Chapter 168: The Iron Is Coming

The Mouth was full of light when Encrid arrived.

Torches burned along both walls of the long barbican tunnel. Soldiers of the Mouth’s garrison stood on the gate towers with lanterns raised, shouting down to the road below. The great southern doors, which had been shut and barred since the first day of the siege, stood open.

And on the road beyond them, stretching back into the dark as far as Encrid could see, were wagons.

Dozens of them.

Heavy freight wagons with iron-rimmed wheels, each pulled by a team of four oxen. They were loaded so high that their axles groaned. Canvas covers had been lashed over the loads, and at the front of every wagon hung a small grey pennant marked with a black anvil.

House Cavel’s banner.

Encrid stood in the tunnel and counted.

He stopped at thirty-eight because the rest of the column was still out of sight around the bend in the road.

A rider came through the gate at a trot. He was young and thin, with a narrow face and a grey cloak crusted with road dust. He reined in when he saw Encrid and swung down from the saddle so quickly that he stumbled.

Encrid recognized him.

"Ellis."

Ellis Cavel, the second son of the Lord of the Cold Iron, straightened up and brushed the dust off his cloak. It made no difference.

"My lord," he said. "I apologize for the hour. We’ve been driving since the day before yesterday without stopping. I didn’t want to wait until morning."

"You came yourself."

"My father said that if the iron was going to the Wall unpaid, then someone from the house should go with it and make sure the Wall knew who sent it." Ellis smiled tiredly. "My brother said he was busy."

Encrid gave a knowing smile and looked past him at the column of wagons.

"How much?"

Ellis pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside his cloak and handed it over.

"Everything we had," he said.

Encrid unfolded the sheet and read it under the torchlight.

Thirty thousand arrows. Two thousand spearheads. Four hundred swords. Six hundred shields. Eighty barrels of pitch.

And at the bottom of the list, underlined twice in a heavy, confident hand that Encrid recognized as Lord Ferris Cavel’s own:

The Cold Iron remembers who warned it first.

Encrid read the list twice.

Then he read the line at the bottom again.

For a moment, he did not trust himself to speak.

"Is it enough?" Ellis asked uncertainly.

Encrid folded the sheet and put it into his coat beside the message from the southern gate.

"It’s more than I asked for," he said.

"My father will be pleased to hear that. He said you would complain it was late."

"It is late," Encrid said. "But it’s here."

✧ ✧ ✧

The arrows were the easiest part.

Encrid had the Quartermastery’s porters unload them at the Mouth and carry them north along the inner road in relays. By the second hour after midnight, bundles of fresh arrows were already arriving at the Fifth Bastion, and the Box crews were refilling tubes that had been half empty for two days.

The spearheads went to the Works, where Volk’s crews had been waiting with shafts cut and stacked since before the siege began. The swords and shields went to the parapets, to men who had been fighting with broken ones.

The iron was different.

Ellis walked with Encrid along the inner road, watching the Works men unload the first of the bars from a wagon. They were dull grey, as long as a man’s forearm and as thick as his wrist, and it took two porters to lift each one.

Two older men had climbed down from the wagon behind them. They were broad and heavy-shouldered, with scorched leather aprons and forearms covered in old burn scars. They looked at the Wall the way farmers look at weather.

"Brannoc and his son," Ellis said. "My father’s best. He said nobody on the Wall would know how to work cold iron properly. It doesn’t behave like ordinary iron. It fights the hammer."

"Then it’s in the right place," Encrid said.

Ellis almost laughed.

Then he looked at the bars again, and frowned.

"My father said you’d complain it wasn’t made into anything," he said. "He said you’d want arrowheads or spearheads, and it would take your smiths a week."

"Not a week," Encrid said. "One night."

"For sixty bars?"

"For one thing."

Encrid did not slow down. He turned off the inner road and led Ellis down a side street to the Works yard behind the Quartermastery. It was a wide courtyard of packed earth with three forges along one wall. The forges had been cold for four days.

In the middle of the yard, stacked in neat rows under an oiled canvas, were wooden shafts.

Hundreds of them.

Each one was as long as a man. Each one was straight and smooth, with three stiff fins of leather fitted at one end. And each one was bare at the other end, where the head should have been.

Ellis stared at them.

"Ballista bolts," he said slowly.

"Six hundred of them."

"Without heads."

"Without heads," Encrid agreed.

He looked at the shafts.

"When we built the twenty ballistae on the Wall, we built them with twenty bolts each. That’s all the iron we had left. Every other scrap went into Box arrowheads and the iron shoes for the trench stakes. The forges ran dry two weeks before the horde came."

"So you had the shafts cut anyway," Ellis said.

Encrid just smiled.

"Why?"

"Because I thought your father might send iron."

Ellis looked at him.

"You didn’t know he would."

"No," Encrid said. "But if he did, and there was nothing ready to put it on, it would have taken the Works four days to cut and fin six hundred shafts. And we don’t have four days."

Ellis stared at him for a moment longer.

Then he laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, the laugh of a young man who had been driving oxen for two days without sleep and had not expected to find anything funny at the end of the road.

"My father said you were a dangerous man to owe a favor to," he said. "I think I understand now."

✧ ✧ ✧

Brannoc lit the first forge himself.

He did not ask anyone’s permission. He walked into the Works yard, looked at the three cold forges, looked at the shafts, and asked Volk one question.

"What does the head look like?"

Volk showed him one of the old bolts from the ballista on the Fifth Bastion. A heavy iron point with three sharp fins behind it, made to go into something and not come out.

Brannoc turned it over in his hands. He ran his thumb along the fins.

"Your smiths made this?"

"The Wall’s smiths."

Brannoc grunted.

"Too thin," he said. "Your iron was too soft for this shape. It’ll bend on bone."

He handed it back.

"Cold iron won’t bend."

By the second hour after midnight, all three forges were burning. Brannoc worked one. His son worked the second. The Wall’s own smiths shared the third, watching the two Cavel men with the careful, sour expressions of craftsmen being shown how to do their own job.

Encrid stood at the edge of the yard and listened to the hammers.

-Kang. Kang. Kang.

It was a good sound.

It was the first good sound he had heard in two days.

By the fourth hour, the first cart of finished bolts rolled north along the inner road toward the Fifth Bastion. Forty of them, laid side by side under a blanket. Their heads were dark grey and still faintly warm, and they were heavier than the old ones. The fins were thicker. The points were shorter and blunter, shaped more like a chisel than a needle.

Encrid walked beside the cart all the way to the bastion.

When the crew of the Fifth Bastion’s ballista lifted the first one into the groove, he put his hand on the head.

It was still warm.

For the first time in two days, something in his chest loosened.

The Wall had arrows again. It had spears. It had shields. And twenty machines that had sat silent for nine days now had something to throw that could kill anything the forest sent at them, short of an Elder.

It was not enough to win.

But it was enough to keep fighting.

Corr’s voice came from behind him.

"My lord."

Encrid turned.

Corr was sitting in his chair at the northern edge of the bastion, with the glass braced against his knee. He had not moved from there since the strike team had gone through the Far-Watch door.

"What is it?"

Corr did not lower the glass.

"The horde," he said. "It’s moving again."

✦ ✦ ✦