Chapter 139: Hell Comes South (2)

The men were not particularly grateful to the Watcher when they returned.

Most of them understood why they had been called back. They were soldiers, and they knew what it meant when a commander ordered an entire workforce to abandon its position before the enemy arrived.

Understanding it, however, did not make them happy about it.

The first complaints began before the men had even reached their barracks.

"Three more days."

A soldier dropped his gloves onto a bench and stared at the mud covering his boots.

"We needed three more days, and the third line would have been finished."

"Three days would not have finished everything."

"It would have finished enough."

"Enough for what?"

The question silenced him for a moment.

The soldier looked toward the northern wall, though he could not see the horde from inside the barracks.

"For us to have something to show for all that work."

That was the part that angered them.

For the last few days, they had worked like dogs because the Watcher had told them to.

They had dug because he said the trenches would matter. They had moved earth because he said slowing the horde by even a little could change what happened at the Wall. They had carried stakes until their shoulders hurt and spent days in the mud laying out funnels and channels that most of them had never understood.

The Watcher had always known what he wanted.

Now, just before the fighting began, he had ordered them to abandon it.

"He knew," one of the men muttered.

The soldier beside him looked over.

"Knew what?"

"That this was coming."

Everyone knew who he meant.

"The Watcher knew the horde was coming. He has known for months. So why did he keep us out there until now?"

Another soldier, an older man whose hands were still swollen from working the trenches, gave a bitter laugh.

"Because he wanted every last shovel of dirt moved before the beasts arrived."

"Then why pull us back now?"

"Ask him."

"How? Should I walk into the Strategist’s office and ask why he wasted our effort?"

Nobody answered.

The Watcher had become a strange figure to the soldiers of the Wall over the past six months.

Encrid Gannon was still a clerk by origin. He did not wear armor, did not lead soldiers into battle, and had never pretended to be a great warrior. Yet his orders had reached almost every part of the Wall, and the soldiers had spent half a year following instructions from a man many of them had once barely known.

They had called him Watcher because he saw things.

They had called him Strategist because the Council had given him the seat.

Some respected him.

Some trusted him.

And some simply believed he was an irritating clerk who had found a way to make soldiers dig holes.

Those men were particularly angry now.

"You know what I think?" one of them said.

The others looked toward him.

"I think the Watcher has spent months telling us that every shovel matters, every stake matters, every ditch matters, and now that the Roamers are almost here, he realizes he was wrong."

"Careful."

"Why?"

"Because if you’re wrong, he’ll have a reason to have your head."

The soldier snorted.

"And if I’m right?"

The older man looked toward the window.

"Then we are all in trouble."

Nobody had anything to say to that.

Outside, the distant sound of the horde continued to grow.

The complaints eventually stopped, not because the soldiers had forgiven Encrid, but because there was no more time to complain.

The Wall needed them. And somewhere in their hearts they knew that the Watcher had actually pulled them back because he didn’t want them to get caught with the hore.

✧ ✧ ✧

The Reevers came first.

They were always first.

They had been running ahead of the main mass for two days, and shortly before dawn they finally reached the outer stakes.

The first watchman saw them moving through the darkness.

At first, he thought there were only a few.

Then he saw more.

Then dozens.

Then hundreds.

The Reevers ran close to the ground, their forelimbs longer than their hind legs, which forced their bodies forward as they moved. Their heads stayed low while their shoulders worked violently with every stride, giving them the appearance of creatures that were almost crawling across the earth despite their speed.

Their coats were grey-black and looked wet even when they were dry.

Each one was roughly the size of a large hound, although its body was almost twice as long.

The most disturbing part was its jaw.

It stretched far back into the skull, and when a Reever opened its mouth, the entire front of its head seemed to come apart.

They were Level Two creatures.

A trained watchman could kill one.

There seemed to be at least two thousand of them.

The number was difficult to judge in the darkness, especially with the main horde still moving behind them, but the soldiers could see enough to understand that the first wave was far larger than anything the outer stakes had been built to stop.

The stakes did their first job.

They did not kill many.

A Reever did not stop simply because there was a sharpened piece of wood in front of it. The creature was not intelligent enough to understand the danger, but it was fast and low to the ground, and when the points appeared in its path, it twisted its body aside and continued running.

The first line of stakes pushed them to the side.

The next line pushed them farther.

Then another line caught the creatures coming behind them and forced them in the same direction.

It was what happened next that finally made the nine hundred workers understand why the Watcher had pushed them so hard during those final days. The work they had considered unfinished, exhausting, and at times almost pointless had not been meant to stop the horde.

And seeing what was unfolding before their eyes, they finally understood it.

✦ ✦ ✦