Beacons and Horn Signals

The Mute Wall is 800 kilometres from the capital at Ironhold, and news does not travel fast. The world has two ways of crossing that distance: the beacon and the courier.

Beacons are lit one after another along the 400 watchtowers and the relay towers on the road to the capital, and in a few hours the signal has gone the whole way. The manner of lighting is fixed, and every tower-keeper in the world learns the same set by heart: one straight column of smoke is the ordinary patrol report; two columns side by side, a large pack beyond the wall; three columns and one long horn-note, something wrong with the wall itself; wet grass mixed into the fire to press the smoke black, the king is dead. There are only these signals and not one more — because the men on the relay towers can see smoke, and cannot see writing.

Beacons cannot carry detail. The numbers of dead and wounded, the names of the dead, the wording of an order, which section of the wall something happened on — a beacon cannot bear one word of it. To send those there is only the courier on horseback, riding a solid 5 to 7 days: he changes his first horse leaving the city of the Mute March, his second at the Greyriver post station, and if he meets a closed road or the snow season on the way, add two more days.

There are 27 relay towers along the post road, each within sight of the next tower's smoke. The men who keep them are hired, not on the muster roll — two to a tower, changing by the month. They have one duty only: to watch the tower before theirs. Lighting wrong is punished and missing a sighting is punished, and the heavier punishment is for missing a sighting, because a beacon is passed down the line once only, and wherever it breaks, everything after that is dark.

So days on the border always pass in the same way: tonight the beacon arrives first and tells the south that something serious has happened; the orders and the truth take several more days to come up slowly from the south. In those days between, the men on the wall have to decide for themselves.

It works the same the other way round. By the time an order from the capital reaches the wall, the situation on the wall has turned over once already. The old wallmen have a line for it that sounds like a complaint and is in fact a discipline: What the south writes is the day-before-yesterday's wall.