Chapter 189: The Rearguard [BONUS]

The decision had been made. Now it had to be carried out.

And the first problem was simple.

Someone had to stay behind.

Encrid stood at the map table on the Fifth Bastion with Danel, Ostrand, Gareth, and Merta, and he laid it out as plainly as he could.

"Fourteen hours to move everyone out through the Mouth," he said. "Four hours until the Elder reaches the stone."

He put his finger on the map, on the stretch of the Wall between the Fifth Bastion and the sealed Center Gate.

"When it breaks through, the horde comes with it. If nothing stands in the way, the horde reaches the Mouth an hour later. And the Mouth is a sixty-pace tunnel with the tail end of our column still walking through it."

Nobody needed him to explain what would happen after that.

"So someone needs to hold the Wall," Ostrand said.

"Yes, someone has to, for ten hours. Long enough for the last wagon to be through the Mouth and on the southern road."

"And after ten hours?"

Encrid did not answer.

Ostrand nodded slowly. He did not need an answer either.

"How many are needed at minimum?" Danel asked.

Encrid had done the arithmetic three times. It came out the same every time.

"Enough to hold the parapets along the central stretch. Enough to slow the horde at the breach. At least two hundred. Better with three."

"Two hundred men who will not be coming back from this Wall," Danel said quietly.

"Yes."

For a long moment, no one said anything.

Then Danel straightened.

"Then we ask for volunteers," he said. "I won’t order anyone to stay."

✧ ✧ ✧

The volunteers came quickly.

That was the part Encrid had not expected.

The old sergeant from the sixth mile was first. He climbed up to the Fifth Bastion, took off his helmet, and said, "I told you I’d die here. I’d like to do it on my own terms."

Dael came next.

"The First Watch holds Commander Dane’s gate until the end," he said. "Forty of us. We’ve already decided."

Then men from the Fourth Watch. Men from the Eighth, who had watched the Talljacks come over the parapet an hour ago and still wanted to stay. A handful from the Gleaning, whom Rael sent back down the stairs with a single look.

By the end of the first hour, there were almost a hundred and fifty.

It was not enough.

And Encrid did not want it to be.

Because every one of them was a soldier. And the column that was about to walk thirty miles south with eight thousand people in it, while defending their rear, needed every soldier it could get.

Sir Gareth had understood that too. When the old sergeant came up the stairs, Gareth had stepped forward and offered two hundred of his own men-at-arms for the rearguard.

Encrid had refused.

"Your Legion is the only fresh force we have," he had said. "If the wall doesn’t hold and the roamers are on our backs, your men are the ones who meet it. Not the rearguard."

Gareth had not argued. But he had not looked happy about it either.

Encrid was standing at the map table trying to work out how to explain that, when the Head of the Lampwrights came up the stairs.

Iolan Vire did not look any different than he always did.

The same thin face. The same leather apron. The same quiet, unhurried walk. He came across the platform and stopped in front of the map table, and he looked down at the map for a moment before he spoke.

"The Lampwrights will stay," he said.

Danel looked up.

"Master Vire?"

"All of us." Vire’s voice was calm. "Two hundred and twelve. Every Lampwright on the Wall. We will hold the central stretch. You can take your soldiers with the column."

There was a short, stunned silence.

"With respect, Master Vire," Danel said carefully, "your people light lamps."

"Yes."

"They’re not soldiers."

"No," Vire agreed. "We are not soldiers."

He looked up from the map. His eyes found Encrid.

"And we have never been only lamplighters, either."

✧ ✧ ✧

Encrid opened Appraisal.

He did it without thinking, the way he had done it to every face at the Council table the day before. He had appraised Iolan Vire only once, months ago, in the Council chamber. The window had shown him nothing interesting. An old man with no Star and no realm.

It showed him the same thing now.

[ Name: Iolan Vire ]

[ Age: 71 ]

[ Realm: None ]

[ Star Level: None ]

[ Condition: Bound. ]

Encrid stared at the last line.

Seventy-one.

Vire did not look seventy-one. He did not look fifty. He had the smooth, strange face of a man whose age no one could guess, and Encrid had assumed, when he first saw it, that Vire was simply one of those men.

And bound.

Bound to what?

Vire was watching him. Encrid had the uncomfortable feeling that Vire knew exactly what he had just done.

"The Strategist asked me a question once," Vire said. "In the Council chamber. Or rather, I asked him one. Whether he was the kind of man who asked what was underneath a thing that works."

"I remember," Encrid said.

"Are you?"

Encrid thought about the blue lamps. Four hundred of them, burning along the whole length of the Wall, night after night. Burning nowhere else in the Empire. No one on the Wall had ever been able to tell him why. The Quartermastery did not pay for them. The Lampwrights did not ask for anything.

They simply burned.

"Yes," Encrid said. "I am."

Vire nodded slowly.

"Then come with me to the Hall," he said. "There isn’t much time. But there’s enough for you to hear it."

He turned toward the stairs.

Then he stopped and looked back at Danel.

"Take your soldiers south, Vice-Commander," he said. "The Wall has one more thing it can do. It was always going to be us who did it."

✦ ✦ ✦

Bonus Chapter for previous week gifts~ Thank you @Nagii344 & @Nievena