Chapter 235 — A Door Across the River II

Chapter 235: Chapter 235 — A Door Across the River II

Finn had both axes in his hands and his eyes on the far bank, where a single figure was fighting a dozen riders in the dark.

"I can be across in ninety seconds."

"You can be in the water in ninety seconds," Ronan said, without turning round. "Look at the span, Finn. There’s no lane. You’d be climbing over people."

"He’s alone over there."

"He’s alone because it works, and it stops working the second that column stops moving." Ronan shoved a cart out of the walking lane with his hip. "He doesn’t need another sword. He needs this bridge to empty. So empty it."

Finn stood there for about two seconds with the argument still in his mouth.

Then he swallowed it and went at the ox.

He cut the traces off it in three swings, hauled the whole harness clear and dumped it over the rail, and when the animal still refused the timber he got a shoulder into its flank and walked it bodily off the approach and out of the way. The first handcart he threw one-handed. The second had a wheel jammed sideways under its own axle, and he smashed the wheel off with the flat of an axe rather than waste a minute freeing it, and then dragged the whole cart to the rail on its side.

He worked like a man being paid by the obstacle, and he did not say another word about crossing.

The four skeletons worked around him without being told twice. One of the whole ones got both arms under a woman who had gone down between two wagons and lifted her clear over the press until her husband could take her wrists and pull her into the walking lane. The other braced a tilting cart with its shoulder long enough for Finn to get a grip and roll it against the railing.

At the outer edge, the two broken ones simply stood, spaced along the drop, and a bolting horse hit them and went sideways into the ruts instead of over the side.

On the wall, Maeve stopped trying to hold anything large.

The big barrier had been eating her since the gate, and it was covering a great deal of empty air and about a third of what mattered. So she let it go, and started reading throwing arms instead.

She watched a rider wind up, saw the angle, and did nothing at all as the jar sailed past the column and burst on the water twenty meters short. She watched the next one and put a shield the size of a door in front of it half a second before it arrived, and dropped the shield the instant the clay broke.

Small, late, and exactly where the fire was going to be. Her reserve stopped falling off a cliff and started falling like a thing she could budget.

Cillian killed carriers whenever the line cleared and did not kill anything when it did not, which meant standing with a full charge in both arms watching a goblin wind up and throw, because there had been a wagon in the way.

[RaidStatsGuy]: he crossed to the FAR side. alone. with a corpse as the door

[ShieldMainSiobhan]: nobody’s chasing kills. ronan’s directing traffic and finn is doing manual labour. that’s the fight

[FloorTheoryPod]: they’re not fighting goblins, they’re fighting a bottleneck

The column found its rhythm somewhere in the middle of all that.

People came off the far end past James’s arc of skeletons and kept going into the dark on the other side, and behind them Ronan fed more onto the timber in a steady, sorted, walking stream that did not stop.

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 58% → 61%]

The riders worked out that they were not getting the bridge mouth back.

So they stopped trying for it, and started throwing over James’s head instead, at the middle of the span, where there were no Challengers standing and eight hundred people had nowhere to go.

Maeve caught the first two, and the second one nearly took her to her knees.

Cillian dropped a third carrier before its arm came forward, and the jar burst on the bank under its own mount.

The fourth came from behind another rider, thrown blind over a mounted shoulder with no wind-up to read, and neither of them saw it until it was already falling.

It landed on a canvas-covered wagon in the last third of the span, sixty meters short of where James was standing.

The canvas took light along its whole length in about four seconds. The horse in the traces went straight up on its hind legs, came down turning, and dragged the wagon around until it lay across the span at an angle, and after that there was no walking lane and no clearance lane, only a burning obstacle wedged between two railings.

The people behind it could not see what had happened and kept pushing forward, while the people beside it could see everything and started forcing their way back.

Nobody was going to reach it on foot. Ronan and Finn were at the far end of a bridge packed solid from rail to rail, and the crowd between them and the fire was exactly the crowd that made walking impossible.

James sent a skeleton, and he did not send it through the crowd.

It went over the railing at the bridge mouth and out onto the outside of it, hand over hand along the beam ends and the rail posts with the water below it and nothing living in its way, and it covered the sixty meters faster than any man could have covered ten. Then it came back over the rail beside the burning wagon, got both hands into the canvas, and tore the whole sheet off the frame with the fire still running up it.

It carried the burning cloth two steps to the rail while people flattened themselves against the wagons to let a dead thing full of flame go past.

It got the canvas over the edge, and it did not get itself back. Its footing went on the wet timber as the sheet dragged, and skeleton and canvas went over the rail together, and both of them fell.

And in the four seconds the burning cloth took to reach the water, it lit the whole underside of the bridge.

Between the stone supports, tucked in against the piers where the shadows had been solid a moment before, sat narrow goblin boats.

There were three of them, low and flat and full.

The riders had never been the attack. The riders had been the thing that made two thousand people stand still in one place, above a structure that somebody else was working on.

Goblins were lashing bundles to the underside of the deck — pitch-soaked, wrapped tight, packed against the timber where the beams met the stone — and hanging clay charges alongside them in nets.

They had been working in the dark on purpose, with no torch and no lamp between them, feeling for the beam joints by hand so that nothing above the water would show a light.

The burning canvas took that away from them in one second, and one of the sappers understood it faster than the rest. It reached up as the sheet came down past the pier, tore a strip of burning cloth out of the air, and touched it to the fuse in its other hand.

The charge went off under the middle of the span.

The whole bridge jumped. Every person on it came off their feet at once, and a wagon on the upstream rail went over onto its side and put one wheel out over the water, and the sound came up through the timber into everyone’s teeth.

A child who had just come off the timber past him lost its footing on the wet slope of the bank, went down on its side, and started sliding toward the water with the whole column stumbling around it.

James got a fist into the back of the coat, and then his own boots went out from under him on the mud, and then a dead hand closed on his backplate and held.

The skeleton at the left corner of the road had not moved from where he put it. It simply reached out and took hold of him, and the three of them stopped sliding together.

[BRIDGE INTEGRITY: 100% → 78%]

The evacuation panel in the corner of James’s vision changed colour.

[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 61%]

He set the child on its feet and pushed it toward the running column, and looked back the way he had come.

The span was still standing, and it was full of people from one end to the other, and every one of them was between him and his team.

Ronan was at the near entrance with his shield up, roaring at the crowd to keep walking, and Finn was beside him with an overturned cart in both hands and no way through to anything further out. Maeve was on the tower with her hands already up, and Cillian beside her.

All four of them on that side. Him on this one. Eight hundred civilians in the middle.

James dropped to one knee at the bridge mouth and looked down through the boards.

Through the cracks between the planks, in the moving orange light off the water, he watched the three boats separate.

They pulled apart from the wreckage of the first charge and slid out along the underside of the span, one toward each of the three remaining stone supports, and men in them were already leaning to their work.

Above them, thousands of feet scrambled for balance on the boards.

Below them, three more fuses caught, and began to burn.