Chapter 169: Beacon in the Dark

At the edge of the Gift, west of Grey Creek Fort, the Howling Mountain Pass lay under heavy darkness and a silence with something wrong in it. Late spring had not driven the cold out of these mountains, and at this hour the wind came through the pass like a hundred invisible knives, scraping bare rock and the stunted dead trees. On the slopes to either side, the watchtowers of the Battanian outpost stood like silent giants, their hooded lanterns swaying, throwing small vigilant rings of light.

Old Hake crouched behind a wind-broken boulder in a heavy fur coat that mixed free folk cut with Battanian issue, forced down the last of a cold rye crust, and worked his numbed fingers on the hilt of his hunting knife. He was one of Grey Creek’s best trackers, which was why Torren had posted him to this pass, and for days now the word coming up from Moat Cailin and farther south had put everyone’s teeth on edge; the order had gone out to double the night watch on every outer post. “Colder than a wolf’s belly, this weather,” he muttered, breathing into his palms, ears open past the wind. Wind, and far-off wolves, and nothing else. And the string in his chest wound tighter anyway. A lifetime of hunting had left him something close to an animal’s instinct, and it was telling him that something was crawling quietly under all this dark.

He was easing his frozen legs when he heard it: a faint dry rustle from the scree slope on the pass’s eastern side, like leaves over stone, too light and too regular for wind or beast. Every muscle went still. He sank down and stared.

By starlight and the far watchtower’s spill, he saw them. Figures, and not one or two. They came up out of the rubble and shadow like ghosts, fast and coordinated, speaking with their hands, in dark grey cloaks that ate the night, and under the cloaks the dull gleam of good leather armor. Short spears, hand axes, curved blades; hunting bows across their backs. Ten. Twenty. Thirty, and still pouring from the eastern side of the pass, moving with purpose toward the far end and the road that ran to Grey Creek’s heartland.

Not free folk. Not bandits. Old Hake’s stomach dropped. The free folk had no such gear and no such discipline, and no bandit band on earth mounted a night operation of that size at that hour on that ground. This was soldiers, mountain-trained and night-trained, and their object was Grey Creek Fort, or at the least the cutting of its western artery. The Vale. Petyr, whose patience had finally run out; who had not waited for his full preparations, or who had been handed some signal or some opening, and had chosen to move early, while New Soil was still soft.

Hake did not hesitate. From inside his coat he drew the fist-sized horn wrapped in oiled cloth, the Battanian sentry horn, low-voiced and long-carrying, filled his lungs, and blew the emergency rhythm: three short, two long. Enemy. In force. East side of the pass.

The desolate note tore the silence open and came back off the mountains in echoes. Almost on top of it an angry whistle went up among the grey shapes, and arrows shrieked in and struck his boulder, thud, thud, thud, sparking off the rock; but he had already rolled clear and was behind another stone with his undershirt soaked cold.

“We’re seen! Assault! Take the pass, straight through to Grey Creek!” a low furious voice roared in a Vale accent.

They stopped hiding. The grey line came at the western outpost like a broken dam, arrows going before them in sheets across the watchtower and the makeshift works, while several dozen split off to climb the side slopes and get behind. The tower’s sentries were quick: the alarm bell was ringing before the first arrow landed, its dull tolling braided into the horn, and the men inside shuttered the loopholes with shields and answered with crossbow bolts and stones. Behind the timber wall the outpost’s defenders took their places: the picked men of Grey Creek’s militia, short on great battles and long on drill, forming their line under their officers’ shouting and throwing hunting arrows and javelins into the charge.

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The fight came apart into blood and noise in minutes. The Vale men were prepared, well-armed, and clear in their tactics, trying to open the gap fast on surprise and numbers; the Battanians were few and fought from ground they had prepared and would not leave. Arrows whistled; steel rang; the valley filled with screaming.

Old Hake moved among the rocks the way he had hunted all his life, putting cold arrows into the dark from the shadows, one man at a time, slowing them. The warning was away; Grey Creek and the settlements would have heard it. What was left was to hold, and to cost them minutes.

“Hold! For Grey Creek! For New Soil!” The outpost commander, a scarred Battanian veteran, bellowed it across the line, and the line held on it.

But the numbers began to tell. More squads fed in from the eastern side; and though the flankers on the slopes died in heaps under rolled logs, stones, and arrows, a party of some twenty crested the steep ridge and came down behind the outpost, and the defense was suddenly caught between two fires. The line bowed. Blood froze on the timber and on the ground.

And then, from the west, out of the dark toward Grey Creek: drums. Heavy, penetrating, felt in the ground before heard, and closing fast. And after the drums, the sound of feet in unison like distant thunder, and under that a low, rising war-song older than any kingdom.

“Ha — boom —!”

“Hum — long —!”

“In the name of the mountain and the forest —!”

The Battanian war-song. Reinforcement.

A deep green wave came out of the darkness on the western side of the pass: the vanguard of the Bannermen Guard, quiet as a forest and firm as rock, the Oathsworn at the front behind great shields and long spears like a wall on the move, Fians and veteran skirmishers on both wings with arrows already nocked, and behind them the noble warriors and the free folk volunteers with axes and reaping blades and murder in their faces. At their head rode Torren Flint, who had come himself at the sound of the horn, on a tall northern warhorse, his axe leveled at the Vale.

“Men of Grey Creek! We are here!” And then, to his own: “Battania! For the oath! For our homes! Break them!”

The war cry went up like a roof coming off, and the song swelled behind it, and the Battanian line did not slow: it went straight into the flank and rear of the force besieging the outpost. The Vale commander had not priced this, not so fast and not this good; he split his men to meet it and the improvised line came apart at first contact under fresh, furious heavy infantry. Spears went through leather; axes went through helms; arrows came down like a harvest. And the outpost’s defenders, seeing it, roared out from behind their works and took the enemy from the other side.

It stopped being a battle. The Vale’s elite, their surprise spent, their formation broken, their enemy far better than their briefing had promised, left dozens on the ground and ran for the eastern side of the pass and the depths of the Gift.

“Pursue, but no man goes deep into the Gift! Hold the pass, clear the ground!” Torren hauled his horse around and shouted the red-eyed ones back. Night, unknown country, and the Gift’s own capacity for ambush made a long chase a gift to the enemy.

It was over inside the hour. The Howling Mountain Pass was Battanian again, and the smell of it, and the bodies across it, said what the night had cost: over twenty dead on their side, dozens hurt, the outpost nearly wrecked. Torren dismounted with a face like slate and went through the enemy dead himself, confirming what the equipment and the small personal things said: mockingbird badges, Vale ration bags, Vale steel.

“So it is the Vale. The snake has finally shown teeth.” His eyes were flat with killing. “A probe? Or the opening of the whole thing?”

“My lord! Wounded prisoners!” A soldier brought several forward.