Chapter 144: Day One (3)

Two thousand four hundred arrows fell on the northern killing ground at almost the same time. The Reevers never saw them coming.

-Kwaaaang!

It was not the sound of arrows.

Arrows did not make a sound like that.

What struck the ground was closer to the sound of a great structure breaking apart, as though some enormous section of the Wall had suddenly fallen forward into the field.

The Box had no powder.

There was no explosion behind the arrows, no burning charge, and nothing magical hidden inside the tubes.

The arrows were launched by force alone.

Each one sat inside its own groove, held in place by the firing mechanism behind it. A massive arrangement of springs and tensioned limbs stored the force, and when the mechanism was released, all of it was transferred into the arrows at once.

One hundred and twenty arrows.

One release.

One machine.

Twenty machines had fired together.

Two thousand four hundred arrows had crossed the sky.

In practice, that meant that two thousand four hundred streaks of iron and wood had come down into a mass of living bodies packed shoulder to shoulder.

The front of the Reever wave simply stopped existing.

It did not scatter.

It did not break apart and flee.

There was no room to flee.

Across nearly two hundred paces of frontage, the first rank went down almost together. Some were struck directly. Others were knocked aside by the bodies falling around them, and several were trampled beneath the feet of those behind.

The animals immediately behind them kept running.

They had no way of knowing what had happened.

They could not see over the bodies in front of them, and there was nothing in their minds capable of warning them.

So they ran.

Then they fell.

Then those behind them ran over them.

For several seconds, the horde continued moving forward while the front ranks collapsed beneath it.

From the Fifth Bastion, Encrid watched a hole open in the horde.

It was roughly two hundred paces wide and reached perhaps forty paces into the mass. Dust hung over the opening, turning the sunlight brown, and for a few moments there was nothing moving inside it.

Encrid watched carefully.

He did not celebrate.

He did not smile.

He simply counted.

Two thousand four hundred arrows.

Perhaps eight hundred dead.

Perhaps a thousand.

He had not expected the weapon to be this effective.

✧ ✧ ✧

On the parapet, nobody spoke.

The soldiers who had spent nine days cursing the Watcher’s name while digging trenches stood with their hands against the stone and stared at the killing ground.

One of them, a levy man of perhaps twenty, slowly turned toward the machine behind him.

The Box was already being reloaded.

Six men were working along its frame, placing arrows into the tubes one by one. Each arrow was carefully seated into its groove, and each mechanism was checked before the next one was loaded.

The levy man watched them for several seconds.

Then he looked back toward the field.

"...What was that?"

Nobody answered him.

Further along the Wall, an old sergeant who had served for twenty-two years slowly lowered the spear he had been holding.

In twenty-two years, he had never seen the Wall kill a thousand Roamers in a single day.

He looked toward the Fifth Bastion.

The Strategist stood there with his hands behind his back, already speaking to someone about something else.

The sergeant had met him twice.

Both times, the man had been carrying paperwork.

"That clerk," he muttered.

He did not finish the thought.

He was not sure how.

✧ ✧ ✧

Then the killing ground began to fill again.

That was the part most of the men on the parapet failed to notice.

It was also the part Encrid could not stop watching.

The gap was closing from both sides.

The Roamers did not understand what had happened, but they understood movement. The creatures to the east continued south. Those to the west did the same.

They simply walked into the empty space.

They stepped over the dead.

Some stumbled.

Others climbed over the bodies.

None of them stopped.

Within a few minutes, the hole that had appeared in the horde was already becoming smaller.

Within fifteen minutes, it had disappeared completely.

There was no longer any obvious sign that two thousand four hundred arrows had struck that section of the killing ground.

The horde had lost hundreds.

Possibly more than a thousand.

The horde had not noticed.

Ansel Corr had been carried up to the bastion in a chair an hour earlier.

He sat beside the map table with a tally board across his knees. His injured body had prevented him from doing much of the physical work, but it had not prevented him from counting.

He looked down at the marks he had made.

"My lord."

"Say it."

"Eleven minutes to reload the first machine."

Encrid looked at him.

"The others?"

"They will be similar. Some may reach ten once the crews become familiar with the mechanism. Nine minutes would be possible after enough practice."

Encrid nodded.

"And the count?"

Corr looked toward the field.

"Near enough to seven hundred confirmed dead in the Fifth’s section. There will be more beneath the bodies. Across the northern face, perhaps twelve hundred."

Twelve hundred.

It was a large number.

Encrid did not let himself think about it that way.

He looked beyond the dead.

The horde was still coming.

The dust was still rising.

There were still thousands of Reevers behind the first ranks, and behind those were more creatures that could not yet even be seen.

Encrid did the only arithmetic that mattered.

Two thousand four hundred arrows.

Perhaps twelve hundred dead.

One volley.

He looked toward the ammunition stacks.

There were eleven thousand arrows prepared for the Boxes.

That sounded like a great many until he compared it with the size of what was coming.

His expression did not change.

"Send word to every Box on the northern face."

Corr lifted his pen.

"What should I tell them?"

"They are not to fire again without an order from a Watch commander or from this office."

Corr’s pen stopped.

"My lord, the crews will want to fire the moment they are loaded."

"I know."

"They will think they should use every opportunity."

"I know that too."

Corr looked at him.

"Then why hold them?"

Encrid turned toward the northern horizon.

The first volley had proved that the Box worked.

That was important.

But proving a weapon worked and knowing when to use it were two different things.

"The first volley taught us what the machine can do," he said. "The next one needs to do something more important than that."

Corr waited.

Encrid pointed toward the horde.

"We do not have enough arrows to kill everything coming toward us."

His finger lowered.

"So we make every arrow matter."

Corr nodded and began writing.

Across the Wall, the Boxes continued to reload.

✦ ✦ ✦