Chapter 187: The Decision

For a long moment, no one on the Fifth Bastion said anything.

Then everyone did.

"Absolutely not."

"The Charter-"

"The Lord Commander would never-"

"Two hundred years-"

Encrid let them speak.

He had known this would happen. He had known it since the moment he asked Merta to take the evacuation order out of its locked drawer. He had known it would be the hardest argument of his life.

He waited until they had run out of breath.

It took a while.

"I’m going to give you the numbers," he said when it was finally quiet. "Only numbers. After that, you can decide whatever you want."

Danel looked at him with a face like stone.

"Go on."

Encrid took a folded sheet of paper out of his coat.

"There are just over eight thousand people left alive on the Wall," he said. "About four and a half thousand of them are soldiers who can still fight. The rest are civilians, healers, workers, the wounded, and children."

He turned the page.

"The Quartermastery has a hundred and forty wagons. Merta and Vess have counted them twice. The Healers’ Hall has two hundred and ten wounded who can be moved by wagon. There are more who cannot."

Nobody said anything.

"Harun’s riders came back from the southern road an hour before dawn. The Darwen Span is thirty miles from the Mouth. The road is good. There is one narrow place, at the ford below Harlow’s Hill, where wagons will have to cross one at a time."

He looked up.

"If we start now, it will take fourteen hours to move nine thousand people out through the Mouth. It will take them a day and a half to reach the Span."

"And the Elder reaches the Wall in four," Ostrand said quietly.

"In four," Encrid agreed

"Then we’ll just have to hold," Danel said. "We hold it back from the stone."

"With what?"

"With everything we have."

"Everything we have didn’t stop it when the Lord Commander walked up to it with a sword," Encrid said. "The Lord Commander was stronger than everything we have."

Danel’s face went red.

"Then we die holding it."

"Yes," Encrid said. "We could."

He did not raise his voice.

"We could stand on this stone and die holding it. All four and a half thousand of us. And the Elder would reach the Wall anyway. And when it breaks the stone, the horde would come through, and the rest of the people behind us who can’t fight would still be here."

He looked around the platform.

"Our dying would not save one of them."

Neriah Fold had closed her eyes. Tolm Bree was staring at the paper in Encrid’s hand. Dael’s knuckles were white on the hilt of his sword.

"The Charter of the Wall," Danel said, and his voice shook slightly, "says that the Wall is never abandoned. Never. Not in two hundred years has any Lord Commander-"

"The Lord Commander is dead."

The words came out harder than Encrid had meant.

He did not take them back.

"The Lord Commander walked into that forest," Encrid said, "and he cut off a tusk that no one else on this Wall could have cut. And when he was dying, he said, ’Tell them I bought a day. Tell them to use it.’"

He looked straight at Danel.

"You asked me two days ago what he meant us to use it for. I didn’t tell you then but let me tell you now."

Encrid took a breath.

"The night he left, he took me aside in the Far-Watch passage. He told me the Council would argue about the stone. About honor. About what the men would want. He told me that someone would need to remember what the stone is for."

The platform was completely silent.

"He said the Wall is for the people behind it. That’s all. He said the Wall is only stone."

Encrid paused.

"And he said, ’Don’t let them die for it if it can’t keep them alive.’"

No one spoke for a long time.

Encrid watched Danel’s face.

He watched the Vice-Commander hear the words. He watched him turn them over and try to find some way to disbelieve them.

He could not.

It was too much like Ulrich Vance. Everyone on the platform knew it. The plainness of it. The way it cut straight through everything else.

Halvic Ostrand was the first to speak.

"The numbers are right," he said. His voice was rough. "I’ve been counting too. We can’t hold the Wall."

Tolm Bree nodded slowly.

"The numbers are right," he said.

Serapha Lund closed her eyes.

Ysolde said nothing at all. She stood at the parapet with her back to them and looked north at the Elder, and her hands were gripping the stone so hard that small cracks had appeared under her fingers.

Encrid did not look at her.

He looked at the window that had appeared in the corner of his vision.

He had not called it. It had simply opened, the way it sometimes did.

[ THE WALL AND THE UNSEEN ]

[ Primary Objective: Prevent the fall of the Wall. ]

He looked at it for a long moment.

A year and a half. Every trench. Every Box. Every sheet sewn by four hundred people who had never been asked to sew for a war. Every letter. Every name in his ledger.

All of it, for one line of text.

Prevent the fall of the Wall.

The system wanted the Wall.

The system had wanted it from the beginning. It had never once asked him about the people.

Encrid closed the window.

He knew exactly what he was choosing.

The quest would most probably fail from the choice he was making but he chose anyway.

"Vice-Commander," he said. "I’m asking you to order the evacuation of the Wall."

Danel looked at him.

Then he looked at the Elder, walking across the killing ground.

Then he looked at the empty space beside him on the parapet, where Ulrich Vance should have been standing.

"The men will not go," he said quietly.

"Then tell them why."

Danel was silent for a long moment.

"I will," he said. "And may Lord Vessa forgive us all for breaking the oath to hold the Wall."

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