Chapter 83: Rael (1)
For the next few days, Encrid made a habit of lingering around the watchtowers near the ninth mile at dawn.
On the fourth morning, a rest day, he finally spotted the man from the top of the Wall, roughly six hundred paces away.
He had come up to the walk with a clerk’s satchel and his ledger, using the usual excuse of checking supplies against their records. He had been leaning against the outer parapet for perhaps a quarter of an hour when he noticed movement beyond the stakes.
There was a man in the killing ground.
Encrid straightened.
Nobody went out past the stakes on a rest day. In fact, nobody went out there at all except the Far-Watch and the salvage parties. Both went in numbers, and both were supposed to have the tower archers informed in advance.
There had been no word of a detail going out that morning.
Encrid pulled the glass from his satchel and raised it to his eyes.
The man was young and alone, standing roughly six hundred paces from the foot of the Wall. That put him two hundred paces beyond the outermost stake line.
He wasn’t in the killing ground at all.
He was in the strip of scrub between the killing ground and the treeline, where the Wall’s engines could not reach and the tower archers could not help him.
Encrid adjusted the glass.
The man looked to be around twenty five years old, perhaps a little older. He was lean rather than muscular, with a narrow frame that made him look almost underfed. His dark hair was uneven and fell loosely around his forehead, as if it had been cut with a knife rather than by a barber.
He wore a faded brown coat over a plain shirt, both stained with dirt and darkened from repeated use. Leather straps crossed his chest, holding a small pack against his back, while a large great sword hung at his back. Nothing about him suggested a soldier, and there was no insignia or uniform to mark him as a member of any Wall party.
His clothes were practical rather than protective, made for moving through the forest instead of standing behind a shield.
He wasn’t walking back toward the stakes.
He was walking north.
And there were Reevers coming out of the treeline toward him.
Encrid had read about Reevers in the Wall’s bestiary and had seen two dead ones on a salvage sledge, but this was the first time he had seen one alive.
In fact, they were the first Roamers he had encountered since coming to this world.
The Reevers were long-bodied and low to the ground, running with their heads down. Their forelimbs were longer than their hind legs, giving the entire animal a slanted appearance. Their coats were grey-black and looked wet even when they weren’t.
They were about the size of a large hound, but nearly twice as long. Their jaws extended much farther back into the skull than a dog’s, so when one opened its mouth, the entire front of its head seemed to split apart.
There were six of them.
From what he had read about them in the bestiary, each one was likely Level Two individually.
But there were six of them together. Any sane man would have turned and run for the safety of the stakes.
The man in the scrub did not.
He stopped walking.
Then he turned to face them.
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It took a little under two minutes.
Encrid watched all of it through the glass without moving.
The man did not fight them the way the Wall fought them, by holding a line and letting the creatures come to it.
He went at them.
The first Reever came in low and fast. He stepped inside it and drove a knee into the base of its skull as it passed. The creature went down and rolled, and when it tried to rise, it could not get its footing.
By then, the man was already moving toward the second.
The great sword that rested on his back did not come out until the third exchange.
What Encrid understood while watching was that the man was not simply trying to kill six Reevers.
He was trying to kill them in an order.
He had chosen that order before the first one reached him, and every movement afterward was about keeping the pack from surrounding him in the open.
He gave ground twice. Both times, he moved toward a fold in the dead ground where only two of the creatures could reach him at once.
There was gold along his arms.
Encrid noticed it during the fourth exchange and did not understand what he was seeing until the sixth. The light came and went, flaring along the man’s forearms and the length of his blade before disappearing again after two or three movements.
Then he had to bring it back.
The last two came at him together.
He took both.
One of them opened his left arm from the elbow to the wrist.
The man stood there in the scrub for a moment, breathing heavily, six dead Reevers scattered around him.
Then he crouched beside the nearest carcass, drove a knife into its chest, and began cutting.
He was harvesting the cores.
That was when Encrid understood the whole of it.
The realization came with a certain amount of anger at himself because the answer had been sitting in there for months, and he had walked past it every day.
’He is not a man of the Wall.’
That was why he had never been able to find him.
Encrid had appraised hundreds of people in mess lines, muster yards, stair heads, and work crews. Rael had been in none of them because he was rarely there at all.
He was outside.
He went into the Great Green before the regular details left. He returned after they came back. He slept in the Shambles when he slept anywhere at all, and there was no roster with his name on it because a man who was not employed by the Wall did not appear on its rosters.
’I have spent months searching the inside of a building for somebody who is standing outside it.’
Encrid watched the man cut the cores from all six carcasses along with any parts that could be sold. He wrapped them clumsily and walked back toward the stakes with his left arm hanging uselessly at his side.
Encrid did not put the glass down until the sally port closed behind him.
’Appraise.’
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