Chapter 234 — A Door Across the River I
The first jar came over before anyone on the tower had finished looking at the bridge.
Maeve did not try to stop it, because stopping it directly would have burst it in the air above four hundred people. She put a barrier under it on a slant instead, and the clay shattered against the light and the burning liquid ran down the incline she had built for it and went into the river, where it floated and kept burning on the water.
A second rider was already lifting the next one.
That was the whole problem in one movement. She could hold the settlement, or the span, or the far mouth of the crossing, and the moment she committed to one of the three the other two were open.
James looked along the bridge and did the arithmetic he did not like.
Killing riders from the wall would not clear that end. Even if Cillian emptied every saddle in reach, more were coming down the bank, and the ones already there stood between two thousand civilians and the only ground those civilians could reach. Somebody had to be standing at the far mouth, and the span between here and there was packed solid with wagons and animals and people, which meant nobody could run across it without turning the crush into a killing.
Behind him, the commander was already shouting at his guards on the near bank.
"Turn them! Turn them round and bring them back inside—"
"No." James did not look away from the bridge. "Keep them moving forward."
"There are goblins waiting at the other end."
"I know." He found what he was looking for in the torchlight at the far mouth. "I’m going there."
He split them where they stood, because there was no time to do it anywhere else.
"Ronan, Finn — down to the near entrance. That column has stopped moving and it needs to not have stopped moving. Maeve, Cillian, stay high. You’re the only two who can see the whole span."
He turned his four skeletons out of the gate lane and sent them down after Ronan with their orders already set. The two that still had all their limbs were to clear abandoned carts and lift anyone who went down under the crowd. The two that were half wreckage — one missing an arm, one carrying its ribs open where a wolf had opened them — went to the outer edge of the approach, where the ground fell away to the water.
They could not fight anymore. They could stand in a line between a panicking horse and a twelve-foot drop, and that was worth more than fighting.
"Cillian." James pointed at the far mouth. "I need one goblin dead over there. Doesn’t matter which. It has to be at that end of the bridge and it has to be intact."
Cillian was already tracking. "The one loading a jar?"
"Perfect."
Cillian raised his hand and had to hold it, because a wagon was crossing his line with people walking beside the wheels. He held it while the rider turned its mount, and held it while a second wagon came, and then the rider stepped its mount sideways to throw and its whole upper body came clear of everything living.
[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING IMPACT]
The bolt went through its chest and out the back of the saddle, and it dropped beside the bridge mouth with the jar still unbroken in its hand.
James was casting before it landed.
[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — MANA COST: 80]
[MANA: 2,550 → 2,470]
Two hundred meters away, in the middle of a dozen goblin riders, the corpse came apart and something stood up out of it.
"Far anchor," James said.
Ronan was halfway down the wall stair and looked back at exactly the wrong moment, and James watched him work out the whole plan in about a second and a half and hate every part of it.
There was no time for the argument.
[GRAVE STEP — MANA COST: 120]
[MANA: 2,470 → 2,350]
The tower went away and the far bank arrived, and the world came with it a half second late as it always did.
James’s inner ear insisted he was still facing the river. His feet were on packed mud and his eyes were telling him about torches and mounted shapes, and for one second the two halves of him did not agree about which way up anything was.
The nearest rider was quicker than his balance.
The hooked spear came at his chest while he was still arriving — and the skeleton, following the last order it had been given, which was simply to stand where it had stood, threw itself across the line of the thrust.
The head went in through its ribs instead of James’s, and the barbs caught, and the whole weight of the undead dragged the spear shaft sideways and down.
That was the second James needed.
He drove Durendal’s point into the ground and hung on it long enough for the horizon to stop moving, and then he turned under the trapped spear and put his free hand out at contact range.
[NECRO BLAST — MANA COST: 60]
[MANA: 2,350 → 2,290]
The rider came out of the saddle backward and did not get up.
A second goblin saw the gap and drove its mount past him for the open ground behind, where the first civilians were about to come off the bridge. James stepped into the animal’s path rather than out of it, turned the rider’s first cut off Durendal, and killed it when it leaned down out of the saddle to try a second.
[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 160]
[GOBLIN RIDER SLAIN — EXP GAINED: 160]
[JAMES GANNER — EXP: 42,645 → 42,965 / 57,000]
[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED]
[MANA RESTORED: +60]
[MANA: 2,290 → 2,350]
He did not chase the ones falling back. He raised the two he had.
[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x2 — MANA COST: 160]
[MANA: 2,350 → 2,190]
The pair came up out of the mud on either side of him and he placed them at the mouth of the bridge itself, one at each corner of the road where it left the timber, and he gave them three instructions and nothing else.
Take hold of anything carrying fire. Put every jar in the river. Do not follow anything past the road.
The left-hand one had a goblin’s own hooked spear in its hands within twenty seconds, and it used it exactly the way it had been told to use it, catching a rider’s arm as the arm came back to throw and dragging both arm and jar down until the clay burst harmlessly against the animal’s own shoulder.
The right-hand one caught a second jar out of the air, turned, and dropped it over the bank into the water without ever taking a step off the road.
A panel opened in the corner of James’s vision.
[BATTLEFIELD EVENT DISCOVERED — THE WESTERN EVACUATION]
[KEEP THE CROSSING OPEN UNTIL EVACUATION IS COMPLETE]
[EVACUATION PROGRESS: 58%]
He got about a second and a half to look at it before the first of the column reached him, and then there were people everywhere.
The riders tried to work around him, and every one of them that got close enough to try gave him something.
He killed two more in the space of a minute and had them standing before the bodies cooled, and the barrier at the mouth went from two skeletons to four, and then the four became a shallow arc that the column could pour through the middle of.
[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON x2 — MANA COST: 160]
[MANA: 2,250 → 2,090]
Once, with six riders bunched at the edge of the torchlight and a corpse lying almost exactly between them, James started a Corpse Explosion.
He had the shape of it half-built when a woman came off the bridge at a run with two children in front of her and cut straight across the ground between him and the body, and behind her came a handcart, and behind that a man carrying somebody’s grandmother.
He let it go unspent. His hand was still open and cold with it when the riders broke and circled wide again.
Death Chain was the same problem in a different shape, and he did not even begin that one.
At the near entrance, Ronan had found what was actually stopping the column, and it was not the goblins at all.
It was two overturned handcarts, and an ox that had planted all four feet at the edge of the timber and decided it was not walking onto a bridge that moved.
He put his shield up on its edge and stood beside the flow rather than in it, and he started splitting the approach in half with his voice.
"WALKING LANE ON MY LEFT. IF YOU’RE CARRYING SOMETHING BROKEN OR PULLING SOMETHING DEAD, YOU GO RIGHT. LEFT KEEPS MOVING. LEFT DOES NOT STOP."