Chapter 231: Not My Problem

"Put it on the merchant’s bill?!" the driver shouted from the high seat of the tilted wagon.

He was leaning halfway over the side rail, staring down into the drainage ditch where the four surviving scavengers were snarling and tearing into the spilled pile of slaughterhouse scraps.

"Do you have any idea what my boss is going to do when I come back one barrel short?!" the man yelled, his face red beneath a layer of road dust. "He’s going to take the whole cask out of my month’s pay!"

Arthur lowered Whisperwind and glanced up at the box seat. "Your boss wrote ’dried grain feed’ on the manifest and sent you down the highway with six barrels of rotting tripe. You’re lucky those things are eating the barrel instead of your mule."

"The mule belongs to him too!" the driver said miserably, dropping back onto the wooden bench and wiping sweat from his neck. "The bastard docks us two coppers if a tarp comes back torn. If I tell him a hunter shot the tie-down off a full barrel, he’ll have me hauling night-soil carts until winter."

Arthur looked up at him. "What’s your name?"

"Hobb."

"Well, Hobb, my guildmaster handles the contracts for the south gate," Arthur said. "When she goes after your boss for falsifying a cargo manifest, I’ll make sure she puts it on record that I dumped the barrel to clear the road."

Hobb blinked, some of the panic leaving his face. "Think that’ll stop him taking it out of my wages?"

"Sylvia likes dishonest merchants even less than I do," Arthur said. "Leave the arguing to her."

"That’s very touching," Felix said from the edge of the gravel, his tower shield still braced in front of his knees as a wet crunch of bone echoed up from the reeds. "Now do you want to shoot the rest of these ugly bastards while they’re busy chewing, or are we waiting for them to ask for seconds?"

Down in the culvert, the four scavengers were shoulder-deep in the split staves and offal, snapping at each other’s ears whenever one tried to drag a larger piece of bone into the weeds.

Without the panicking mule and the boy in the middle of the road, it wasn’t much of a fight.

Arthur stepped up to the lip of the ditch, braced his splinted left wrist against the bow grip, and drew a Mana Quiver shaft to his cheek. He sighted on the heaviest male—the one that had nearly climbed over Felix’s shield a minute ago—and loosed.

Thwip!

The blue shaft punched straight between the beast’s shoulder blades, pinning it into the mud at the bottom of the ditch.

The other three tore their bloody muzzles up from the pile in alarm. One scrambled straight up the far bank toward the open fields, only for Arthur to form and loose a second arrow that caught it through the ribs before it cleared the top of the weeds.

The remaining two bolted in opposite directions along the ditch bottom.

"Mine," Alicia said calmly.

She paced along the gravel shoulder alongside Leon, who had just jogged back down from leaving the mule with the replacement crew. When the first scavenger lunged up the stony bank toward the road, Leon met it at the crest with a heavy downward slash that broke its foreleg, and Alicia stepped in seamlessly to drive her point through its chest.

The last one tried to bull its way through the tall reeds at the shallow end of the culvert.

Felix cut the angle off, jumping down onto the muddy bank and slamming the bottom rim of Aegis Bulwark across the narrow channel. The panicked beast crashed headfirst into the steel plate.

The impact didn’t budge Felix, but the scavenger’s thrashing hind legs churned straight through the pooled ditch water and spilled offal, kicking a thick, foul arc of bloody muck directly up over the top of the shield and across the front of Felix’s chest plate.

For one second, Felix went completely rigid.

"You motherfucker," Felix whispered.

He shoved his weight forward, pinning the snarling beast against the mud bank with the edge of the shield while Arthur walked over and put a final arrow cleanly through the back of its skull.

The ditch went quiet save for the buzz of blackflies settling back onto the reeds.

Felix stood on the bank, slowly looking down at the grey-red slime dripping down his polished steel breastplate and onto his boots.

Arthur coughed into his fist, turning his head away so Felix wouldn’t see him grinning. "Nice block."

"Don’t talk to me," Felix said flatly, climbing back up onto the gravel road and scraping his boot heel against a rock. "Don’t say a single word to me for the rest of the evening."

"Hey, at least the armor caught most of it," Leon offered, wiping his longsword clean on a patch of dry grass.

"It went inside the collar, Leon. Inside the collar."

With the pack dead, the two teamsters from the replacement wagon finally came jogging down the hill with an iron-wheeled handcart. Once they got within twenty paces of the ditch, both men stopped short, gagging into their sleeves at the stench before pulling their kerchiefs up over their noses.

Getting the five remaining barrels off the wrecked cart took twenty minutes of miserable, filthy work. Because the shattered rear wheel was still threatening to collapse the rest of the way into the culvert, the workers couldn’t climb into the back alone without tipping the bed.

Felix and Leon braced the low side of the wagon with their shoulders while Hobb and the replacement crew wrestled the heavy, grease-smeared casks one by one onto the handcart. Arthur used his good right hand to help guide the ropes, keeping well clear of the ditch side.

Halfway through loading the third barrel, Alicia glanced down at Leon’s left leg as he shifted his footing on the stones.

"Hold still a second," she said, crouching beside his knee after the barrel rolled onto the handcart.

"It didn’t get through the leather," Leon said, looking down at the three deep claw gouges where the scavenger had raked his greave during the fight.

"It cut halfway through the lower buckle strap," Alicia pointed out, tugging the frayed leather strip with two fingers so he could see where it was hanging by a thread. "If you run on it, you’re going to drop the plate in the dirt."

She pulled a short leather spare lace from her belt pouch, threaded it cleanly through the iron ring, and tied the greave tight against his calf with practiced efficiency before standing back up and brushing the dust from her knees.

"Thanks," Leon said, testing the fit with a slight flex of his ankle.

"Just don’t use your shin to block next time," Alicia replied.

Over by the tailgate, Felix leaned against the wheel hub, trying to use a handful of dry weeds to wipe the worst of the offal off his pauldrons.

"Every time," Felix muttered. "Every time you look at your phone and say ’easy silver,’ I end up wishing I’d stayed at the academy."

"The fight took less than five minutes," Arthur pointed out, leaning against the front of the wagon while the teamsters wheeled the fourth barrel up the hill. "Nobody broke any bones, the cargo is saved, and we didn’t even have to hike into the woods."

"I smell like a butcher’s drain, Arthur."

"Think of it as character building."

"Go fuck yourself," Felix said pleasantly.

As the workers muscled the fifth and final barrel onto the handcart and started hauling it up the slope toward the waiting wagon, the young assistant walked back down the gravel, leading the big brown mule by its rope halter so they could retrieve the spare harness straps from the wreck.

The boy stopped near Arthur, looking down at the dead scavenger lying near the front axle before looking up at Arthur’s bandaged right hand.

"Thanks," the boy said quietly, his knuckles still white around the halter rope. "For getting that one under the wheel. And for getting them away from Barnaby."

Arthur glanced at the scrawny, flop-eared mule, which was currently trying to chew the top off a roadside thistle. "Barnaby?"

"My uncle raised him from a foal," the boy said, patting the side of the mule’s dusty neck. "I’ve been driving him since I started working the carts four years ago. If the boss’s cargo gets lost, we just get yelled at, but if the mule died, the old man wouldn’t buy another one. I’d be out of a job."

Arthur looked at the kid’s torn sleeve where the scavenger had nearly gotten him earlier.

"Next time, shout for help before you jump down in front of a pack of hungry monsters," Arthur said easily. "I’d rather not have to explain that to Barnaby."

The boy managed a shaky grin, nodded once, and led the mule back up the hill toward the replacement wagon.

Arthur pulled his phone from his pocket, wiped a smudge of grease off the glass with his thumb, and sent Sophia the photos he’d taken of the leaking offal barrels and the falsified cargo manifest, along with a short message:

Road clear. Seven scavengers dead, crew and mule intact. Had to dump one leaking barrel into the ditch to draw the pack off the workers. The driver’s name is Hobb—let Sylvia know his boss is probably going to try docking his wages for the lost barrel.

He stood by the roadside as the last of the daylight faded into a dull orange streak along the western hills. A minute later, his phone buzzed.

[Sophia]:Logged. The base twelve silver is cleared for your party. Sylvia will go after the merchant for hazard pay over the false declaration tomorrow, and she’ll raise the barrel and the driver’s wages when she calls him in. Don’t track ditch mud into the office.

Arthur slipped the phone back into his coat pocket. "Base pay is cleared, and Sylvia’s going after the merchant for hazard pay tomorrow."

"Good," Alicia said, adjusting her scabbard as the four of them walked up the gravel incline to where the replacement wagon was now fully loaded. "Because owning half a guild doesn’t seem to be getting you any cleaner contracts."

"That’s because Sophia gives the clean contracts to teams she actually likes," Felix grumbled.

Up by the replacement wagon, Hobb was sitting on the tailboard while the two teamsters secured the canvas tarp over the five remaining barrels.

Arthur walked up to the side of the cart, looking from the darkening two-mile stretch of highway ahead of them to the back of the wagon.

"Hey, Hobb," Arthur called out. "You got room on that wagon for four more back to the south gate?"

Hobb looked back over his shoulder at the cramped strip of planking at the rear of the wagon bed, wedged tightly against the five sloshing, sun-warmed barrels of slaughterhouse offal. A fresh trickle of dark liquid was already seeping under the edge of the tarp.

"You can squeeze onto the tailboard if you hold onto the side rails," Hobb offered. "Gets a little bumpy around the potholes, though."

A slow, warm breeze drifted off the back of the wagon.

"Absolutely not," Felix said immediately. "If one of those lids pops off over a rut, I’m jumping under the wheels. We’re walking."

Arthur stared at the seeping tarp for two seconds, then turned on his heel and started down the road toward the distant lights of Lornfell.

"Yeah, even I have standards," Arthur agreed.

"It’s two miles back to the gate!" Felix complained, falling into step beside him with his shield slung over his shoulder while Leon and Alicia followed a pace behind. "The dining hall is going to be locked up tight by the time we reach the hill!"

"We’ll stop at the meat-pie stall by the canal bridge," Arthur said.

Felix glared at him sideways through the dusk. "If you mention meat pies within the next hour, Vance, I swear to the gods I’m wiping this shield on your bedsheets."