Chapter 55: A needle in a snowfield
The main reason Encrid had chosen to come to the Wall was simple.
He wanted to find the Mercenary King.
When he had stood before the Duke and said that he would take the Wall, he had no idea how he was actually going to accomplish it.
At the time, it had been nothing more than a declaration.
But during the journey north, he had come up with a plan.
A simple one.
Use Appraisal.
There were thousands of people at the Wall. If the Mercenary King was there, Encrid believed he could find him by appraising everyone he came across.
It was not a perfect plan.
But it was the only one he had.
Or at least, he had thought so.
But by the end of the sixth week, Encrid had discovered the massive flaw in it.
There were simply too many people.
At his absolute best, he could Appraise around three hundred new faces in a day.
But doing that meant spending the entire day finding excuses to stand around mess lines, training grounds, and muster yards.
Every day he spent doing that was a day stolen from the ledger work that justified his position here.
And from the training that might one day keep him alive.
What’s more, there were eleven thousand people on the Wall and two hundred kilometers of territory he couldn’t freely travel.
The soldiers also rotated between postings faster than he could keep track of them.
That was assuming Rael was even stationed on the Wall itself.
The territory around it was much larger than the fortress.
There were supply villages.
Span crews.
Trapper camps.
Far-Watch patrols that disappeared into the forest for weeks at a time.
’A needle in a snowfield,’ Jin thought, rubbing his eyes.
’And the snow keeps falling.’
He had tried being clever.
He pulled the personnel ledgers, something only four people on the Wall were authorized to do, and searched for the name.
There were two Raels.
One was a sixty-year-old lamplighter.
The other was a cooper’s apprentice whose panel was so thoroughly Common that Jin almost felt sorry for it.
Neither was the person he was looking for.
He tried another approach.
He asked watch officers during requisition business about strong men.
Promising men.
Men that other soldiers naturally followed.
That gave him a dozen names.
Every one of them turned out to be nothing.
Because sergeants recommended the men who made their lives easier.
And a king waiting was never convenient.
One night, Encrid even considered starting a small crisis just to see who naturally rose to deal with it.
He quickly abandoned the idea.
Causing a disaster at the most important fortress in the world just to conduct a job interview was the sort of plan the system ought to have created a quest against.
The candle flickered.
Across the room, Gus had fallen asleep over his letters, his cheek resting on the practice slate.
Encrid stood, took off his coat, and placed it over the boy.
Then he remained standing in the cold darkness, thinking about the one option he had been avoiding.
There was an organization built for exactly this kind of problem.
An organization that dealt in information.
It had ears in almost every tavern between the capital and the Wall.
It traded in names, locations, and secrets the same way merchants traded grain.
And seven different times across fifteen volumes, it had been the novel’s answer to one particular question:
’How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?’
The Blue Moon.
An organization built from the bottom of the world.
Beggars, inn workers, prostitutes, caravan drivers, servants, stable hands, street vendors, and countless others whose existence most powerful people barely noticed.
They were people who heard things.
People who saw things.
People who were ignored.
The Blue Moon had turned that invisibility into its greatest weapon.
It had ears in taverns, inns, markets, caravans, and roadside camps across the Empire.
They didn’t need soldiers to gather information.
They simply needed people no one thought worth watching.
Encrid had known since leaving the Dukehold that this moment would eventually come.
He had simply been putting it off.
The Blue Moon didn’t take money from strangers.
They accepted work from people who were known, vouched for, and properly checked.
Everyone else was turned away.
Or worse.
Unknown men who walked into a Blue Moon establishment and started reciting recognition codes had a habit of becoming lessons for everyone else.
Those codes were practically a death sentence in the wrong mouth.
And by every measure the Blue Moon could use, Encrid’s mouth was the wrong one.
A Duke’s son.
Two hundred miles from home.
With no introduction.
And somehow carrying knowledge of a phrase he should never have known existed.
But Encrid had exactly one thing the Blue Moon wanted more than his silence or his money.
Information.
Information that even the Blue Moon had been unable to obtain.
Something they would give almost anything to have.
’But it’s dangerous.’
It wasn’t simply dangerous.
It was like walking into a tiger’s den.
There was a good chance the Blue Moon already knew most of what Encrid had done on his journey to the Wall and what he had been doing since arriving.
If he exposed the fact that he was searching for someone, they might find him first.
And once they did, they could try to squeeze every piece of information out of Encrid, using Rael as a bait.
Worse, they could sell what they learned to people who wanted him dead.
His own siblings, for example.
They could even decide that killing him was easier than letting him walk away with knowledge he was never supposed to have.
All things considered, it was an extremely risky move.
But Encrid was running out of time.
He had already spent a month and a half searching for Rael.
He couldn’t afford to waste another month in vain.
He had to make a decision.
After a long moment, Encrid finally resolved himself.
He reached for another coat-the one he had recently bought specifically to fight the northern cold.
He put it on, opened the door, and stepped outside.
✦ ✦ ✦