Chapter 440 — The Next Line I

Chapter 440: Chapter 440 — The Next Line I

The medic at the staging area peeled the dressing back, looked at the stitches, and made a noise through her nose.

"You’ve pulled three of these," she said.

"Two."

"Three. That one’s holding by a thread, literally." She pressed a fresh dressing over it and taped it down hard. "You lifted something yesterday."

"A lintel."

"Course you did." She stood back. "You’re cleared to travel. You’re not cleared to lift any more lintels. If those go, you’ll be leaking all the way to Sligo."

"Understood."

"No, you’re not. But I’ve said it."

He pulled his shirt down. His whole left side had gone stiff overnight, and when he reached up to get his jacket off the truck’s side rail, the dressing pulled like a fishhook.

Behind him, soldiers were loading six trucks in the school car park.

Finn came across the car park with his kit bag over one shoulder and his axes in their case.

"Eamon’s going down today," he said. "Through the army. They’ve got it all done properly. Flag and everything." He dropped the bag by the truck. "His sister’s meeting him in Cork."

"Good."

"Yeah." Finn did not say anything else about it. "What do we know about where we’re going?"

"The British have Finner. They’re coming south toward Sligo. The army’s building a line north of the town to stop them." James shrugged his jacket on. "That’s all I know. I don’t know how many there are or how long the line holds."

"Grand," said Finn. "So same as usual."

---

A lieutenant with a clipboard went down the line of trucks calling names.

Most of them James did not know: two Challengers in Galway guild colours, a big quiet independent with a two-handed hammer, a woman from a Limerick outfit ignoring the sling on her arm.

"Ganner."

"Here."

The lieutenant ticked him off and moved on without looking up.

A soldier at the next tailgate said, not quietly, "That’s him. The necro." The man beside him looked for a second, said "Grand," and went back to his crate.

---

The convoy left Drogheda a little after nine.

It took them west through Navan and Mullingar and Longford. Every major junction had a checkpoint. At Mullingar they sat in a queue for twenty minutes, and a man in a Volvo full of suitcases leaned out to ask whether the road to Galway was open. The driver did not know.

The radio in the cab was on the whole way. There was fighting across the north. In Monaghan an Irish formation had held a bridge all night. In Cavan the British had taken a town, and in Leitrim the Irish had taken one back. In the north-west, the army was holding a line along the N15 north of Sligo, so that everything that had got out of Finner could come down the coast road.

James watched the Shannon go past under the bridge at Rooskey.

At Dundalk they had fought three days over one junction. Now a whole county’s worth of ground was gone between Finner and Sligo, and the army was fighting to stop it going any further. Whoever was on the N15 had probably been living like Farrell’s unit at Rathduff for two days now.

---

They came into Grange a little after three.

The army had taken the place over. Grange was a village on the N15 between Sligo and the Donegal border, a long street of houses and a church and a pub and a petrol station, with fields running down to the sea on one side and up to the foot of Benbulben on the other. The mountain stood over all of it, flat-topped and grey, the cloud sitting on its shoulder.

The command post was in the community hall. The medical station was the GAA pitch behind it, white tents in rows on the grass. The school had been turned into a barracks.

Muddy trucks were coming down the N15 as the convoy pulled in, one with no windscreen. A soldier sat on the kerb outside the pub with his boots still on and his eyes closed. Somewhere north there was artillery, a dull thump every minute or two. By the church wall a group of Challengers stood in mixed kit, some of them wearing army combats and helmets over their guild armour.

---

Captain Orla Kavanagh had a map spread on a trestle table in the community hall and a mug of tea going cold beside it.

She was in her late thirties, short and square, with dark hair cut very short and a face that had clearly not been to bed. She looked up when James and Finn came in, looked at them both for about a second, and went back to the map.

"Ganner. Hale. Good. What do you do?"

"Sword," said James. "Necromancy. I need bodies to raise anything. I can step short distances to my own undead."

"Axes," said Finn. "Fast. Front line."

"Right." She put a finger on the map. "Here’s what I’ve got."

The N15 ran north from Grange along the coast toward Cliffoney and Bundoran. A kilometre and a half north of the village, where the road crossed a small river at a place called Mullaghmore Cross, her formation was dug in either side of the road. They were in the farmyards and along the stone walls, with a section in a pair of houses on the rise.

"Everything coming out of Donegal comes down that road," she said. "Most of what got out of Finner isn’t units any more. It’s bits. A truck here, half a section there, some of them still coming. My job is to keep this road open till they’re all past us and into Grange."

"Where are the British coming from?" said James.

"North. Down the road and along the coast. Some of them in the fields either side." She tapped the map north of the river. "We’ve had probing all day. Small groups. Nothing big yet."

"How bad are the ones coming down the road?" said Finn. "The ones that got out?"

Kavanagh looked at him.

"Bad," she said. "Most of them have been fighting or moving for two days without stopping. Some of them don’t have officers any more. Some of them don’t know who’s alive." She rolled up the map. "You’re going forward. Mullaghmore Cross. Sergeant Brennan’s got the section on the road. You’ll be with him and with Nolan. She’s been up there since yesterday."

---

Sergeant Colm Brennan was in his forties, broad and grey, with a moustache and a voice that had been shouting across fields for twenty years. He was standing in the middle of the road at Mullaghmore Cross with a clipboard and a list of names, watching a truck come south over the bridge.

"Ganner," he said, without looking round. "Right. Kavanagh said. Get behind that wall. Don’t stand in the road."

James got behind the wall.

There was a woman already behind it, sitting on an upturned crate with a spear across her knees. She was perhaps thirty, tall, with fair hair braided tight against her head and mud to the knees. The spear was plain ash with a long leaf-shaped head, and it had seen a lot of use.

"Eimear Nolan," she said. "Independent. You’re Ganner."

"James."

"James." She looked at Finn. "And Hale."

"Finn."

"Right." She went back to wrapping a strip of tape round the shaft of the spear below the head. "I’ve been up here since yesterday morning. The wall goes along to that gate, then there’s a ditch, then the farmyard. The road’s the road. They come from up there." She pointed with her chin north up the N15, toward where it bent round a hill. "Anything else you want to know, ask."

She did not tell him what she had done yesterday or what rank she was. She bit the tape off.

---

The truck came over the bridge.

It was an army four-tonner, and it was in a state. The canvas on the back was in strips. One headlight was gone, and there were holes in the cab door, a neat row of them. It came down the road too fast and stopped too hard beside Brennan, and the back flap came open, and men started climbing down out of it.

Brennan went straight to it.

"Doherty! Doherty, Christ, you made it. Where’s—Gallagher? Is that you? Where’s the rest of you?" He was already looking at the faces coming down, one after another. "McLoughlin. Right. Where’s Breen? Where’s Carr?"

"Not with us," said the man called Doherty. He was a corporal, with blood down the side of his face that had dried black. "Sarge. They were in the other truck."

"What other truck?"

"There were two. We were holding outside the camp, at the crossroads by the—the place with the caravans. They hit us with artillery. We had to go. Two trucks. Ours went first. The other one was behind us."

"And?"

"And I don’t know." Doherty’s voice cracked. "I don’t know. We came round the bend at Cliffoney and it wasn’t behind us any more."

"Did you go back?"

"Sarge, there was—"

"*Did you go back for them?*"

"We couldn’t." It was another man, McLoughlin, older, with one arm strapped against his chest. "We couldn’t, Colm. They were shelling the bend. You’d have gone back into it and there’d be two trucks missing instead of one."

"You don’t know that."

"I do know it. I was there. You weren’t."

Brennan looked at him for a long moment.

Then he looked down at his clipboard.

"Where were they last seen?" he said, quieter. "Exactly. Breen and Carr. Exactly where."

"Behind us coming out of the caravan park. That’s all I’ve got. That’s the last."

Brennan wrote it down. He wrote it very carefully, every word.

"Right," he said. "Right. Get to the medical station. All of you. Doherty, get that head looked at." He put his hand briefly on McLoughlin’s good shoulder. "I’m not saying you did wrong. I’m saying I need to know where they are."

"I know, Colm."

"Go on."

They went.

Brennan stood in the road with the clipboard and looked north for a while, and did not say anything.

---

Kavanagh’s voice came on the radio at quarter to four.

"*All sections, Kavanagh. Forward observer reports British movement north of the Cross. Infantry and at least one armoured vehicle on the road. Challengers with them. Not the main body. Probing. Get the trucks out of the road and south now. Forward sections, stand to. Nobody fires till I say.*"

Brennan was already shouting at the last truck to get moving.

James went down behind the wall with Finn and Eimear.

He opened his window.

`[JAMES GANNER — LEVEL: 51]`

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

`[EXP: 33,385 / 96,000]`

A night’s sleep in a school classroom and a long drive had filled him back up. It was the first time since he came north that he had been full.

---

They came round the bend in the road about four hundred metres north.

There was a British armoured vehicle first, a wheeled one with a turret, moving slow. Infantry walked either side of it in the ditches, maybe twenty of them. Behind them, keeping to the fields, there were three figures who did not move like the infantry.

Nobody fired.

Kavanagh let them come. Three hundred metres, two-fifty, two hundred. James watched Brennan behind the low wall twenty metres to his right, with his rifle up, not firing, his hand flat out to the side to keep his section down.

At a hundred and fifty metres, the British infantry started moving forward faster, toward the bridge.

"*Now,*" said Kavanagh.

The whole Irish line opened up.

---

Brennan’s section was behind the low wall on the west side of the road. James was at the east end of that same wall, by the gate. Finn was across the road in the ditch on the far side, with another section and a big independent Challenger with a hammer. Eimear was further east again, in the farmyard behind the ditch.

The British went to ground. The armoured vehicle stopped, its turret turning toward the houses on the rise, and it fired, and one of the house windows went out. The infantry spread out along the far ditch and fired back.

The three Challengers came forward through the fields.

One of them came at Eimear’s farmyard, a tall man with a long sword. James saw Eimear come out from behind the farmyard wall to meet him. She did not wait. She went at him with the spear low, then high, and drove him back the way he had come. He tried to go round her, and she was round the same way.

The second went at Finn’s ditch.

The third came up the west side, along the line of the field wall, at Brennan.

James saw it coming. The British Challenger was a stocky woman with two short blades. Behind her, three British soldiers came along the wall at a crouch, keeping her between them and Brennan’s rifles. She was going to come round the end of the wall where Brennan was and into his section from the side.

James went along the back of the wall, low, and came up at the end of it.

She saw him at ten metres.

She came at him anyway. The two blades came in, one high, one at his ribs on the left, where his stitches were. He turned the high one with Durendal and twisted away from the low one and felt it go past him. It pulled the stitches all the same and he felt one give.

He stepped back, and put his hand out.

`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`

`[MANA: 3,040 / 3,100]`

It took her full in the chest from four metres. She went back into the wall and slid down it and did not get up.

`[BRITISH COMBATANT SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: +200]`

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

`[MANA: 3,070 / 3,100]`

The three soldiers behind her had stopped. Brennan’s section, which could see them now that she was gone, fired. Two of them went down in the field. The third went back the way he had come.

---

There were British dead in the field and on the road now. Some were from Brennan’s first volley, two by the wall. One lay in the road short of the bridge where the infantry had run for it.

The two by the wall were eight metres from James, behind the end of it, out of sight of the road.

He went to them, kept low, and put his hands on them.

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

`[MANA: 2,910 / 3,100]`

They stood up out of what they had been, with their uniforms in rags on their ribs. One had kept its helmet on. The other’s webbing hung off its spine.

"*Undead!*" he shouted along the wall. "*Mine! Don’t shoot them!*"