“But that’s the thing,” Wren said, cutting her off. She took a quick sip of alka and gasped as it lit a fiery track down her throat. She coughed, but the words still came out as little more than a croak. “I don’t want to be safe.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to be a valkyr—failed trial or not. I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I want to make the most of it while I am.”
Something flickered in Odile’s gaze, and it looked almost like approval. “Indeed. And so we shall. Come, let’s give you a tour.”
“Of the fort?”
Odile turned in the doorframe and smiled. She shook her head. “The world beyond.”
* * *
They armored up, Wren digging her bones from her bags in the adjoining room and Odile stepping into a side chamber. As she was a reapyr, not a valkyr, her protections sat under her long, sweeping black robes. Wren, meanwhile, had both armor and weapons strapped to every inch of her body.
Odile quirked an eyebrow. “Twin blades,” she murmured, nodding at the swords that poked out over her shoulders from their place in her baldric. “Like Locke, though he wore them on his belt. Vance preferred long-range artillery. Didn’t like to get his hands dirty.”
Wren grinned, relishing every scrap of information Odile gave her about her family, particularly her father. She had to admit that she’d often put him on a pedestal, despite his shortcomings—especially as they related to her—and it was grounding to know he was every bit as flawed as Wren. Perhaps even more so. Locke, too, wasn’t perfect, and the information made them feel more like real people. Like family.
When they arrived at the gate, one word from Odile had the guards hurrying to let them through.
First they raised the portcullis—made of bone—and then the wide wooden doors creaked open.
The land beyond was gray and barren, whatever trees or greenery that might have once grown here hacked away to maintain their defenses.
There was a road underfoot, a remnant from before the Wall, though they had clearly built the gate overtop with its usage in mind. It would make for easy riding in and out on patrols, especially as it split not far ahead of them, running north and south along the Wall in both directions.
And the Wall… Wren gaped at it, soaring above them and blotting out the sky. It was impressive enough when viewed from its western front: easily fifty feet high—not including the crenellations—and twenty deep, made of massive blocks of granite that were as tall as Wren, each movable only by a team of stonesmiths. As a rule, a smith couldn’t use their magic to lift an object that was heavier than their own body weight. They called it the law of ratios, which could be no more than 1:1. It must have taken ten burly stonesmiths combined to lift each brick, and there were thousands of them stretched out before her.
The view was even more astounding from the east. The blocks no longer glowed dull gray in the day’s watery sunlight. No, they shone pearly white and emanated a powerful presence in Wren’s magical senses.
Bone. Ground down into bonedust and shaped into bricks.
It gave the Wall a polished, slightly elegant look—and could easily be mistaken for marble from a distance—but the closer one got, the more that effect eroded. The color was not quite as lustrous, the finish not quite as smooth. It caused a chill to run down Wren’s spine, and she regularly handled bones and bodies.
“I was here when it was built,” Odile said idly, coming to stand next to Wren as she stared up at the structure. “Once the king officially decided to demarcate a border and erect a barrier, it went up alarmingly fast. Dozens and dozens of stonesmiths working around the clock. The bone facing took longer—we had to collect the bones and grind the dust first, then create the bricks—but it was finished before the Uprising. They say it took a hundred thousand bones to create enough bonedust for the job.”
The number was almost beyond comprehension. “Where did they get them from?” Anyone killed by the undead from the Breach would have succumbed to deathrot, which rendered their bones soulless and without magic. They’d be useless for protection.
“Marrow Hall emptied its stores—the catacombs beneath the castle were stocked full of bones they’d been collecting for centuries—and every crypt, coffin, and mausoleum from Giltmore to Granite Gate was cleaned out. They weren’t all anchor bones, of course. We’d never have enough to manage such a surface area. Instead, they used keystones”—she pointed to a smaller brick set among a cluster of larger ones—“carefully spread throughout. They’re the true protections, while the others simply amplify their magic.”
“Like a body,” Wren mused. While the anchor bone held the soul and the most powerful magic, every bone connected to it shared in that power. One of her teachers had said it was like a fire in a hearth. The flames were the source of the heat, but the surrounding stones absorbed the warmth all the same.
“Exactly. But the Wall is a last resort. The first barrier is the palisade.”
She stepped off the road and headed east, deeper into the Breachlands, where roughly fifty meters away stood a second wall—technically the first one built—made up of a series of animal bones poking straight out of the earth, like jagged teeth.
Wren recognized this type of fortification. It was the more traditional bonesmith method, as she’d seen in towns and villages all over the Dominions. Each bone, depending on size, provided a certain radius of protection, and the bonesmith fabricators who built these structures had it down to an exact science. Massive bones, not unlike the rib cage Wren had seen in the Bonewood, protruded from the soil every ten feet, with smaller bones used to bridge the gap between the harder-to-find and much more valuable mammoth and whale bones.
It was a truly haunting sight, more primal and unnerving than the stone-and-bone Border Wall behind it. Wilder and less civilized, maybe, it harkened back to simpler times.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t hold up on its own,” Odile said. “Heavy rain, the freezing and thawing of the ground… They cause the bones to shift over time, creating gaps and weak points. And on a Wall that traverses nearly a hundred miles of wilderness, it was impossible to catch every variance. Now it acts more as a deterrent than an actual barrier. Stronger undead can sense the holes and pass right through, and tier fives… Some of them can even touch it.”
Wren stared out past the palisade, imagining what it would be like to see a walking corpse. To fight one. “What are they like?” she asked. “The tier fives? The revenants?”
Odile cocked her head at Wren, considering. “Didn’t your father…？”
Wren shrugged, kicking at a stone on the ground. “He doesn’t talk much, about the war. About any of it.”
When she looked up again, Odile had glanced away. “I suppose not.” She sighed. “It’s difficult to explain. Some of them look almost human. Fully intact, moving with the lingering familiarity of the living. Those are the hardest to deal with.” She cleared her throat. “Others, they’re so badly decomposed, the spirit shines through their bones and barely there scraps of flesh, turning them into something more akin to a puppet on strings. Either way, our usual methods don’t work against them.” She reached up and tapped Wren’s temple. “Use this, if ever you should face one. And this…”