The first one came over the lip of the cliff about four seconds after the bell, and Corin, who had read about them in his father's correspondence for two years and had never once seen one, understood within the first of those seconds why none of the letters had ever managed to describe them properly. It was almost a man. That was the whole of the horror of it. It had the right number of limbs, more or less, and they were roughly where they ought to be, but they were too long in the wrong places and joined at angles that a body would have had to be broken to reach, and it came up over the rock on all of them at once. It was grey all over, the grey of a thing that has been a long time underwater, and the skin of it had the smoothness of sea glass, worn down past anything that could have been called a face. There was nothing in it. Corin had fought men and he had fought the thing at Beckwith, and both of them had wanted something, even if it was only to not be hurt. This did not want anything. It came over the edge and stood up and turned toward the nearest fire as though it had been told the fire was there, and walked at it.
Then there were six of them, and then twenty, all along the cliff edge where the marks had been, coming up out of the dark in their lines.
CAPT: SHIELDS TO THE EDGE. SPEARS BEHIND. HOLD THE FIRES.
The men did what they had been doing for two years, which was the thing Corin had come to see, and he saw it. They went to the edge in pairs without being sent, shield and spear, and the shields went down hard at the lip and the spears went out over them, and the first line of grey things went back off the cliff into the dark without a sound. Not one of them cried out falling. That was almost the worst part. He went to the gap nobody had filled yet, at the southern end of the parapet where the wall turned, and filled it.
He had thought, riding up, about how he would fight here if he had to. He had thought about it in the particular way he had once thought about everything, as a question of how it would look. He found, now that it had come, that he did not think about it at all. A thing came over the wall at him and he put the sword into the place where its leg met its body, the way he had at Beckwith, and twisted, and was gone before it had finished falling. Another came behind it. He whispered two words, and something between it and itself came apart, and it folded down onto the stones and lay there like dropped rope. He did not stand over it. He did not look at it. He turned to the next one, because there was a next one, and did the same, and the next, and it took him no time at all, and nothing about it was for anybody watching. Nobody was watching. Every man on the wall was looking at the edge in front of him. He found that he preferred it.
The fourth one he cut, he felt something he had not felt before. Severance went where it was sent. That was the whole of what it did. He reached for the thread that held a thing together and cut it, and the thread ended in the thing, and that was all. This one did not end. He cut it and felt the cut go on past the body, thin as a hair, out over the cliff and over the water and away into the dark, toward something that was holding the other end. The grey thing dropped. The thread stayed. He stood at the parapet with his sword out and the spray in his face and looked along it, out to sea, at nothing he could see.
COR: Talon.
Talon was not fighting, exactly. Corin had seen him do this once before, in the chamber under the hill, and had not properly understood it then. He was moving people. A man went down on one knee with his spear knocked from his hand, and Talon had him by the collar and back behind the shield wall before anybody else had seen him fall. A boy of nineteen froze at the lip with a grey thing coming up the rock directly under him, and Talon put him to one side with one hand and a shield into the gap with the other, and the shield took it, and the boy was three yards back and breathing before he knew he had moved. At one point a spear went spinning off the parapet out of a man's grip and over the edge into the dark, and the man beside him found he was holding two, and did not have time to wonder about it, and passed one across.
TLN: I know. I feel it too.
COR: It's not them.
TLN: No.
COR: They're being held.
TLN: Yes. Corin. Look at the fires.
He looked. The mist was coming up. It came up the cliff the way the grey things had, out of the water, but all at once and all along the edge, low and white and very cold. It rolled over the shield wall and the men behind it, and it came up against the iron basket at the cliff's edge and went over it, and the fire did not go out but went small and grey and far away, as though it were burning at the bottom of a well. Down the headland the other two fires went the same way. In thirty seconds the whole of Harlow's Reach was standing in a cloud with three grey smudges of light in it, and Corin could not see the end of his own sword. And the grey things stopped.
All of them, at once. The ones on the rock stopped where they clung, and the ones on the wall stopped mid-stride, and the one in front of Oswin at the cliff fire stopped with its long grey arm drawn back for a blow. Oswin, who was fifty and one-armed and not a fool, did not wait to find out why, and put his spear through it. It went down without having moved. Nothing else moved at all. Twenty-two men and two students stood in the white with their weapons up and listened, and heard the sea, and nothing else, and then they heard somebody come up the cliff path.
He walked. That was what Corin would remember afterwards, out of everything. Not the size of him or the iron on him, but that after a whole night of things that came up the rock on all fours in their lines, this one came up the path at low tide the way the captain had brought Corin down it that afternoon, on two feet, unhurried, like a man coming home late. The mist opened in front of him as he came and closed behind him. He had been a man, once. He was tall and had been broad, and the iron on him was old, so old that the salt had eaten it into lace at the edges and barnacles had taken the shoulders, and the skin of his face was the white of something drowned and left to dry. But the eyes were not grey. They were brown and wet and entirely alive, and they moved along the wall from man to man, counting.
The other came up behind him and a little to one side, in the place a sergeant walks. This one had never been a man. He was monsterkind, heavy and low and broad across the back, and the scales on him had been dark green once and were the colour of old bronze now, flaking at the edges. There were gill slits along both sides of his thick neck that had dried and closed and gone grey. He had a short iron rod in one fist, and he was looking at the wall with the expression of somebody pricing it.
The first one stopped at the head of the path, inside the white, a little way from the cliff fire. He looked at the grey thing Oswin had killed, lying at his feet, and then at Oswin.
VEY: That one was standing still.
OSW: Aye. So were you, a minute ago.
The drowned man looked at him for a moment longer. Then he laughed, short and dry and almost pleasant, which was considerably worse than if he had not.
VEY: Good. I was told the line here had teeth. My name is Vey. I command the Twenty-Seventh Ruination Battalion of the Ruined King, whom your stories call a god, and these, the things you have been killing all night with such enthusiasm, are the Twenty-Seventh. This is Raske, who is my sergeant and has opinions about your wall.
RSK: It's old.
VEY: He thinks it's old.
CAPT: It's held longer than you've been dead.
RSK: Against them.
The sergeant put out one hand, not hurrying, and laid his palm flat on the nearest stone of the parapet, a block the size of a man's chest. There was a small hard sound, like a spark struck off flint, and a flash under his hand no bigger than a candle. The block left the wall. It did not fall. It went, straight out from under his palm along the line of the parapet as if it had been fired, and went through the shield at the end of the line and the man behind the shield, and took both of them off their feet and five yards along the walkway, and stopped. The man got up. He was alive. Corin heard himself breathe out.
RSK: Old.
VEY: You'll want to know why we've come up the cliff when we have always come down the road, and why the fires have stopped working, and why tonight and not some other night. The answers are that I was sent, and that I am not afraid of fire, and that the rest is not mine to tell you. Your captain can guess. He has been guessing since the marks.
He looked along the wall again. The brown eyes stopped on Corin, and stayed.
VEY: And I'll tell you the rest, since you'll none of you be alive to repeat it. I am nothing. You understand? The Twenty-Seventh is nothing. There are twenty-six before us and a great many after, and above all of us there are the Fingers, and a Finger of the King would not have troubled to climb this cliff. It would have stood on the water and taken the tower off the headland with one hand. I am what he sends to a wall that does not matter. Which of you is the one they all keep looking at?
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. Corin had not noticed, until the drowned man said it, that every time a man on the wall had needed to decide something tonight, he had looked to the southern end of the parapet first. He had not noticed being looked to. He had not noticed it at all. He stepped forward.
COR: I am.
VEY: Name.
COR: Corin Ashby. My father holds this line.
VEY: Your father sits in a chair. I know who holds this line. Raske.
RSK: Commander.
VEY: The rest of them. Leave the boy to me.
The sergeant went past him into the white at a walk, toward the shield wall and the men behind it, and Corin turned to go after him and found that somebody was already there. Talon was standing in the sergeant's path, between him and the men he had spent the whole night moving out of the way, with a borrowed spear in one hand and no expression on his face whatsoever.
RSK: Move.
TLN: No.
RSK: I wasn't asking.
TLN: I know. My mother says that. It works better when she does.
The mist closed between them. Corin heard a sound like a spark struck off flint, and then a great deal of stone moving at once, and then he could not hear Talon at all, and Vey was in front of him. Then he was not. Corin turned, and turned again, and reached for him with everything he had, and found that he could not cut what he could not see, and that in all this white he could not see anything at all.