Chapter 58: Something very, very wrong!
"Stand down," the woman said.
The blades left Encrid’s skin as quickly as they had appeared.
The woman pressed both hands against the table and took a slow breath. When she looked up again, her expression had returned to its usual calm.
But something had changed.
There was a crack in that calm now.
And hope was showing through it.
"I was the Master’s first disciple," she said quietly. "I have held that girl in these hands, watched her grow and suffer. There are probably only five people alive who know what you just told me."
She paused.
"And I know where every one of them is tonight."
Her eyes narrowed.
"I don’t know what you are, Encrid Gannon. But I will send word to the Leader before morning."
"Then we understand each other."
Encrid stood.
His legs wanted to shake, but he refused to let them. He straightened his coat and made his way toward the stairs.
He stopped at the first step and looked back.
"The man I’m looking for is called Rael. He’s in his mid-twenties, northern. He is somewhere within these walls. He would know the moment you see him, he must have a lot of scars on his body by now."
The woman said nothing even though her expression changed a bit when he said, ’by now.’
"And, Madam."
Encrid’s gaze hardened.
"When your Leader comes, and he will come himself, tell him to come and talk."
He paused.
"Not to test me."
A faint smile appeared on his lips.
"I bruise easily. And the cure is in my head."
He turned and climbed the stairs, the door had been opened in the middle of their conversation at some point.
The moment he stepped back into the tavern, the noise and warmth of the Shambles swallowed him again.
Encrid returned to the counter, picked up his unfinished wine, and drank it.
He paid the keeper and walked out into the falling snow.
He did not look back.
Only when the door of the Third Office was bolted shut behind him did Encrid finally allow himself to stop.
His legs gave out.
He slid down against the door and sat on the cold floor, breathing heavily.
For several seconds, he simply stared into the darkness.
"Never again," he whispered.
The system responded immediately.
[ Narrative Relevance: 1.25% → 1.41% ]
Encrid stared at the notification for a moment.
Then he closed the panel.
"Never again," he repeated.
Somewhere in his mind, he already knew he was probably going to do something similar.
✧ ✧ ✧
Ansel Corr had walked beyond the stakes four hundred and eleven times.
He knew the exact number because he had written down each and every patrol.
He was thirty-eight years old, which was ancient by Far-Watch standards. Nineteen years spent beyond the Wall had made him older than most men expected to become.
Most lasted four or five years in the Far-Watch.
After that, they either died or requested a transfer back to the Wall, where at least anything trying to kill them had to climb over the massive fortification first.
Corr had never asked for a transfer.
He had never even accepted a promotion.
Three different watch commanders had offered him better terms over the years, but he had refused every time, giving the same reason.
An officer had to sit in rooms.
And Corr belonged outside.
He also had one saying - that he would repeat over and over to all the young ones who joined the far watch.
It wasn’t a particularly good one, and the Far-Watch had made jokes about it for years before eventually stopping.
"You don’t survive the forest by seeing more. You survive by noticing what has changed."
Corr noticed everything.
His own steps, like every trained scout.
The birds.
The deer droppings.
The number of trees along a hundred-yard stretch that had their bark stripped at chest height.
How long it took a leaf to travel from one stone to another in a stream.
None of those things meant much on their own.
That was the point he could never make the young scouts understand.
Noticing wasn’t the trick.
The trick was knowing when something had changed.
Knowing by how much.
And, if he was lucky, knowing how long ago the change had begun.
That habit had saved his entire patrol more times than he could remember.
Today, he stepped beyond the Wall for the four hundred and twelfth time.
The Eleventh Far-Watch party had left through the northern sally of the Seventh Bastion during the second week of winter.
They had been provisioned for twenty-eight days.
The party consisted of five of them.
Dorn was forty-one. He had served alongside Corr for six years and had never once said anything that didn’t need saying.
Sena was the best climber in the Far-Watch. She had come north because of a debt nobody had ever bothered asking about.
Brey was reliable.
And Wick was nineteen. It was only his fourth patrol.
He was also desperately good, which was the reason why he was in Corr’s party in the first place.
By the sixteenth day, they were eleven days deeper into the forest than their original route required and roughly forty miles beyond the point where their orders told them to turn back.
Corr had made that decision on the ninth day.
He had made it because he had noticed something deeply wrong.
"Corr, I think we should turn back."
Dorn, who had never spoken anything to oppose Corr in so many of their expeditions, spoke up for the very first time.
But Corr was not ready to listen to him - he didn’t even turn to consider his request because right now, he was noticing something very, very wrong.
For the first time in nineteen years of walking the Great Green Forest, the forest was empty.
There were no birds.
No deer.
No roamers.
No distant calls from the undergrowth.
No movement between the trees.
Nothing.
Corr had spent nineteen years learning what the forest sounded like.
This was the first time it had sounded like nothing at all.
And that frightened him more than any monster ever had.
✦ ✦ ✦