Chapter 149: Sumpers

The Roamers finally reached the foot of the Wall.

Everything Encrid had prepared for this moment had bought them time.

The trenches had slowed the horde. The Boxes had torn apart the Reever formations. The catapults had scattered burning oil across the ground and forced entire sections of the horde to change direction. Every preparation, every calculation, and every order had done exactly what it was supposed to do.

It had bought the Wall a day and a half.

That was all.

A day and a half was a long time when measured in lives.

It was very little when measured against a horde.

By the eleventh hour, the Great Green Forest had finally reached the fortress.

The first creatures to touch the Wall were not the Reevers, who had led the horde from the beginning, nor the Gorehorns that had followed behind them.

It was the Sumpers.

A Sumper was roughly the length of a grown man, though its body was far flatter and considerably less pleasant to look at. It stayed close to the ground, its long body covered in pairs of short legs that continued almost to its tail. Each leg ended in a curved hook capable of catching onto cracks, roots, mud, or anything else that offered even the smallest purchase.

Its back was divided into overlapping segments, dark enough to appear black beneath the overcast sky, and perpetually wet.

Sumpers lived in water.

In practice, that meant they lived in the drains, the sumps, and the flooded ground around the Wall.

For two hundred years, the fortress’s relationship with them had been remarkably simple.

In spring, the Watch pulled dead Sumpers from the drainage grates.

Occasionally, a live one crawled somewhere it was not supposed to be, and someone killed it.

That was generally the end of the matter.

A Sumper was a Level One Roamer. Large specimens could reach Level Two, but that was uncommon.

They were not dangerous because they were strong.

They were dangerous because there were so many of them.

More importantly, a Sumper could not climb granite.

It had never been able to climb granite.

That fact had not changed during the siege.

The problem was that Sumpers did not need to climb granite.

They could climb each other.

The first Sumper reached the base of the Wall and pressed its wet body against the stone.

It searched for a foothold.

There was none.

Its hooks scraped uselessly against the granite.

Another arrived behind it.

Then another.

The creature at the bottom drove its hooks into the ground and locked its legs in place. The one behind it crawled over its back and began climbing.

A third followed.

Then a fourth.

The creatures did not hesitate.

They simply climbed.

The ones underneath were crushed beneath the weight of those above them. Some were forced into the mud. Others were drowned beneath the bodies piling over them.

It did not matter.

They were not there to survive.

They were there to become the ground for the next creature.

Given enough time, a river of Sumpers could build a living ramp from their own bodies.

Given a full day, that ramp could reach roughly a third of the way up the Wall.

And there were thousands of them.

Perhaps tens of thousands.

The Watchers standing along the parapet understood the danger almost immediately.

A few Sumpers were nothing.

A hundred were unpleasant.

A thousand could become a staircase.

Encrid looked down from the Wall.

The first mass was already beginning to form.

"Ask the Lampwrights to open the channels."

The order passed from man to man.

No one questioned it.

The channels had been prepared six days earlier.

During the preparations, shallow cuts had been carved along the top of the outer parapet and extended across the entire northern face of the Wall. The cuts had been lined with lead and connected to lipped spouts placed at twenty-pace intervals.

The Works crews had hated every moment of it.

For six days, they had cursed the Watcher’s name while cutting into the stone.

One foreman had even submitted a formal objection to the Works ledger, which he was perfectly entitled to do.

The objection remained there.

Encrid had made certain it would.

It was not his concern whether the Works crews liked the channels.

His concern was whether they worked.

"Open them."

The Lampwrights opened the channels.

Two hundred and eleven barrels of oil had been poured into them.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the oil began to move.

It ran through the lead-lined cuts, gathered speed, and spilled from the spouts.

Across two hundred kilometres of granite, oil came down in a dark, glistening sheet.

The Sumpers arrived a few minutes later.

The first four climbed.

They reached perhaps nine feet.

Then they slipped.

Their hooks scraped helplessly against the oil-covered granite before their bodies slid backward and crashed into the mass below.

The next creatures climbed over them.

They reached the same height.

They slipped as well.

More came.

More climbed.

More fell.

The Sumpers could climb one another.

They could not climb this.

There was nothing for their hooks to catch.

No crack.

No dry stone.

No purchase.

Only wet granite.

The bodies at the bottom began to pile together, but the pile could not hold its shape. Every creature that reached the upper section slid backward, dragging others down with it.

The entire northern face became a moving mass of dark bodies.

And then came the sound.

"Kurururururu-"

Thousands of hooked legs scraped against the stone.

It was a terrible sound.

Not loud in the way a roar was loud.

There was no single voice to it, no clear source.

It was the sound of countless small claws striking stone at once, an endless scratching that spread along the Wall and seemed to come from everywhere.

Men on the parapet looked over the edge despite themselves.

Some immediately wished they had not.

The Sumpers continued climbing.

They continued slipping.

They continued crawling over the bodies of those beneath them, entirely indifferent to the fact that they were dying.

There was no intelligence in the swarm that needed to be defeated.

There was only instinct.

Forward.

Up.

Over.

Again.

The Watchers had seen blood, fire, and death for the last two days.

They had watched Reevers burn.

They had watched Gorehorns fall beneath ballista bolts.

They had watched thousands of creatures die in the trenches.

None of that had prepared them for this.

Several men later said that the sound had been worse than the screaming.

They were not exaggerating.

Encrid stood above the northern face and watched the Sumpers throw themselves against a wall they could not climb.

The horde had finally reached them.

The Wall was no longer buying time.

Now it had to hold.

✦ ✦ ✦