Chapter 1455: Spear With Split Shaft

I CAN COPY AND EVOLVE TALENTS

Chapter 1457: Spear With Split Shaft

The reply from the south arrived eleven days after the wall came down.

It came on the back of a single wagon, pulled by two tired horses and driven by a quartermaster’s clerk who looked at the ruined northern rampart the way a man looks at a house fire on the other side of the road. Behind him, under a sheet of oiled canvas, were four crates of spears, six sacks of flour, a barrel of lamp oil and a sealed letter.

That was all.

Northern was on the rubble slope with his squad when the wagon rolled in. They had spent the morning hauling broken stone off the breach by hand, because the stonemasons the Keep had asked for had not come either. From the top of the slope, with a block of grey granite braced against his hip, he watched two soldiers pry the lid off the first crate and lift out a spear.

The shaft had already split along the grain, a long pale crack running from the socket halfway to the butt.

The soldier turned it over in his hands. Then he reached into the crate and lifted out another one.

It was the same.

Beside Northern, Baletta had gone very still. She did not look at the crate. She looked at him, and he could see her remembering the exact words he had used on the training ground, eleven days and a lifetime ago. A wagon of spears with the shafts already splitting at the grain.

’I didn’t think they’d be that literal about it...’

"Captain," Baletta said quietly. "How did you know?"

Northern shrugged and bent to pick up another stone.

"Lucky guess."

Down in the yard, Commander Vanessa broke the seal on the letter.

She read it standing next to the wagon, with the pot pipe between her teeth and her vermilion hair tied back off her face, and nobody in the yard went back to work while she did it. It was a short letter, and it did not take her long. When she was done, she folded it in half very neatly, then in half again, and then she held it in her closed fist until smoke began to curl out from between her fingers. The smell of scorched paper drifted up the rubble slope.

When she opened her hand, there was nothing left in it but ash.

She did not say anything about it until the evening meal.

The mess hall of the Castle Keep was a long, low room of black timber, crowded with trestle tables and loud with the scrape of spoons on tin bowls, as five hundred soldiers ate as though they would not get another chance. Vanessa did not climb onto a table or call for silence. She simply stood up at the head of the room, and the noise died by itself, table by table, from the front to the back.

"The Empire thanks us for our service," she said.

Someone at the back laughed. Nobody joined in.

"There will be no reinforcements this season. The masons are needed in the east. The healers are needed in the east. The Imperial treasury is paying for a war in the east, and it regrets that it cannot also pay for ours." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "And the North Guards are to send two hundred soldiers south by the end of the month to join the Eastern campaign."

For a moment, the room did not seem to understand her.

Then it did, and the noise came back in a very different shape.

Northern sat at the end of the Eleventh Squad’s table and ate his bread and listened to it. Soldiers were on their feet all down the hall. Somebody had thrown a cup, and it was still rolling somewhere under the benches. The mountain of a captain in the earthen plates, still one-armed with his side bandaged, was shouting at the ceiling as though the Emperor might be hiding up in the rafters.

"Two hundred?" Han had stopped chewing. "We lost a hundred and six. The wall’s a ramp. And they want two hundred more?"

"The east is where the glory is," Doron said, without looking up from his plate. "Nobody ever became a general holding a wall."

Tema frowned at him.

"But the Hunters are here, though."

Doron did not answer her. Nobody did.

Northern finished his bread.

’Good. Let them be angry. Angry is useful.’

He did not say it aloud. He had said enough on his first morning here, and he had learned a long time ago that when the truth was already standing up in a room shouting, it did not need a man to introduce it.

The next morning, he started training them properly.

He took the Eleventh Squad out past the second ground to a stretch of cleared earth near the foot of the western wall, where the only people who could see them were the sentries on the ramparts. There, he set them against each other, and then against him. It was not complicated. He stood in the middle of the ground with Lightning Rod humming quietly in his hands, throttled down so low it barely stung, and told them to try and reach him.

They could not.

They tried for three days. On the first day, none of them came within ten paces. On the second day, Baletta worked out on her own that if she set off two small explosions instead of one large one, a breath apart, the second caught whatever had dodged the first, and she knocked Northern’s feet out from under him for the first time. She was so shocked by it that she stood there with her mouth open while he got back up and put her on her back.

On the third day, Han picked up the head of one of the split spears, took on the property of iron up to the elbows, and walked straight through the lightning with his teeth gritted and his hair standing on end.

He did not reach Northern. But it was close.

"Again," Northern said.

Han groaned from the ground.

"Captain, my ears are ringing."

"Then they’re working. Again."

Tema he trained differently. She could not fight to save her life, and she knew it. Even so, on the second evening he took her up onto the western rampart at dusk and pointed out at the treeline, where the birds were settling for the night in their thousands, turning the tops of the pines black.

"You told me the birds screamed before the wall came down."

Tema nodded.

"They were all saying run."

"So the birds knew before we did." He leaned his elbows on the cold stone. "How far can you hear them?"

She thought about it, and then thought about it some more, and then admitted she had never tried.

By the end of the week, she could hear a crow two miles into the forest complaining about the weather. By the end of the second week, she had made friends with most of them, and the birds of the northern forest had begun, without anyone in the Empire being asked for permission, to report to a girl on the western wall every time something tall and blue moved beneath the trees.

Nobody else on the Keep had thought to ask them.

The other squads noticed, of course. It would have been hard not to. Soldiers came down to the western ground in ones and twos to watch the Eleventh train, pretending to be passing, and then stayed. Some of them laughed when Jalsket, whose hair had finally gone back to green four days after the battle, turned it red on command and nearly fainted with pride. Most of them did not laugh at anything. They only stood at the edge of the churned earth with their arms folded and watched a squad of Drifters that nobody had wanted getting quicker, and harder, and more stubborn every day, under a black-haired boy who did not seem to care who was watching.

On the fifteenth day of training, Peaker came down to the western ground with a sheet of paper in his hand.

Northern knew what it was before he read it, because the tall, gaunt assistant captain was walking the way men walked to a funeral.

"The list," Peaker said. "For the south. Command drew the names."

Northern took it from him and ran his eyes down the columns. Two hundred names, squad by squad, in a clerk’s neat brown ink. The Fifth had lost eleven. The Second had lost nine.

The Eleventh had lost two.

Baletta Fransca. Han Thessa.

Northern looked at the names for a long moment. Across the ground, Han was lying flat on his back in the dirt with his arms spread wide, complaining to the sky about his ears, and Baletta was standing over him, laughing at him properly for the first time since Northern had met her.

He folded the list in half.

"No," he said.