Chapter 335 - 326 — The Road Eats Travelers I

Chapter 335: Chapter 326 — The Road Eats Travelers I

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 11.1 KM]`

`[TIME REMAINING: 1:44:18]`

The road went east, pale and wide and empty, with the gullies running alongside it and the low ochre ridges standing further out. Heat came off the ground in sheets. Dust had got up past James’s ankles and into the hinges of his knee plates and would be there for the rest of the day.

The wagon ground along in the middle of them. Wheels over stone, a steady grating rhythm with a knock in it every time the offside rear went over something. Leather creaking. Both horses blowing through their noses in the dry air.

And ten kilometres ahead, small and square in the gap between two cliffs, the Eastern Gatehouse sat there and did not get any closer at any speed James found reassuring.

Two hundred metres up the road, four people stood beside a pile of baggage.

---

Cillian was right about what they looked like.

Travelling clothes, worn and dust-coloured. Two packs and a bedroll on the ground. One of them standing with a hand up against the sun. And one sitting down in the dirt at the edge of the road with a leg stuck out in front of him at an angle that made your own leg hurt to look at, and another one crouched beside him.

If James had come round a bend and seen that on Earth he would have stopped the car.

Halden got a fistful of the reins and did not slow down.

"Don’t go near them."

"They’ve got a man down—"

"They haven’t." The courier’s voice had gone flat and quick. "That’s how it works out here. Ghouls. They get the clothes off the last lot and they put somebody where you’ll see him and they make sure he’s hurt badly enough that a decent person stops." He shifted on the board. "They don’t hunt on the road. They hunt the people who leave it."

"How far off does it work?"

"Far enough. Thirty, forty paces off the ruts and there’s a gully. That’s all they need."

Finn had already dropped back four metres to be nearer the wagon.

"Are we going past them?"

"We’re going past them," said James. "Nobody looks at them for more than a second and nobody goes off the road. Halden, keep the pace."

"Keeping the pace."

---

They got to within sixty metres before it dropped.

The one with his hand up against the sun stopped being a man standing in a road, all at once, with no transition anybody could point at afterward.

It came off its heels and forward, and the run was wrong — too long in the stride, the arms coming up too high and too far, and there was a hard clipping sound off the stone that no boot has ever made.

It had no boots.

The legs under the ragged travelling trousers ended in hooves — dark, split, worn down at the front, and that was the thing James’s eye caught before anything else.

The rest arrived as it closed. Lean to the point of ugliness, all length and no bulk, skin grey-brown and cracked like the ground. Arms too long for the body with hands at the end of them built for taking hold of things. And a mouth that went back past where a mouth stops, so that when it opened there was more of it than there should have been and all of it was teeth.

Forty metres behind it, the one sitting in the dirt stood up on a leg that was perfectly fine.

The one crouched beside him did not get up. It went sideways off the road and down into the gully, low and fast, and vanished.

And all along the gully on both sides, for a hundred metres in either direction, the dirt started moving.

`[GHOUL]`

`[LEVEL: 45]`

`[HP: 5,400 / 5,400]`

---

They did not come at James.

That was the thing James understood in the first two seconds, and it was worth more than the panel.

Eleven of them came out of the ground and off the road, and the nearest one had a clear line at Finn Hale standing on his own in the open with both axes out, and it went past him.

Every single one of them went for the wagon.

"They want *him*," Finn shouted.

"Ronan—"

"On it."

Ronan did not move away from the driver’s board. He turned, put his shoulder into the space beside it and got the shield up and simply became part of the wagon, and the first thing to reach him came off the shield face and went under the wheels and made a noise.

Finn took the second one from behind while it was still trying to get round him.

The horses lost their minds.

Both of them went up and sideways in the traces, the bay screaming, the brown one trying to turn in a harness that would not let it, and Halden came half off the board hauling on the reins with one arm and his boot braced against the footboard and his bandage going dark.

"*Hup* — hup — go on, go *on*—"

The wagon did not stop. It jerked, and slewed, and the offside rear came down off a rock hard enough to throw the whole bed sideways six inches, and it kept rolling east.

That was the only thing that mattered.

---

Cillian went round to the right-hand side and did not fire for four full seconds.

He had a line and he did not take it, because the line went through the near horse’s head, and then along the shoulder of the wagon, and then through where Maeve happened to be standing.

He took two paces out, and one back, and then he had it.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

Three of them coming up the right gully in a line went down as one thing.

"*That’s* the angle," he said, to nobody. "I’m living on that angle. Nobody stand in it."

Maeve stayed by the front wheel and did not cast anything for the first twenty seconds. She watched — the courier, the horses, the four of them, the road behind — and then she said "Ronan, other side, *now*," and Ronan came round the back of the board in two steps and caught a ghoul that had got a hand on the canvas.

It came off the wagon with a rip and half a metre of cover in its fist.

---

One of them got to James.

It came up out of the left gully behind the wagon at a flat sprint with its arms already reaching, and James let it come, took its wrist on the crossguard, and put Durendal through the middle of it.

`[GHOUL SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 280]`

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

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

Capped. Full since the Waiting Room.

He put his hand on the chest before the thing had finished twitching.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,020 / 3,100]`

It came up wrong-shaped — hooved, long-armed, with that mouth still on it — and James did not send it anywhere.

He walked it to the offside rear corner of the wagon and left it there, walking, keeping pace, filling a piece of ground that no living member of Team Zero was standing in and could not be.

The next one that came at that corner met it instead of meeting the canvas.

---

He did it twice more in the next ninety seconds.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,960 / 3,100]`

`[GHOUL SLAIN]`

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

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

`[MANA: 2,830 / 3,100]`

One went to the nearside rear. One went in front of the horses, which the horses hated, and which stopped anything coming up the road head-on at the traces.

Three of them, moving with the wagon, in three places the five of them physically could not be at once.

It was the same thing he had done in a fort a fortnight ago with six skeletons and five ward points, except that this time the thing he was fencing in was moving east at the speed of two frightened horses.

And Fossor stayed out ahead the whole time.

James did not bring it in. There were eleven ghouls inside forty metres and the fight was already going one way and adding half a tonne of burrowing summon to it would have won them nothing — whereas out in front, ninety metres up a road they had to be on, it was the only thing in the party that could tell him where the *next* one was.

---

The last of them died with the wagon still rolling.

`[GHOULS SLAIN ×9]`

`[EXP GAINED: 2,520]`

`[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 55,585 / 72,000]`

Finn came back to the road at a jog with one axe hanging.

"Two went into the gully. I can get them—"

"Leave them."

"They’ll come back."

"Then they’ll come back to five of us on a road instead of one of us in a hole," said James. "Get in."

Finn got in.

And James walked past four dead ghouls lying in the dirt inside eight metres of good road — two of them barely marked, one of them absolutely ideal — and did not raise a single one of them, because raising a body takes six seconds and the wagon was already thirty metres past it and there was a hundred-metre leash on his ankles and a clock in the corner of his eye.

He watched them go behind him.

He had never once had to leave a body before.

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 9.8 KM]`

`[TIME REMAINING: 1:31:40]`

Thirteen minutes for nine ghouls and one and a bit kilometres.