The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Chapter 272: Chapter265: The Anley Road

The north road out of Vaunt, past dark

Halder Cray sat at the tail of the carrier’s cart with his back to the driver and his eyes on the road behind, and watched the lights of Vaunt sink into the river mist until there was nothing back there but dark.

He’d told himself he would feel better once the town was gone. That was the plan, and the plan was the last good use he had for the last of the money: distance. Get on the road, get the wharf off his back — the wharf where Tobrin’s boat still knocked against the pilings with no Tobrin to tie it off — and somewhere north of that the fear would loosen, the way a bad tooth loosens once you stop working it with your tongue.

It wasn’t loosening. The dark behind the cart was worse than the lit room he’d left. In the Drowned Cat there had been faces and noise and a body in the chair across from him. Out here there was one road, no lights, six oxen breathing, and the whole black length behind him where anything could be keeping pace and he would never know until it was on him.

He had driven this road for twenty years. He knew every ford and every rise, which holdings kept dogs and which kept nothing. And he had never once driven it afraid, and being afraid on ground he knew turned out to be the worst kind, because his own memory kept offering him the places along it where a man could be taken and never found.

The seed factor beside him tried twice to talk with him twiceand eventually gave up. Cray couldn’t hold a sentence in his head. His mouth was dry despite all he’d drunk, and the drink was thinning out of him now, the one thing he’d kept at bay for six days, and beneath it the fact sat clear and cold: someone asked where I sleep. By name.

Nobody asks where a man sleeps to buy him a drink.

They’d asked after Tobrin’s room, too, a week back on the wharf, and he’d made himself not hear it. Now the two things stood side by side and became one thing, and the one thing was that whatever had reached into the river and pulled Tobrin under without leaving a mark was working down a list — and the list had two names on it, and one was already crossed off.

He’d hauled a cargo for cold coin. Now the cold was coming for the balance.

The cart crested a rise, and ahead the road ran down into the black line of trees at Anley ford, and past the trees the moor opened under no moon at all.

Two miles north, past Anley, off the road

The armor came out of the rings, and it never stopped being strange.

Arven turned the band on his finger and gave it the pull of will it wanted, and the air beside him folded and unfolded and his suit was simply there on the heather — all of it, plates and power unit and the mana channels threaded through the whole of it, laid out cold in the order he’d stored it. The first time it had happened, a year ago, he’d flinched. Now his hands were moving before the last of it had finished arriving.

Around him the other four were doing the same, and the dark filled with the sounds of men going to war without a wagon in sight: the heavy seat-and-seal of one plate locking to the next, and then the low rising hum as each suit woke and its power unit took the weight of itself off the wearer and onto the servos, until seventy pounds of armor became a thing a man wore rather than a thing that wore him.

"The rings hold nothing living," Malen had told them the first week they’d had them. "So they’ll never carry you, and they’ll never carry a man you’re trying to bring home. But everything that keeps you alive rides on your finger, weighing nothing, until the second you need it." He’d made them suit and strip in the dark, in water, on bad ground, blind, until the marvel wore off it entirely, because a knight who has to think about his armor is thinking about the wrong thing.

The weapons came out last, each man’s own.

Arven drew the towering shield first — the great slab of layered plate that was half his trade, made to bracket a doorway and let a squad live behind it — and slung it, and took up the Thunderbolt in his other hand, the twenty-five-millimetre bolter that only powered armor could hold level. A Shield Bearer went first through gaps and stood last in retreats, and he carried the tools for both.

Daren’s rifle was nothing like it. He unwrapped the long precision piece Sella Marsh had married to his hands over six weeks at Skyforge — a single-shot, finest barrel Ironhold had ever cut, made to put one round through one man at a distance the rest of them couldn’t see.

Varro brought out the heavy gun, and the heavy gun changed the shape of the night. Where the others carried weapons, Varro carried a volume —a belt-fed support piece cradled against the suit’s shoulder mount, fed by a belt running from the drum locked to his back, the round-count on it enough to shut a road by himself.No stand, no ground. The armor ate the recoil that would have torn the gun out of an unarmored man’s hands and thrown him down the slope, so Varro simply stood at the treeline with it levelled at the ford, feet planted, and after that he was less a man than a fact about that stretch of road.

Pell and Rellan carried the standard Thunderbolt. Pell had his tools in the ring and a rifle in his fists. Rellan had his medic’s pouch on his hip and the same, and both of them took the flanks.

"Time," Arven said, and his voice came flat and close through the helm.

"Cart made the rise a while back," Varro answered from behind the gun, without lifting his eye from it. "Loaded pace, six oxen — it’s into Anley trees by now, or near it. Past the ford it’s four miles of open moor to the Corran holding, and nothing on it but us."

"And the rider."

"Pell had eyes on the north gate till we left the town." Varro’s voice didn’t change. "The man in the too-clean settled nothing and slept nowhere. He directly went to the carrier’s yard, asked which loads went up the road tonight, and hired a horse. A horse runs faster than a loaded cart down." A pause. "He’s behind Cray and he’s gaining, and he doesn’t have four miles of moor to cross first. He can take the drover at the ford if we don’t."

Arven looked down the black slope toward the trees where the road disappeared.

"Then we don’t wait on the moor for a clean field," he said. "We take the ford, in the trees, in the dark, and we take it before the rider does. Cray comes off that cart alive. He’s the only man breathing who knows where the wagons stopped and what the cold was, and he stays the map until he’s told us — not an hour before." He turned his helm toward the shape of the too-clean man somewhere back on the road. "The rider doesn’t reach the ford. That part’s Daren’s, if the line’s there, and Varro’s if it isn’t."

"The line will be there," Daren said, from the rise, not turning his head.

The Anley ford

The trees closed over the road before the water, and under them the dark went total, and it was there — with the ford loud ahead and the oxen slowing for the descent — that Halder Cray finally heard the thing he’d been listening for the whole way north.

A horse. Ridden hard. On the road at his back, in the dark, closing.

No honest man rode a hired horse into Anley trees at this hour and ran a horse that fast toward a cart carrying nothing worth catching. Cray knew exactly what it meant, and the last of the drink went out of him in a single cold rush that left him shaking on the boards.

"Stop," he said, and then louder, cracking, "stop the cart —" with no plan past getting off it, past the trees, past being anywhere but the one place a rider already knew to find him.

The carrier hauled the oxen up at the head of the ford, more startled than obedient, and Cray was already over the tailboard and stumbling for the black edge of the road where the trees began.

He got three steps.

Then the dark at the treeline stood up, and it was enormous, armored, and the low hum of it reached him a half-second before the hand did — a plated gauntlet closing over his mouth, gentle and absolute, stopping the scream before he could spend it. A voice came through a helm very close to his ear, quiet and level and not unkind.

"Not that way. That way’s the man who’s been asking where you sleep." The grip held him while his whole body locked rigid and then, by degrees, understood it was being held and not broken. "We’re the other thing, Halder. We’ve come a long way to make sure he doesn’t reach you. Be still. Be quiet. In one minute you’ll be the safest you’ve been in a week."

Out on the road, the hoofbeats came on toward the trees, and then slowed — the unhurried slowing of a rider who believes he is arriving first.

Arven drew the drover back into the dark, one arm across him, the shield angled to put steel between Cray and the road. Off to his right, Varro’s gun tracked without a sound. On the rise behind, Daren had his one line and was breathing slow over it. Pell and Rellan had folded into the black on either flank, watching the edges, doing the after-work’s waiting.

The rider came into the trees, into the one stretch of the north road where he thought no one was watching him, and somehow five men and a war carried on their fingers had got there first.