hit it, too. It shed a rib, then a piece of skull. It kept coming.

The other went round toward the building, wide, toward the left end of the sandbags.

The man in grey and green saw it.

James watched him see it. His head went toward the skeleton coming at the sandbags, then to James, then back.

He had three things now. There was the Irish fire on his line, a skeleton coming at the pumps, another coming at his flank, and James coming over the wall again.

He could not cover them all with fifteen metres of shimmer.

---

The first skeleton got to the pumps and went into the British soldiers behind them like a lorry into a hedge. It did not kill anyone that James saw. It scattered them. One man went sideways over a bin, and two went flat. Then the British rifles at the building found it. They were close, all of them firing together, and they tore it apart. James felt it go.

He did not send anything else in after it. There was no point. Undead could not stand in front of rifles at that range for long, and he was not going to throw mana at a wall of lead.

But it had done its job. The British at the pumps were not shooting at the houses any more.

The second skeleton was still going, round the left side, at the end of the sandbags.

"Stay there," James told it, under his breath, and felt it hear him. "Stay there. Don’t go in. Stand on that corner."

It stopped at the end of the British line, by the left corner of the building, and stood there. It was not attacking. It was standing where the man in grey and green would have to go if he wanted to fall back.

James came over the forecourt wall again.

---

The man turned to meet him. The shimmer came round in front.

But this time, as it came round, it left the sandbags. It left the soldiers behind them open to Finn’s group, and they started going down.

The man knew. James saw it on his face, the instant of choosing. He jerked the shimmer half back toward his soldiers.

That left his own right side open.

James was already there.

Durendal took him across the armour at the right shoulder. It did not go through, but it hit hard, and James felt something underneath the armour give. The man went back two steps into the wall of the building.

He brought his hand round and a burst of force came off it at James’s face, short range and very hard.

James got his arm up. It knocked him backward off his feet. He hit the ground on his back and rolled and came up, two metres further back than he wanted to be, with his ears ringing.

The man had used that second to try for the left corner of the building, to get round it, behind his soldiers, to somewhere better.

The skeleton was standing in it.

It did not attack him. It just stood there, three hundred kilos of bone, in the gap he wanted.

He stopped, for half a second, because he had to.

---

James was up and coming.

The man turned to face him and brought the shimmer round in front of himself, all of it. He had nothing left for his soldiers now, nothing at all.

James put Durendal into it, high, and the man held it there. Then, as the man shifted his feet to brace, his left side came off the line for a fraction of a moment. James was close enough to touch him.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,640 / 3,100]`

It went in under the edge of the shimmer from half a metre. There was nothing there to stop it. It took him in the ribs on the left and his whole body jolted, and the shimmer went out like a light.

James did not give him a chance to put it back.

Durendal came down.

The man in grey and green went down against the wall of the building, and did not move.

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

`[MANA: 2,670 / 3,100]`

James felt it come in, cold, and did not look at it.

---

Up and down the British line, it changed at once.

There had been a curtain in front of them all morning. Now there was nothing. The Irish rounds that had been stopping in the air were going through. On the left, Finn’s group was getting up off the road and moving. James heard Farrell on the radio, and the officer with the road group, and another voice he did not know.

"*Shield’s down, shield’s down—*"

"*All call signs, go. Go now.*"

He went back toward the houses, to get out of the middle of the junction while the rifles worked.

---

Off to the left, the road group was going up the connector, and James could see some of it.

He saw Finn get to the end of the sandbags first. A British Challenger came round from behind the building to meet him, a lean one with a short spear. Finn met him head-on, both axes, a body’s width in front of the soldiers coming up behind. He did not go past them. He held, and drove the spear-man back step by step toward the building, and the soldiers came up on either side of him and put fire past him.

He saw Eamon further back, in among the younger volunteers. Three of them had got ahead, over the wall and out into the field behind the houses, after a British soldier who was running. Eamon went after them, fast for a man holding his arm. James saw him catch the last of the three by the back of the armour and haul him round. He saw Eamon’s mouth moving, and one of the volunteers shaking his head and pointing at the running man.

He did not hear any of it. He saw the volunteer, after a second, come back.

He saw Owen in the middle of the soldiers, at the officer’s shoulder, pointing off the road to the right, to a lane between two of the houses. The officer looked, nodded and sent four soldiers down it. James lost them behind the houses. A minute later he saw them come out on the far side of the petrol station, behind the last of the British there, on a path that had not been on Farrell’s map.

Owen spoke to the soldier next to him for a second, quickly, a hand on his arm. Then he turned back to the officer.

James stood at the corner of the house and watched it.

He had killed the thing holding the junction. But he had not found that lane, and he would never have found it. Somebody who had been here at six that morning had found it. He had watched his mates go down here and then come back.

---

It did not happen all at once.

The British held the building for another quarter of an hour without their shield. Then a British Challenger with a heavy weapon came up from the vehicles at the back and started putting rounds into the road group, and James went across to deal with him. He did not go after anyone else. He drove that one back behind the vehicles and left him there, then came back to the houses.

And then the British started to go.

They did not run. They pulled back in good order, section by section, off the building and off the petrol station, out of the north side of the junction and back up the road, covering each other as they went. Two vehicles went with them. A third had been hit and stayed where it was.

Some of the younger volunteers went after them.

"*Hold,*" said Farrell over the radio. "*All call signs, hold. Do not pursue. Secure the junction. I want the junction, not the road to Newry.*"

The volunteers stopped.

James stood at the edge of the junction and watched the last British soldiers go round the bend in the road to the north.

They had it back.

---

Farrell came up twenty minutes later and spoke to the unit up north on the radio. The connector was open. They could reach it. The first of their vehicles was already coming down it toward the junction, a jeep with its lights on and wounded in the back.

Soldiers started going through the junction, checking the buildings and the petrol station. They counted the wounded. Two of their own had been hit in the last push, and medics were working on them by the pumps. They collected the British equipment that had been left behind, the tripod gun, the boxes and the wire.

They found the dead and began, carefully, to identify them.

James stood beside the third British vehicle and looked at it.

It had been hit by something big. Its front was black, its windscreen was gone, and one tyre had melted into the road. Every window along the front of the two-storey building had been shot out. The road was covered in brass casings and broken glass and pieces of somebody’s kit. A medic was kneeling beside an Irish soldier near the pumps, with his hands on the man’s chest, pressing. Further along, two soldiers were zipping a bag.

They had won it back. It had not given anything back.

---

He found Owen near the wall of the farmyard behind the houses on the western road.

Owen was standing over a small heap of things somebody had left beside the wall. There was a water bottle, a beanie hat and a set of earphones in a little case. He bent and picked up the earphones and looked at the case. Then he held it out to the soldier next to him.

"That’s Kelly’s," he said. "That’s his. He had it this morning." He turned it over. "Has anyone heard from him? Kelly. He was on the left with the other two when it went."

The other soldier shook his head.

"Nobody’s said."

Owen looked at the case for a while.

Then he put it in the breast pocket of his jacket and buttoned the pocket shut, and went back to checking the wall.

---

"How’d you do it?" said Finn. "The shield lad."

He had come up from the connector with his axes back on his harness and his face black with smoke and somebody else’s blood. They were sitting on the low wall of the petrol station forecourt.

"He could only point it one way," said James. "Fifteen metres or so. As long as all he had to do was protect his lads, he could do it all day. And as long as all he had to do was keep me off him, he could do that all day too." He looked at his hands. "He couldn’t do both. So I gave him more things to look at than he had shield for. When he had to choose, he chose wrong."

Finn nodded slowly. "Is it anything we’ve seen? In the Tower?"

James thought about it.

"There’s things like it," he said. "Shield-casters. We’ve fought a few. But I don’t know. It might not be a Tower class at all. Or it’s one we’ve never met." He shook his head. "I’m not going to guess."

"Fair."

"How was yours?"

Finn looked off up the road.

"Eamon’s yours," he said. "Honestly. There were three of the young ones went over the wall after some lad who was legging it. If they’d gone another fifty metres, they’d have been in that field on their own with the whole British line behind them, and we’d have had to go in after them. Eamon dragged them back by the collars." He shook his head. "I’d have been in that field. If he hadn’t. Chasing them."

James looked across the junction.

Eamon was sitting on the ground with his back against the wall of the building, with his left arm in his lap. He had his good hand on the dressing, pressing it. His face was grey under the dirt.

They went over.

"You all right?"

"Never better," said Eamon. "Look at me. Picture of health."

"Ruth’s going to kill you," said Finn.

"Ruth’s not impressed with me most days anyway. This won’t move the needle." He shifted, and his face went tight. "Christ."

"Do you need a medic now?" said James.

Eamon was quiet for a moment.

"It’s bothering me," he admitted. "It’s opened up a bit. I can walk. I can walk back." He looked up at James. "I’ll get it looked at. Properly. When we get back. I promise."

"You’d better," said Finn. "Or I’m telling her."

"You wouldn’t."

"Watch me."