Chapter 134: The Petitions Desk

Dellan Ost was a commoner who had worked hard for years, passed several examinations, and eventually earned an appointment as a clerk at the Imperial Petition Desk.

He was twenty-nine years old that year.

He had held the position for four years.

People who knew the department considered him extremely good at his job.

His job did not sound important when explained aloud, but it was necessary for the Empire to function.

Dellan’s responsibility was to decide, at a rate of roughly ninety an hour, which letters were going to be read by somebody else.

There were four hundred people in the Empire who were entitled to write directly to the Emperor.

There were perhaps eleven thousand who did it anyway.

The difference between those two numbers was Dellan Ost and six men like him.

A letter arrived at the Petition Desk that morning marked as very important.

Dellan read the first page in forty-two seconds.

That was longer than he gave most letters.

It was an unusually well-made document.

Someone had taken a great deal of trouble with it.

The figures were laid out cleanly.

The sources were referenced.

The handwriting was clear.

Most importantly, the letter did not raise its voice.

Nine petitions out of ten did that somewhere around the second paragraph.

Dellan had learned that people who shouted at the Emperor through paper were rarely the people with the most useful information.

He turned to the second page.

He read the totals.

Then he stopped.

He went back to the beginning.

This time, he read the entire thing.

He had not done that with a petition in almost two years.

When he finished, Dellan sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

There was only one thing he could do with the letter.

He marked it for the desk above his own and wrote a note on the cover recommending that it be read immediately.

Then he looked at the signature line again.

Encrid Gannon.

Strategist of the Wall.

Dellan frowned.

He had no memory of such a title or position existing at the northern Wall.

That bothered him.

Not because he cared particularly about the Wall, but because Dellan Ost had the entire establishment of the northern command in a drawer six feet from his elbow.

He had it because somebody had to.

Twice a year, the Wall’s official returns came south, and somebody needed to compare them against the records already held by the Crown.

Dellan went and retrieved the file.

He opened it.

Lord Commander. Vice-Commander. Nine Watch commanders. Captain of the Far-Watch. Chief Healer. Steward of the Quartermastery. Head of the Lampwrights.

Fifteen official seats. There was no mention of anything related to Strategist.

Dellan stared at the page for a while.

Then he picked up his pen.

Under his first note, he added a second line in the careful, neutral hand he used for everything.

Signatory holds a position not recorded in the establishment of this command. Recommend verification.

He placed the letter in the tray for the Northern Desk.

Then he went to supper.

He thought about it twice more that evening.

Then he stopped thinking about it.

There were eleven thousand letters a year.

He had done his part correctly.

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The letter went up three levels in three days.

That was fast.

At each level, a different man read it.

Each of them believed it.

Each of them understood almost immediately that the real problem was not whether the information was true.

The northern Wall did not belong to the Crown.

It was chartered as an autonomous command precisely so that no faction in the capital could use it for its own purposes.

That arrangement had held for two hundred years.

At present, it was held together by an understanding between four ducal houses that had taken eleven years to negotiate.

The political consequences were therefore obvious.

If the Crown sent a legion, the Crown would be accepting responsibility for the north.

Three of the four houses would have an opinion about that within a month.

If the Crown sent nothing, and the thing described in the letter turned out to be real, then a fortress had asked for help and been refused in writing.

That document would exist forever.

Neither option was particularly pleasant.

The decision was made in a room that neither Dellan Ost nor his immediate superior was permitted to enter.

It was, in the way of decisions made in that room, a reasonable one.

The Crown would not commit a legion.

The Crown would, however, be seen to have acted.

So an order went out under seal.

One company of the Imperial Orders would march north and place itself under the Lord Commander’s direction for the duration of the emergency.

The company chosen was the Order of the Silver Crane.

It had four hundred men on paper.

It had roughly two hundred and ninety in reality.

Its commander had purchased his position eleven years earlier and had never held a field command.

The Order had been stationed at a southern river crossing for so long that several of its current officers had been born there.

The last significant thing the Silver Crane had done was provide an honour guard for the wedding of a minor noble.

Every man in the room understood exactly why it had been chosen.

Not one of them said so aloud.

The Silver Crane had been useless for nearly a decade.

This was simply the first genuinely useful thing anyone had managed to find for it to do.

The order was sealed.

It was sent north.

The Silver Crane received it.

The commander acknowledged it.

Then the order began preparing to march.

They did so at the pace of a military body that had just been informed it was going north in winter, to a place most of its men had never seen, to stand on a wall against an enemy nobody had properly explained to them.

They needed supplies, horses, and winter clothing.

They also needed to bring most of their men back from leave.

They needed to find out which of their officers could actually command soldiers in the field.

They needed time, which was the only thing the North didn’t have.

It was later found out that they were still preparing for the dispatch when the horde had reached the Wall.

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