CHAPTER 183: FRAGILE CARGO PART 3

The quarry road narrowed into a thread between scrub and the broken ribs of old stone. The JLTV hummed steady, the cargo behind them murmuring with strap-creaks at every gentle sway. Lyra had her bow loose across her knees now, one arrow laid along the grip like a thought half-formed.

The dust behind them fattened.

"Three riders," she said, not guessing. "Fourth hanging back."

"Scout, vanguard, and a conscience," Inigo replied. He eased the wheel an inch to the right, just enough to put the sun at an angle that punished anyone who tried to pace them on the cliff side. "Let’s see if they’ve done this before."

The first hint of the welcome committee came plain as a signboard: a dead tree dropped across the road at a bend where the downhill shoulder fell into scrub and the uphill shoulder rose to rotten shale. If you were on a horse, you stopped. If you stopped, you talked—or bled.

Inigo downshifted with a soft thunk and rolled to a crawl ten yards shy of the trunk. He didn’t touch the horn. He didn’t touch anything he didn’t need.

A gray pennant winked from behind a boulder. Then three men resolved from the scenery with the easy arrogance of people who’d practiced this on caravans that didn’t bite back. Chain shirts under travel cloaks. Bows strung, blades bare but low. The fourth rider appeared at the rear, staying well out of range, a watcher on a dappled horse that looked smarter than its owner.

The leader—thin face, mouth like a cut—raised a palm. "Afternoon," he said, as if they were neighbors in a lane. "Road’s closed."

"By whose order?" Inigo asked through the half-open window.

"By ours," the man said cheerfully, and tapped the pennant pole with his knuckles. "Neighborly tax. You pay, we lift."

Lyra’s voice was soft. "Don’t jostle," she murmured, as if to the crates and to him both.

Inigo nodded once, so small only she could have felt it. He flicked his gaze to a spot three feet inboard of the JLTV’s right tire—an opening where the trunk met dirt and the root ball left a pocket. The JLTV was heavy. The opening was narrow. The math would be close.

"Tax schedule?" Inigo asked, mildly curious.

The thin man smiled like a knifepoint catching light. "Depends what’s in the cart."

Lyra leaned slightly so he could see her, eyes amused, not friendly. "Flour," she said.

"Stone," Inigo added.

"Regret," Lyra said, and the man’s smile cooled a degree.

He had enough sense to clock the rifle. He had enough vanity to think his angle was still good. "Two gold," he said. "And whatever’s in the back we like the look of."

"Counteroffer," Inigo said, and that got all their attention because no one ever counteroffered without fear. He reached with slow, deliberate hands—not for the rifle, not for a coin purse—but for the switch on the dash that killed the headlights and left the engine. Then he rolled the window down, so his voice carried clean. "We don’t stop," he said. "We don’t pay. You step left. Everyone goes home with the same number of holes."

"Or?" the leader asked, because pride makes men greedy for the second option.

"Or I move the tree in the way that’s easiest for me," Inigo said, and let that sit in the road like a snake.

The leader’s eyes flicked to the trunk, to the tires, to the angle. He took a step he probably thought was subtle—closer to the wheel well, as if proximity could make physics choose his side.

Lyra smiled without showing teeth. "Step left," she repeated, and lifted her bow in one hand, the arrow in the other, not nocked but there. She didn’t aim at anyone. She aimed at the chain that looped from a piton in the uphill bank to a ring sunk in the downhill stone—insurance to keep the tree from rolling when carts pushed. Smart. Annoying.

Inigo took a breath long enough to be seen by those who were watching for tremor and found none. He feathered the throttle, the diesel note deepening to a patient growl. "Hold," he told the JLTV, as if it were a hound eyeing a rabbit.

Then he let it creep.

The front bumper kissed the trunk like a handshake. The JLTV didn’t slam. It pressed. Wood creaked. Bark powdered. The chain on the downhill ring sang a note like a struck saw. The men flinched at the sound instinct turns into prophecy.

"Left," Inigo said again.

The leader hesitated a heartbeat too long.

Lyra nocked and drew in that same heartbeat. The arrow hissed past the leader’s ear and cut the chain where rust had gnawed it thin beneath the ring. The chain snapped back with a whipcrack; the tree rolled an inch toward open ground, momentum hunting for a path. Inigo fed the JLTV a finger’s more power and the bumper became a quiet, relentless argument.

The trunk rolled. The pocket opened. The right tire took the dirt lip and climbed; the left tire rode the trunk like a balance beam. The whole vehicle tilted a degree that made the straps in back hum. Inigo’s hands did not whiten. His mouth did not tighten. He let the weight do what weight does when guided with respect.

"Back," the thin man said now, voice higher, but it was too late to choose a new script. The JLTV stepped over the tree like a warhorse taking a ditch, the tail of the oilskin tarp just brushing bark.

They were through.

The leftmost brigand—young, bold, not as smart as he should have been—tried to seize the moment by grabbing the door handle. He found only the flat plane of armored steel. Lyra’s second arrow pinned his cloak to the dirt through the hem, a stitch driven by a merciful seamstress. He jerked to a stop with a sound that embarrassed him, then fumbled a knife with hands that shook.

"Don’t," Lyra said, the single syllable bright and sharp as the arrowhead.

The leader, to his credit, raised his palm again—not as a greeting now, as a surrender. "We’ll remember you," he said flatly.

"Write a letter," Inigo said, and drove on without looking back.

They didn’t chase immediately. Pride needs time to triage. But pride heals fast in men like that. A mile on, the dust behind them re-bloomed, thicker now, determined. Lyra didn’t say "I told you." She said, "Fork in two minutes. Then trees."

Inigo took the fork onto the old quarry road without drama, the turn signal winking to no one, and let the JLTV sink into the cover the woods offered. The track here was rutted but passable, worn by generations of carts hauling stone and now by deer and fools. The canopy cut the light into coins that fell across the hood.

"Plan?" Lyra asked.

"Keep the cargo smooth. Convince them we’re not worth the doctor bills," Inigo said. "No firefights around red crates."

"I could put an arrow in a horse’s bridle," she offered, practical cruelty.

"Only if we have to," he said. "Let’s try something they haven’t seen."

He drove until the track dipped, then rose—just enough of a roll to hide a vehicle that knew how to hold still. He pulled the JLTV into the lee of a boulder and killed the engine, the sudden quiet like a dropped curtain. Birds that had stopped singing considered their options and decided the world wasn’t ending.

"Brake," he said. "Handbrake," he amended, and set it with care. "We talk now."

Lyra slid out with impossible economy, moving to a position above and to the right where a root-snarled bank gave her a clean angle on the approach. She didn’t vanish; she simply ceased to be the first thing you’d notice. Inigo stepped to the back, unlatched the tailgate, and let it hang just enough to suggest access without granting it. Then he walked ahead ten paces and stood in the middle of the track with his hands visible and his rifle slung—not raised, not idle.

The riders came around the bend with caution molded into their bones by the last five minutes. Four now, not three. The watcher had committed. Gray pennants flicked in the breeze. The thin leader kept his horse at a walk, reins loose, blade out but low. He saw Inigo standing alone and smiled with too many teeth. "Changed your mind?"

"Changed the terrain," Inigo said. "We can do this in the open on the cliff where any idiot pulls a trigger and we all die interestingly... or we can do it here, where there’s shade and choices."

"Choice," the leader echoed, amused. "What do you offer?"

"An education," Inigo said mildly. "On the limits of your business model."

He let the silence grow roots. He let them imagine that sentence with too many possible outcomes. Men fear what they can’t cost.