Chapter 426 — The Line Bends II

Chapter 426: Chapter 426 — The Line Bends II

It started with rifles and something heavier from the vehicles.

The whole Irish position went down behind its cover. Rounds came through the gaps in the sandbags, into the front of the building and across the petrol station. The Irish fired back from the slits and from behind the pumps.

Then the Challenger at the back of the British line did something.

James saw it start, a man standing beside the vehicles with both arms out in front of him. Then the air between his hands went thick and dark, and he pushed.

What came off him was a wall, a broad flat wave of force as wide as the road, that crossed the two hundred metres in a second and hit the eastern end of the Irish line.

It hit the sandbags there and they went over in a heap. It hit the wall behind them and the wall cracked. The soldiers who had been behind both were picked up and thrown down the road like leaves. One got up. Two did not get up straight away.

The man at the back walked three steps to his left, to a new spot, and lifted his arms again.

The second wave hit the front of the petrol station. The glass that had survived the afternoon went. One of the pumps tipped over.

James watched him walk again. He moved a few metres and stopped, then pushed.

He was not aiming at people. He was aiming at the places people were hiding.

---

The Irish at the eastern end of the line were scrambling back from the wrecked sandbags. A British Challenger came out of the smoke toward them. It was not the heavy one or the one at the back, but another, younger, quick, with a short blade in each hand, going for the gap where the Irish had been.

James went.

He came off the end of the burnt vehicle and across thirty metres of road. The young Challenger saw him and turned. They met just short of the wrecked sandbags.

The young man was fast. He got one blade up into Durendal’s path and the other came round at James’s ribs.

But James was much stronger than him, and the first blade did not stop Durendal. It went backward into the young man’s own shoulder. James turned the second blade on his forearm guard, stepped in and put his weight behind the sword.

The young man went back three steps, and then four, out of the gap and back toward his own lines. Each time he tried to set his feet James was there. On the fifth step James caught him across the body, and he went down.

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

`[MANA: 2,700 / 3,100]`

James looked round. The Irish soldiers behind him had got back into what was left of the sandbags. They were firing again.

Then another wave came off the man at the back and hit the building behind him. James felt the ground shake through his boots. Plaster came off the front in a sheet, and two of the firing slits on the upper floor collapsed into one big hole.

He turned to look at the man by the vehicles.

That was the one, not the young one, and not the heavy one on the left either. The one at the back, walking along the British line, picking a new spot and knocking down whatever the Irish were hiding behind. He would do it all night. As long as he did, there would be nothing left for anyone to hide behind.

James could not stop him from here.

"Sergeant!" he shouted. "I’m going for the one at the back! Hold here!"

"*Go!*"

---

It was two hundred metres up a road full of British infantry.

He did not try to go up the middle of it. He went up the right side, along the ditch and the hedge where the field began, keeping the hedge between him and the riflemen as much as he could.

He was not going to do it on his own.

Two of the cattle were still lying against the hedge behind the petrol station where they had been since the night before. He had raised two from that field in the afternoon. One had been shot to pieces at the pumps. The other was still standing where he had left it, at the corner of the building, as he had told it to, because nobody had told it to do anything else.

He went through the gap in the hedge and put his hand on the nearest carcass.

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

`[MANA: 2,540 / 3,100]`

The two came up out of the field in the dark.

"Sergeant! Undead! *Mine!*" he shouted back, the way he had in the afternoon, and heard the same voice shout back *don’t shoot the skeletons* down the line.

Then he called the third one from the corner of the building.

He sent two of them out ahead into the field on the right, wide, toward the infantry spread along the hedge between him and the vehicles. They were not to go into the British rifles head-on, just across the front of them. He wanted them noisy and big, to make every rifle on that side turn.

It worked. The riflemen on the right turned. Somebody shouted. Somebody fired, then everybody did, and James heard bone crack and split out in the dark, and felt one of them go down in pieces.

He did not send the third after it.

"Not you," he told it. "With me. Stay on my left. Between me and the hedge."

He went forward up the ditch with it beside him.

---

The man at the back saw him coming at about sixty metres.

He was older than the young one, in his forties, plain-faced, in the same dark kit as the others. He turned. The air between his hands was already going thick.

He did not aim at James.

He aimed at the ground in front of him.

The wave hit the road two metres ahead and came up out of it in a spray of tarmac and stone and earth. James got his arm over his face, but the force of it lifted him off his feet and put him on his back in the ditch, with gravel coming down on him like hail.

He rolled and came up.

The man was already moving to a new spot, to get a clean angle.

James did not go straight at him. He went left, round the back of the cattle skeleton, so that the skeleton was between them for a second. The man pushed again. The wave hit the skeleton and took half of its ribs off, and threw it sideways. It did not reach James.

He came round the other side of it, closer.

Forty metres. Thirty.

The man was looking at James. Then, for a fraction of a second, his eyes went past him to the Irish line, as if he were checking whether he still had time to put one more into it.

He did not.

James saw that he could not do both. He could aim a wave at James, or at the Irish, and while he was deciding, he was doing neither.

James took the last thirty metres while the man was deciding.

The man got one more wave off, short and fast, straight at him. James went down under it and it went over his back and took the hedge behind him apart. Then he was close enough, and he came up with Durendal.

The man got his arms up. There was no time for anything big. He put a small, hard pulse into James’s chest from a metre away, enough to stagger him back a step.

James came back the same step and hit him with the flat of the blade on the forearm. He felt something break.

The man went back toward the vehicles, toward his own people. James went with him. He did not let him stop or plant his feet and push. Every time he tried to turn and face James, James was already on the side he was turning to. The half-wrecked skeleton came after them both, limping on three legs, and got in the way whenever the man tried to go left.

He could not get his hands up.

At the vehicles, two British soldiers came round the end of a truck and started firing at James. The man used the second they bought him to throw himself sideways behind the truck, back among his own infantry.

James let him go.

He could have gone round the truck after him. There were a dozen riflemen on the other side of it. He did not need to kill the man. He needed him away from where he had been standing, the spot where he could see the whole Irish line and knock it down one piece at a time.

And he was away. He was behind a truck with a broken arm and a lot of his own people between him and anything he could aim at.

James went back down the ditch, toward the junction, with the skeleton limping after him.

---

The waves had stopped.

He could see it as he came back down the road. The Irish in the centre were back in their positions. Somebody had dragged two of the wrecked sandbags into a new line. The riflemen in the building had moved down from the collapsed slits upstairs to the ground floor windows. The petrol station was firing again.

The British push up the middle of the road had slowed. The heavy Challenger on the left had stopped coming forward. The infantry in front of the junction were lying down in the field instead of moving.

The centre was holding.

He got back behind the burnt vehicle, and turned, and looked east.

---

He could only see the eastern road in pieces, through the gaps between the buildings.

There were houses along it, a row of six, where Farrell had put a section with Finn. The houses were on fire, and two of them were burning badly. In the light of the fire James could see shapes moving in the gardens behind them, in the field and along the road itself.

There were a lot of them. Far more than there had been at the start.

He saw Finn.

He saw him between two of the houses, in a gap in a garden wall, with a British Challenger in front of him, and he saw the British Challenger go backward. Then Finn was gone behind the end of a house, and when James saw him again he was further back. He had a soldier with him, and was pointing, and the soldier was shouting to others.

He saw the Irish at the near end of the row of houses get up and go back, one at a time, covering each other, to the last house in the row. Then they went through it and out the back, and took up the garden wall behind it. Finn was the last one out.

James could not hear any of it. He did not know what had been said or why. But he could see the shape of it. Finn and whoever was in command over there had looked at the front houses, and at how many British were coming at them, and decided they could not hold them. So they had moved everybody to the one they could hold.

The British saw it too. James watched a second Challenger come off the north road and go across toward the eastern houses. It was the heavy one, the one who had stopped advancing up the middle.

They were moving their weight across to Finn.

James started to go.

Then another British Challenger came out of the field on the left of the junction straight at the centre, at the sandbags, with infantry behind him.

James turned back.

He met him at the end of the burnt vehicle and drove him back into the field, and the infantry with him. He did not kill this one. He just drove him off, far enough, and turned back to the sandbags, because if he chased him into the field, the centre would have nobody.

When he looked east again, he could not see Finn at all.