The Hounds of the Gods

The Hounds of the Gods are the things that come up at the Mute Wall from beyond it at night, dozens of them in a single night. They are 3 metres long and go on all fours; the skin is black-grey scale with the edges of the scales turned up, so that from a distance it looks like a crust of old scab. There are no eyes at the centre of the face, only a depression. The howl comes out of that depression, low, travelling along the ground, and a man feels it itching in the soles of his feet before he hears it.

Before they come, everything beyond the wall goes quiet. The wind is still there, but every other sound has gone — no snow sliding, no beast calling in the distance. The old soldiers call this the breath-hold beyond the wall, and when they hear it they start lighting the fire-oil barrels; there is usually still half a stick of incense of time left.

They hunt together and know to pick off the man who is alone, and to pick the gaps between one tower and the next. The Wallwardens deal with them by oil, fire and bow, but the real trouble is that the things are hard to kill: cut them anywhere and they do not die, with one exception — the third vertebra behind the neck. The blade has to go into that joint before one will go down. Once down they do not bleed; what seeps out from under the scales is grey, and where it falls on snow it melts a small ring open. After daylight the carcass dries and shrinks into a hard shell that breaks at the flick of a spear, and the wind scatters it along the foot of the wall until nothing is left.

The name was given by the White Tower Church. The Church's account is that these things are hounds the gods left in the north, keeping watch over what men are not to touch, and that so long as men keep to their place the hounds will not come down. The Wallwardens do not use the name; up on the towers they say only “those down there”. Further south the whole matter has turned into a story — children in Ironhold have heard of the hounds, grown-ups use them to frighten a child who will not sleep, and no one has ever really seen one.

No one knows where they come from, why they always come at night, or why they must throw themselves at this one wall. The Wallwardens do not ask any of that. They only count: how many came tonight, and how many men are missing tonight.