Chapter 182: Bloodlust

It came over the Wall like a wave.

There was no sound. There was no light. There was nothing anyone could point to and say, there, that is where it is coming from.

There was only the feeling.

Encrid had felt killing intent before. Ysolde had pointed it at him once, on the sparring yard, when she had wanted to see what he would do. It had felt like standing in front of a sword that had already decided where to cut.

This was not like that.

This was like standing in front of a thousand swords.

A hundred thousand.

It pressed down on the Council chamber from every direction at once. The air grew thick. The lamps did not dim, but the light seemed to shrink away from the corners of the room. Encrid felt his heart stumble in his chest, miss a beat, then begin to pound.

Across the table, Neriah Fold slid out of her chair onto the floor.

She was not dead. She was curled up with her arms wrapped around her head, and she was shaking.

Bastian Ryn had gone white. He was gripping the edge of the table with both hands. Tolm Bree was bent over, breathing in short gasps, his forehead almost touching the wood.

Even Halvic Ostrand, who had stood at the eastern gate for fourteen years, had closed his eyes.

Only two people in the room were still standing straight.

One of them was Ysolde Marr.

The red light had come up along her arms on its own. She had not called it. It had simply risen, the way a dog’s hackles rise when it smells a wolf. She was looking north, through the high windows, and her face was very pale.

The other was Encrid.

He did not know why.

He was the weakest person at that table by far. A one-Star Ascendant. Anyone in the room could have killed him with one hand.

But something unknown inside him was doing something that it had never done before.

His star energy was flowing.

Not the way it flowed during cultivation. It was moving the way water moves around a rock. The pressure came down on him from every side, and the Star simply let it pass. Around him. Through him. Not resisting it. Not fighting it.

Flow and adaptation.

Stop insisting on yourself.

Encrid had read those words in a cultivation manual a year ago and had not understood them.

He understood them now.

"The Wall," he said, and his voice came out rough. "Everyone to the Wall. Now."

✧ ✧ ✧

The parapet was chaos.

Encrid came out of the chamber stair onto the walk above the fifth mile and stopped.

All along the northern face, as far as he could see in both directions, men were on their knees.

Some were vomiting. Some had dropped their spears and were holding their heads. A young levy soldier was sitting against the parapet crying, his whole body shaking, saying something over and over that Encrid could not hear.

On the Fifth Bastion, one of the ballista crew had fainted. Corr was sitting in his chair with his one hand over his eyes.

And the horde had gone mad.

Encrid had watched the horde for seven days. He had seen it charge, and climb, and push, and flow like water. He had learned its rhythms. He had learned how it moved when it was hungry and how it moved when it was afraid.

He had never seen it like this.

The Roamers were not attacking the Wall anymore.

They were throwing themselves at it.

Grinners ran headlong into the stone and fell back with their skulls cracked and got up and ran at it again. Reevers climbed over each other, over the living and the dead, tearing at whatever was above them. Talljacks picked up smaller Roamers in their long hands and threw them at the parapet, one after another, like a child throwing stones.

A Sumper crawled up the oiled face of the Wall below the fifth mile. It slipped and fell. Another crawled up on top of it, and slipped, and fell. And another. And another.

Until there was a pile of them high enough to reach.

The first one over the parapet was torn apart by spears.

The second was not.

"On your feet!" Encrid shouted. "On your feet! They’re coming over!"

Some of the men heard him.

Most did not.

The pressure was still there, pressing down on everything. It made it hard to think. It made it hard to breathe. It made a man’s arms feel as though they were made of lead.

And it did not seem to touch the Roamers at all.

No.

That was not right.

Encrid watched a Reever claw its way over the parapet with half its jaw torn off. It did not care. It did not even seem to notice.

The pressure was touching the Roamers too.

It was simply doing something different to them.

It was not crushing them.

It was driving them.

Encrid looked at a Reever clawing its way up the ramp below the fifth mile and opened Appraisal on it. He did not need to think about it anymore. It came as easily as it did with people.

[ Name: Reever ]

[ Classification: Level Two ]

[ Condition: Compelled (Enraged). Source: ▮▮▮ (Out of range) ]

He looked at a Talljack. It was the same.

A Grinner. The same.

Compelled.

Last night, it had only been a word. Now it had a source. And the source was hidden from him, the way the system hid the talent of Arthur and Gus and Rael.

The way it hid things that were far above him.

✧ ✧ ✧

It went on for the rest of the day.

Encrid would remember very little of it afterward. He would remember fragments.

Ysolde, running along the parapet from the fifth mile to the eighth and back again, over and over, the red light on her sword so bright it left streaks in his eyes.

Gus on the Fifth Bastion, the white-gold fire of Ember Veil spread around him like a cloak, standing in front of the ballista crew while they cranked.

Holt, with a Grinner hanging from his arm by its teeth, stabbing it again and again with a knife in his other hand until it let go.

Rael, who should have been in the Healers’ Hall, standing on the ninth mile with a borrowed sword in his good hand because the Gleaning’s section had nearly broken.

He would remember the numbers too.

The Eighth Watch lost two hundred men before the sun set.

The Fourth lost a hundred and thirty.

The Fifth, the Second, the Ninth. Another four hundred between them.

And the Roamers kept coming, harder and faster and more carelessly than they had ever come before, as though something was standing behind them with a whip.

As though they were being punished.

Encrid stood on the Fifth Bastion as the sun went down and watched them come.

His hands were shaking. He could not make them stop anymore.

He was thinking about the Elder.

It had been wounded. It had lost a tusk and an eye. It had screamed so loud that the whole Wall had heard it.

An animal that had been hurt like that would be angry.

He raised the glass and looked north, toward the place where the single tusk had been rising and falling that morning.

It was not rising and falling.

It was not moving at all.

The Elder was lying down again. Resting. Somewhere in the forest, miles away, sleeping off its wounds.

Encrid lowered the glass slowly.

The pressure was still there, pressing on the Wall from the north.

And it was not coming from the Elder.

✦ ✦ ✦