The Mute Wall

The Mute Wall lies across the far north of the world, 100 metres high and 2,000 kilometres long, bearing down from the Eastern Sea all the way to the Western Sea. Look up and you cannot see the top of it.

It is laid up of black basalt. There is no mortar between the stones and the joints are too fine to take a knife-blade; in 400 years not one block has worked loose. A thin grey moss grows on the southern face. On the northern face nothing grows at all, and even frost will not hold — the north wind scrapes it away and the stone stays dry the year round. Lay a hand flat against it and the south face is cold, the north face colder, cold enough to numb the palm, like a hand laid on iron in winter.

Set deep in the face of the wall are the names of every lawful king, written in an old script no one can read. The characters are inside the stone, not on its surface; scratch at them with a fingernail and you never reach the edge of a stroke. By day they are heavy and black; after dark they give off the faintest blue light, and from far off the whole wall looks like a constellation laid flat. The old soldiers have a way of getting through a night watch: start from the first tower in the east and count the names, mark where the count stopped, and take it up again the next night. Men have counted all their lives. No one has ever finished.

The wall is held by House Ravenfeather of the Mute March, handed down from generation to generation, never relieved. There is a watchtower every 5 kilometres along it, 400 in all, worked in three watches, day and night without a break.

What the wall is, each of the seven realms tells differently. The White Tower Church says it is a grace the gods left to men, and that the names are the gods keeping accounts on men's behalf: once a king's name is on the wall, the merits and faults of that reign have been taken in. The old people of the Mute March do not tell it that way — they say the wall is alive, and the names are what it has eaten. The Sangold League never takes part in the argument; their long-range contracts carry a usage handed down for generations, called the Mute Wall clause — should the wall not be there, no penalty is owed on any breach along the northern trade line. In the archives of the Bureau of Military Affairs at Ironhold the Mute Wall is listed under “Northern Border Defence Works”, with file number, cost of construction and annual silver for repairs all complete, except that the column for the cost of construction has stood empty since the year the kingdom was founded.

In a fragmentary scroll copied and handed down by the White Tower Pontificate there is this line:

Once the name is carved, it speaks no more; once the wall stands, there is no god in the north.

No one remembers what year the Mute Wall was built, and no one can say what the names set into the stone are for. The men who hold the wall only hold the wall.

Until lately — the characters on the wall have begun to go missing, one after another.