Chapter 337 - 328 — The Road Eats Travellers III (Bonus)
The ground began to go down at about four and a half kilometres.
The road tilted, gently at first and then not gently, and the ridges on both sides fell away — and then they came over a lip and the whole thing opened out in front of them.
The old river was enormous.
It had been a real river once and it had been gone for a very long time. Half a mile across, sunk twenty metres below the level of the flats, with pale gravel and cracked grey mud running the whole width of it and slabs of bare stone standing up out of that where the current had scoured down to bedrock. Not one drop of water anywhere.
The banks on both sides were steep and eroded into a mess of shelves and undercuts and loose scree.
And in the middle of it, a stone crossing — old, heavy, built by people who had expected to come back — ran out from the near bank in a raised causeway of dressed blocks.
The Eastern Gatehouse was still there beyond it, in the notch between the cliffs. It was just no longer above them; from down inside the riverbed, most of what they could see was bank.
The wheels went off hard road onto loose gravel and the whole sound of the wagon changed — grinding, sliding, a constant rattle of stones turning over under the rims.
The air got cooler in the shadow of the near bank. The noise of them carried differently down there, coming back off the walls a half-second late.
"I don’t like being under things," said Ronan.
---
They got two hundred metres out onto the bed before they saw the crossing properly.
The middle of it was gone.
Not damaged. Gone — a forty-metre section of dressed stone lying in a heap on the riverbed with the two standing ends of the causeway pointing at each other across the gap.
Halden stopped the wagon and swore for eleven straight seconds.
"When did that go?"
"It was standing nine days ago."
"Is there another way?"
"There’s a ford. Upstream, where the bank’s fallen in — it’s a ramp, near enough. Wagons use it when the crossing’s out." He pointed north along the bed. "But it’s up that way, and then you’ve to come back down the other side to meet the road again."
"How far does that cost us?"
Halden did the sum with his mouth moving.
"Kilometre and a half. Maybe two."
---
Finn had his eyes up in the corner of his vision.
`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 4.4 KM]`
`[TIME REMAINING: 0:51:17]`
"Four four plus two is six four," he said. "Fifty-one minutes. Loaded wagon on gravel, call it eight kilometres an hour if the horses hold." He shrugged one shoulder. "Forty-eight minutes. We’re fine."
"We’re fine if nothing else happens," said Maeve.
"That’s what I said."
"It isn’t what you said."
"North," said James. "Go."
---
They turned up the riverbed, and the wagon began to make hard work of it, and James felt Fossor go out ahead along the bed toward the ford.
Sixty metres. Eighty. Most of the way to the leash.
And it stopped.
James stopped walking.
"Hold."
It came out flatter than he meant it to and everybody heard it. The wagon ground to a halt with the horses’ heads coming up.
"Ghouls?" said Finn.
"Wait."
He had assumed ghouls. He had felt that shape eleven times in the last ninety minutes and he knew what a cluster of them felt like at the edge of Fossor’s range.
He felt the movement on the near bank first.
Then the far bank.
Then more along the bed itself, north, between them and the ford, in numbers that made the last two ambushes look like the rehearsals they had evidently been.
"Both banks," James said. "Both banks and the bed. It’s — that’s a lot."
Cillian had already turned and was looking up.
"Where?"
"*Everywhere*."
---
For about four seconds the banks looked exactly as empty as they had looked since the wagon came down off the lip.
Then something stood up.
It came up out of the scree on the near bank about fifty metres above them, and it was wearing a hat.
An ordinary wide-brimmed traveller’s hat, and a coat, and it stood there with one hand on a rock looking down at a stranded wagon in a dry riverbed like a man deciding whether to offer help.
Two more stood up beside it, and neither of those bothered pretending at all.
Then the far bank started. In ones and twos, along a hundred and fifty metres of eroded shelving, shapes coming upright out of undercuts and out from behind slabs and out of the wreckage of the fallen crossing itself, where they had evidently been living for the nine days since it came down.
And along the riverbed to the north, between Team Zero and the only ramp out, more of them came out from behind the standing stones.
The noise started — that high broken yelping, from one place, and then from forty, and in a sunken riverbed with twenty-metre walls on both sides it came back off everything and arrived from directions nothing was standing in.
The horses were beyond managing. Halden had both arms on the reins and his boots on the footboard and his teeth shut.
---
"*We do not stop,*" James shouted. "Halden — north, keep going north, do not stop for anything that happens. Ronan, on him, don’t leave the board. Cillian, you’ve got a hundred metres of clear bed, use it. Maeve, on the horses’ heads if she goes again. Finn—"
"Backward," said Finn. He was already turning. "I know. I’m not going up a bank."
"You’re not going up a bank."
James pulled the skeletons in until they were walking within two metres of the wheels, all three of them, a tight ugly ring of hooved things keeping pace with a wagon on gravel.
Then he sent Fossor the rest of the way to the ford, right out to the end of the leash, because the only thing worse than fighting all the way up this riverbed was fighting all the way up it and arriving at a ramp they could not use.
The wagon started moving again, wheels sliding and biting on loose stone.
The ghouls came down off both banks.
---
Fossor reached the ford.
James felt it arrive, felt it turn, felt it go up into the broken ground of the ramp — and then he felt it stop, hard, of its own accord, forty metres short of the top.
Not a cluster.
He knew what a cluster felt like. He had fourteen of them in his head right now, coming down the near bank in a loose line, each one a small separate weight at the back of his skull.
This was not that.
There was one thing sitting in the mouth of the ford, and it was not moving, and the space it took up in the ground was bigger than the wagon.
"James?" said Maeve.
He looked north, up the riverbed, past the standing stones and the shapes coming out from behind them, at the pale broken slope of the only way out — with the gatehouse sitting in the notch between the cliffs beyond it, perfectly visible, four kilometres away and on the other side of whatever that was.
"The ford’s not clear," he said.