Chapter 338 - 329 — The Man-Eater at the Ford I
The wagon went north up the middle of the riverbed with everything closing on it.
Gravel turned and slid under the rims in a constant grinding rattle. The bay was fighting the harness every third stride and Halden had both arms locked on the reins with his boots against the footboard. Dust hung in the air behind them and did not settle, because there was no wind down there to move it.
Ghouls came down both banks in loose lines, picking their way through the scree, unhurried, forty or fifty of them spread across two hundred metres of eroded wall.
More came up the bed behind, out from between the standing stones.
James had the three skeletons walking inside two metres of the wheels. Ronan had not left the driver’s board. Finn was fighting backward alongside the tailboard rather than forward. Cillian had the whole open bed to shoot down and was using it. Maeve stood at the front wheel with one hand on the frame, calling sides.
And four hundred metres ahead, where the bank had fallen in and made a ramp out of the riverbed, something walked out onto the gravel and stopped in the middle of the ford.
---
It was the size of a horse and built nothing like one.
The body was a lion’s, deep through the chest, heavy in the shoulder, with the loose rolling walk of something that had never in its life needed to hurry. Its coat was a dull dark red, the colour of old brick, matted with dust along the flanks.
It stopped, and it turned its head, and its face was a man’s.
Not a mask. Not a mouth arranged to look like one. A broad flat human face sitting on the front of a lion’s skull — brow, nose, cheekbones, a heavy jaw — with eyes in it that were pale blue-grey and entirely calm and were looking directly at the wagon.
It opened its mouth to look at them better, and the human face came apart. Behind the lips there were teeth in rows, one set behind another behind another, going back into the dark of its throat.
Then it made a noise.
It was not a roar. It came out of that face as something between a trumpet and a scream — brassy, tearing, far too high for the size of the animal — and it went up the riverbed and came back off both walls a half-second later so that it seemed to arrive from everywhere.
Both horses tried to stop dead.
And behind it, over its back, a tail came up. It was as long as the body again, jointed and heavy, and it curved forward over the spine and ended in a thick swollen segment, and the whole upper length of it was lined with dark spines standing up in rows like a brush.
`[ELITE HOSTILE DETECTED]`
`[MANTICORE]`
`[LEVEL: 55]`
`[HP: 24,000 / 24,000]`
---
"*Oh*," said Halden.
"Talk," said James.
"Man-eater. They call it a man-eater." The courier hauled the bay’s head round. "The tail throws. It throws the spines, six or eight at a time, forty paces, and they’re poisoned. Don’t give it a clean line at the horses or you’ve no wagon."
"How fast is it?"
"Fast."
"How fast, Halden?"
"Faster than it looks," said Halden, "and it looks like a lion."
---
The tail came forward over the shoulder in a whip.
James saw the spines leave it — a spray of dark shafts going out flat and fast, eight of them, not aimed at any person on that riverbed.
They were aimed at the front of the wagon.
"*SHIELD*—"
Ronan was already moving. He came round the front corner of the driver’s board and got the shield up at an angle, and four of them hit it in a rapid stutter — *crack crack crack crack* — and two went off into the gravel.
The fifth took the skeleton walking in front of the horses through the chest and put it on the ground in pieces.
`[SUMMONED UNIT DESTROYED]`
The sixth went into the front wheel.
It hit the felloe on the outside of the rim and stuck there, and the wood split along the grain in a pale line a hand’s length long, and the wheel kept turning with the shaft standing out of it and the crack opening and closing every revolution.
Maeve saw it. So did James.
Neither of them said anything about it, because there were ghouls on the gravel forty metres away on both sides.
---
They came in the moment the volley landed, which was not a coincidence.
Finn went two strides toward the manticore and had to abandon it entirely, because the instant he left the tailboard four ghouls came round behind him for the canvas.
"*I can’t go forward,*" he shouted.
"Then don’t."
"I can kill that thing—"
"Not while they’re—"
"I *know*."
He turned and took the nearest one apart and did not try again.
Cillian had the best thirty seconds of his floor. The ghouls coming down the near bank had to cross forty metres of open scree in full view of a man standing on the flat with an uninterrupted line and nothing behind them but rock.
`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]` ×3
He dropped six before any of them reached the bed.
James kept the two remaining skeletons on the wheels and put a Necro Blast into a ghoul that got past the tailboard.
`[NECRO BLAST — 60 MANA]`
`[MANA: 2,690 / 3,100]`
`[GHOUL SLAIN]`
`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`
He raised two more before the corpses went behind them.
`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA] ×2`
`[MANA: 2,560 / 3,100]`
"Keep going north," Maeve called. "Halden, keep *going*—"
"It’s standing on the ford!"
"I know what it’s standing on."
---
Then the manticore charged.
It came off its mark without any of the gathering a big animal is supposed to do, and it covered two hundred metres of open riverbed in a time that made no sense for something with that chest on it.
Finn got in front of it and was genuinely surprised.
He put an axe into the shoulder as it came past — a good strike, weight behind it, the kind that had opened plate armour on Floor 30.
It went in about four inches and stopped.
`[MANTICORE — HP: 24,000 → 22,400]`
"*Hide’s like a wall,*" Finn shouted, going backwards.
It turned on him. The paw came round faster than the body had any right to move and he took most of it on the flat of an axe and still went three metres sideways and down onto one knee on the gravel.
And then it did the thing James had been afraid of.
It disengaged.
It broke off Finn entirely and put six metres between them, and the tail started coming up over its shoulder, and it was not looking at Finn at all — it was looking past him at two horses in a harness.
Finn understood that at the same moment and threw himself back into its face.
He did not try to kill it. He got inside six feet and stayed there, hacking at the forelegs and the jaw and the chest, taking a claw across the pauldron for it, doing nothing that was going to bring it down — and the tail could not come over the shoulder while he was under the shoulder.
`[MANTICORE — HP: 22,400 → 20,500]`
"Cillian—"
"You’re *in the line*—"
"Then find another one!"