Chapter 70: What Vess Found
Steward Vess found something very interesting on a Tuesday while looking for something else.
Afterwards, he could never decide whether that had been luck or the other thing.
He was looking for the eastern cistern survey. A guild dispute had broken out over water rights along the Span road, and Vess wanted the original measurements rather than the summary. The raw depths had been taken in Encrid’s own hand and were somewhere in the Third Office.
So Vess went through the drawers.
He had every right to.
It was his office. His name was on the door, on the accounts, and, if anything ever went badly enough, probably his head on the rope.
The folder was not locked - that was the first thing.
The second was the heading.
It was written in Encrid’s neat handwriting on the front page.
A Plan to Prevent the Fall of the Wall
Vess stopped.
’Oh...!’ He sat down with the book, his interest piqued.
He meant to read the first page.
But he was still reading when the ninth-hour bell rang.
He was still reading when the second-hour bell followed it in the afternoon.
Vess had been Steward of the Third Office for eleven years.
Before that, he had spent nine years as a clerk there. Before that, he had worked at the Mouth. Before that, he had been a boy in a counting house in a southern town.
He was not a soldier.
He had held a spear maybe twice, both times during drills, and both times so badly that he had decided that a pen would suit his hands better.
What he was, was a man who understood that eleven thousand people ate every day.
And that the arrangements which made those eleven thousand meals possible were held together by paper, numbers, signatures, and people who noticed when the numbers stopped making sense.
Vess had seen a great many documents in his life.
But he had never seen anything like this.
The first pages were familiar territory.
Grain, oil, timber, arrows, bandages, charcoal, salt, water, manpower.
Every resource the Wall possessed had been measured, cross-referenced, and projected against different situations.
The ordinary year.
A difficult year.
And then-
If the Wall is attacked at full scale.
Vess read that section multiple times.
The document was written on an assumption that the Wall might fall.
And then asked a simple question.
What would have to happen for that to occur?
The pages that followed were not predictions.
They were problems.
If the eastern granaries were destroyed, how long could the remaining stores feed the garrison?
If the Span was blocked, how much food could be moved through the secondary roads?
How many wounded could the infirmaries actually handle before beds became the limiting factor?
Which watch would run out of arrows first?
Which section of the Wall had too few men to hold its assigned length?
How quickly could civilians be moved behind the inner fortifications?
Which roads would become useless if the forest advanced?
Which sally ports could evacuate the most people?
Which ones would become death traps?
And, most importantly at the end of every questions-
What could be changed now so that none of those things happened later?
Vess turned another page.
There were solutions beside almost every problem.
Move the reserve stores.
Repair the ninth-mile culvert.
Increase the grain reserve.
Train additional signalmen.
Create emergency evacuation routes.
Reassign manpower.
Map every usable water source.
Stockpile timber before winter.
Build a secondary command post.
Establish a system for communicating between watches if the main towers were lost.
None of it was grand.
There were no speeches or heroic formations.
No fantasy of a single warrior standing atop the Wall and killing whatever came from the forest.
It was simply one problem after another.
And beside each problem was a cost.
Vess slowly leaned back.
’This boy isn’t preparing for the Wall to fall.’
He looked at the heading again.
’He’s trying to make sure it doesn’t.’
That was when the document began to frighten him.
Because Encrid had not merely asked how the Wall could survive.
He had asked why it might fail.
And then he had gone looking for every weakness he could find.
The farther Vess read, the more unsettling it became.
There was even a section titled:
Failure Points That Cannot Be Repaired Quickly
Under it were several locations along the two hundred kilometres of fortification.
The ninth-mile culvert.
The eastern drainage galleries.
Three old stairways.
Two supply roads.
A section of outer wall where the foundations had shifted.
And beside each one, Encrid had written what could be done.
Vess put the pages down.
For the first time that night, he understood what he was holding.
This was not a report.
It was not a prediction.
It was not even a contingency plan.
It was an attempt to understand the entire Wall as a single living thing.
And Encrid was trying to find out where it could be wounded before anyone had the chance to strike it.
Vess did not sleep that night.
He did not sleep properly for the next four either.
During those days, he worked out precisely what he was holding.
It was, first, the most useful document ever produced in the Third Office.
Possibly on the entire Wall.
It was also dangerous.
Not because it predicted defeat.
Because anyone reading it without understanding Encrid’s intent could easily interpret it as a document preparing for the loss of the fortress.
And there was a difference between saying:
The Wall will fall.
and saying:
If the Wall falls, this is what will happen, and therefore these are the things we must change before that day comes.
Vess understood that difference.
A magistrate in the capital or a noble who has never experienced the harshness of the Wall might not.
He considered burning it.
He even carried the folder to the brazier on the third night.
Then he stopped.
One page had caught his attention.
The ninth-mile culvert.
There were two sentences Encrid had written below it.
|| The structure was old. The foundations had been weakened by the drainage galleries beneath it. Under sustained rain, it would likely fail. ||
And the next sentence.
|| Repair requires four days of labour and eleven silver. No available labour currently assigned. Recommend reassignment from winter road maintenance. Cost negligible compared to evacuation delay.||
Vess stared at the sentence.
Four days and eleven silver.
That was all.
It was a problem that could be solved now.
Before anyone died.
He looked at the folder in his hands.
Then at the brazier.
Slowly, Vess lowered the papers.
"No," he muttered.
He tucked the folder beneath his coat and walked out, heading toward the one man who had the authority to turn the solutions on those pages into action.
✦ ✦ ✦