Chapter 148: Unfair

Oil-soaked cloth does not burn the way ordinary cloth burns.

Ordinary cloth catches fire at one point, and the fire spreads outward from there, a man with a blanket can usually beat it out if he is quick.

Oiled cloth goes up along every inch of itself at once. The fuel is already distributed through the whole fabric. The flame does not have to travel anywhere. It only has to arrive.

Fifty or sixty Gorehorns were wearing the oil-covered cloth.

Tearing through the cloth doesn’t mean they didn’t get smeared with the oil in it. In that time they had torn it, dragged it, wound it around their own horns and shoulders and forelegs, and worked it down into the hair along their flanks.

Which was precisely why the sheets had been thrown on top of them from above instead of laid on the ground in front of them.

A Gorehorn carries a great deal of hair. It grows thick over the flanks and hindquarters, and thicker in winter, and beneath it is a layer of fat that has kept the animal alive through every cold season of its life.

All of it became fuel for the fire and burned.

-Gwaaaaaaah!

The first one screamed.

Nobody on that Wall had ever heard a Gorehorn scream before. There was a reason for this. A wounded Gorehorn normally did not survive long enough to make the sound, because the injuries that reached anything vital on a Gorehorn were injuries that killed it immediately.

Then the second one screamed.

Then eleven at once, as the fire ran along a torn strip that connected three animals together.

Then the whole front of the wedge.

And a burning animal doesn’t stand idle - it runs.

That is instinct, and that instinct was exactly Encrid was betting on because does not take into account that running is the worst possible thing to do in the middle of forty thousand other animals.

They did not run forward.

Forward was the Wall, and the Wall was where the pain had come from.

So the roamer, however out of mind it might be - would not move towards the same direction.

They turned.

Behind them were Reevers, packed shoulder to shoulder across four hundred paces with nowhere at all to go.

-Kwaang! Kwang! Bududududuk!

Six-ton animals on fire went into a Reever pack at full speed.

What happened over the next two minutes was not fighting and could not be described as a battle. The Reevers tried to get clear and could not. The Gorehorns tried to escape a fire that was travelling with them and could not. The oil that had soaked the canvas came off onto everything they touched, and the fire went with the oil.

The wedge came apart from the inside.

Then it started spreading outward.

The thing about a hundred thousand creatures packed into four hundred paces of open ground is the fact that the ones on the outside can move. The ones in the middle cannot, because the ones on the outside are in the way.

There is nowhere to go.

The hole kept getting bigger for eleven minutes.

✧ ✧ ✧

On the Fourth Mile, a levy man of about nineteen sat down on the walk with his back against the parapet and did not get up for some time.

He had been on the Wall four months. He had joined because the pay was better than farm work and because his brother had joined the year before.

He had spent the whole morning putting a spear into things and had been managing it. That was the word he used afterward when anybody asked him. Managing.

Then he had looked over the edge at three hundred paces of burning animals and had discovered that he was not managing at all.

His sergeant came along the walk, looked at him, and did not order him back up.

"Give it a minute."

"Sir."

"Not longer than a minute, mind."

"Sir."

He was back on his feet inside the minute. Most of them were. That is what a garrison is.

✧ ✧ ✧

The Fifth Bastion.

Ansel Corr had been counting since the arrow landed.

But he stopped at four thousand.

"I can’t give you a real figure," he said.

"Give me the unreal one."

"More than four thousand. Possibly a great deal more. There’s no way to count what’s underneath that."

Encrid nodded and said nothing.

’Twenty stones and twenty sheets. Every bedsheet in the Shambles and one night of sewing.’

The whole of it had cost the Wall nothing that could not be replaced, except the cloth, which could not be replaced at all.

By the end of those eleven minutes the Fourth Mile’s frontage was a burning field three hundred paces wide. The horde had drawn back from it in both directions. The advance on that section had stopped completely for the first time since dawn.

Encrid looked along the parapet.

Rael had already set the bow down. He was standing with his hands at his sides watching the field, and his face was doing something that Encrid could not read.

"Rael."

"My lord."

"Are you all right?"

Rael did not answer immediately.

"I’ve been killing these things one at a time for six years," he said.

"I know."

"Two at a time, if the ground was good. Four once."

He looked like he was very displeased for some reason.

"That was one arrow."

"Yes."

Rael went on looking at the fire.

"...I don’t think I like it much."

Encrid did not tell him that he was not wrong to feel that way.

For Rael, who had spent six years putting his life on the line to fight three or four Roamers at a time, watching hundreds of them burn because of a simple trick devised by a clerk with a single arrow must have felt unfair.

Encrid understood why.

Rael had earned every one of his kills the hard way. He had ventured into the Great Green Forest alone, fought for every core he brought back, and risked his life each time he crossed the stakes. Every Roamer he killed had required effort, skill, and the willingness to put his own life on the line.

Now, from the safety of the Wall, a few simple preparations could kill more Roamers in moments than Rael could kill in days.

It was easy to see why he disliked it.

But Encrid also knew that Rael could not afford to let that feeling spread to the others.

’It’s too early to get complacent.’

It was only the second day of the siege, and around five thousand Roamers had already been killed.

Five thousand sounded like an enormous number.

It was not.

Every dead Roamer also meant one less body standing between the Wall and the thousands still coming from the Great Green Forest.

And there were still far too many of them.

✦ ✦ ✦