The Names Flaking off the Wall

The characters on the Mute Wall were supposed to last for ever. Stone cracks, moss grows, iron rusts; only those characters had not shifted a hair in 400 years.

Lately they have been coming away. One stroke after another vanishes out of the stone, as though something were drawing them off from behind. Where a stroke has gone the surface is still flat to the touch, as cold and as hard as the stone beside it, with nothing to show a character was ever there.

The old wallmen hand down a line: flaking that makes a sound is slow, and can be traced; flaking that makes no sound is quick, and cannot. The kind with a sound begins with one very thin sharp crack, like someone breaking thin ice a long way off; hear it and there is still time to run over and look, and to note down which section and which strokes. The silent kind gives a man no chance — the lower half of a character will go empty in a single night, and it is only when the next day's watch looks up that they find what was there last night is gone.

So the wall has taken on one more duty that is not written into standing orders: the name-round. The man on night watch walks his own section and runs his eye up along it for any place newly gone empty, and if there is one he writes it in the ledger — which tower, east side or west, how many steps up from the ground. The ledgers grow thicker, and the characters grow fewer.

No one knows why the characters come away. And no one dares put the thing into a battle report sent south — a beacon cannot carry a message of that kind, a courier needs 5 to 7 days on the road, and whoever writes the sentence down has first to think through whether the capital will take it for the Mute March making the danger on the border sound worse than it is, so as to ask for a little more grain.

So the Wallwardens only stand a while longer, saying nothing, in front of each piece of stone that has gone empty. The wall is still there. But the names on the wall are leaving this world.