The wolves came back before the frost had finished cracking the puddles.
Giles Croft stood on the new narrow high walkway with his chicory going cold and counted blue eyes. Nine, this time. They sat in the hemlocks sixty yards out and did nothing at all.
“They’re mapping us,” he said. “Testing the gaps between the ward-pads. Four pads for six hundred yards of fence isn’t a defence. It’s a suggestion.”
Kenneth Drake leaned on his iron-shod rod beside him. “They found the gaps in two nights, my lord. Wolves are patient. Wolves with horns are worse.”
“Then we stop relying on pads. We make the approach slow, and we make it loud.”
Giles unrolled a scrap of birch bark on the rail. He had sketched it at dawn, by lantern, between yawns.
“Abatis,” he said. “Fell pines along the outer lip of the ditch, butts toward us, crowns pointing out. Trim the branches to spikes. Lace them together. Thirty feet deep. An animal can get through, but only slowly, and only by hurting itself.”
Kenneth grunted. “Dun-Krag tunnel diggers call that a tangle-belt. We used it against horse.”
“Good. Now the part you didn’t use against horse.” Giles tapped the bark. “Wire. Low, knee height, woven inside the tangle. Pull it and a bell rings on the wall. We learn where they’re before they arrive.”
“A bell,” Kenneth said slowly, “that tells you which side is being tested.”
“Six bells. Six sectors. Toby reads them.”
Kenneth looked at the pines on the ridge, then at the bark. Something almost like a smile cracked his scarred face. He knew a trip-line when he saw one. He also knew the camp, and the camp would call this something else by sundown.
“They’ll say you spun a web across the whole valley,” he said.
“They can say what they like,” said Giles, “as long as they keep digging.”
* * *
The wire was the problem, and it was Borin’s problem first.
Millicent had found the copper. She stood in the tool shed with her tally-book open and read the inventory aloud like a charge sheet.
“Two stills, one dented. A kettle with a hole in it. Eleven door-hinges. A dead man’s cooking pot, which the penal board forgot to confiscate.” She looked up. “That’s all the copper in Rustgate. Spend it carefully.”
Borin Bronze-Lung weighed a hinge in his palm and sniffed. “It’ll draw. Wants a good plate and a better arm.”
He had a drawing plate, a hardened iron slab with a row of tapering holes. He melted down the kettle and hinges in a crucible, cast thin rods, and pulled each rod through the holes with a hand-winch, hole after smaller hole, until the rod became a wire no thicker than a bootlace.
It took two men on the winch and the better part of three days. The forge ate charcoal faster than anyone liked. Millicent wrote the figure down and didn’t comment, which was worse than commenting.
Meanwhile the felling crew went up the north slope. Fourteen men, six axes, a bad-hardened Master Caleb running the saw-pit. They dropped pines, dragged them to the ditch behind the oxen, and trimmed the branches into points.
A conscript named Dob, who walked with a limp from some old bad winter, took the job of lacing. He sat in the tangle on a stool and bound crowns together with green withy, whistling flat through his teeth.
“You’re enjoying this,” Toby said.
“First work I’ve had where sitting down is the job,” said Dob.
Toby’s chalk-reel was not needed for tangle. But a small boy from the new bunk trailed him anyway, scratching marks on a plank with a piece of charcoal and copying Toby’s stride. Toby pretended not to notice and walked a little straighter.
* * *
The first night went badly.
Giles had the wire strung by the fifth afternoon. Stake to stake, thirty paces at a run, each end tied off to a stout ash stake, and the wire hooked through a small iron eye on the bell’s striker. He tested it by hand. Every bell rang clean.
By midnight, every bell was ringing at once.
Toby fell off his stool. Kenneth came off the bunk with his rod already in his hand. Sixty people stood in the yard in their blankets listening to the north wall scream.
“Wolves?” Kenneth demanded.
“No,” said Giles, climbing the ladder with a lantern. He held it to bell three. The striker was jittering against its rim. He could see the wire above it, drum-tight and humming. He touched it. It was ice cold, and tighter than he had left it.
“Contraction,” he said, with a very quiet kind of despair. “Copper shrinks in the cold. Thirty paces of it shrinks a good finger’s width. The wire pulls itself tight, the striker catches, and the bell rings. It’s not a tripwire. It’s a heat gauge.”
“Is that bad?” asked Toby.
“It means nobody sleeps tonight and the wolves know exactly how long it takes us to get dressed.”
Then, near dawn, a wire snapped at a kink. Borin took the broken end between thumb and forefinger, bent it once. Then he heard it crackle.
“Work-hardened,” he said. “I drew it too hard and never softened it. Copper goes brittle as it’s pulled. It wants heat, a good red glow, then a slow cool. You’ll have it soft as a girl’s braid.”
“A girl’s what?”
“Soft,” said Borin. “Don’t write that down.”
Giles didn’t write it down. He wrote down two other things. First, anneal every coil before it goes up. Second, give the wire somewhere to go when the cold took it.
* * *
The second fix took a day and a half and cost Caleb his temper.
“Green ash,” said Giles. He had Caleb’s boys cut saplings, thick as a wrist, and bend them into the bell housings. “Each wire ties off to the tip of a sprung bough. When the cold pulls the wire tight, the bough bends a little. Nothing rings. When something hits the wire hard and fast, the bough snaps back, whips the striker. The bell sounds.”
Caleb squinted along a bough. “A spring made of tree.”
“It’s the cheapest spring we can build. Iron is spoken for.”
“It’ll tire,” said Caleb. “Green wood creeps.”
“Then we replace them monthly. Write it on the roster, Toby.”
Borin heat-softened every coil that night, swearing at the charcoal. Dob and his stool moved to the wall. There, he was promoted to Keeper of the Bough, a title he hated and wore anyway.
By dusk of the sixth day the whole north and west face carried a thirty-foot belt of spiked pine. Wire ran through it at knee height. Six bells hung in a row beneath the narrow high walkway, each with a numbered brass tag.
Giles stood at the end of the row and listened. The wind came through. No bell rang.
“Quiet,” Toby whispered. “It’s quiet.”
“That’s the point,” said Giles. “Quiet means it works.”
* * *
The wolves came on the second night.
Giles was asleep when bell three rang. He knew it was bell three before he opened his eyes, because nobody had to tell him. It had a flat, urgent tone, a bit high of the others.
“Bell three!” Toby was already at the rail, face white in the lantern light. “North ravine! It’s bell three, my lord, that’s the north ravine!”
“How many?” Kenneth was behind him, bow strung, arrows in the crook of his arm.
“I can’t tell. Bell three. Just three.”
Then bell two rang, and bell three rang again, over and over, as something heavy fought the wire.
Kenneth jammed his bow through an arrow slit. His voice dropped low and level, a sergeant’s voice for night work.
“Second side. Sixty yards. Archers on my mark. Wait for the moon.”
Moonlight slid off a cloud. Out in the pine belt, three pale shapes were stuck.
They had come in fast, as wolves do, and gone into the abatis head down. The first branches had slowed them. The wire had tripped the lead beast and dropped it onto the spiked crowns. The second and third piled in behind it. Their crystal horns snagged in the tangle. They tore at the pine. The more they tore, the more tightly the lacing locked around their legs.
“They can’t get out,” Toby breathed.
“They can’t get in, either,” said Giles. “Good. That’s the design.”
Kenneth didn’t shout. He said, “Loose,” once, and twelve arrows went out together, then twelve more. The sound was a flat rattle, nothing like the movies Giles half remembered. The pale shapes thrashed and stilled.
When the last one went quiet, nobody cheered. Not at first.
Then Dob, down at the end of the narrow high walkway, said in a small voice, “Nobody’s hurt.”
“No,” said Giles. He walked the whole row, bell to bell, and counted heads himself. Fifty, and the boy from the new bunk, still in his blanket. Kenneth lowered his bow and began, very quietly, to count the arrows he had spent.
Giles put his hand flat on the cold rail and took a long moment before he spoke.
“Someone should tell the Sister,” Toby said. “She’ll say it’s holy.”
“She will,” said Giles. “Let her. It’s a good wire.”
Kenneth, beside him, was nodding at the dead wolves with the look of a man revising a doctrine. “A spiderweb,” he murmured. “Hung across the valley. Every thread alive with sound. The camp will never call it anything else.”
“It’s a tangle-belt with a bell on it, Kenneth.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Kenneth, without any conviction at all.
* * *
At dawn Giles climbed down. Then he walked the outer lip of the ditch with Kenneth and two men carrying a drag-pole. The frost had come up grey and thick. The three wolves lay where they had fallen, stiff in the branches.
“We’ll drag them out,” Giles said. “Burn them downwind. Teresa will want to inspect the horns.”
“She will want to bless them.”
“She’ll want to do both.”
Kenneth reached for the nearest animal’s foreleg. Then he stopped.
“My lord. Look at its blood.”
Giles looked. Where the arrow had gone in, the blood had not frozen. It should have. Every drop on the frosted grass should have been a dark crust by now.
Instead it was rising.
A thin black vapour peeled off the wound and drifted upward in slow, oily ribbons. Where it passed, the frost died. Where it settled, the grass beneath the carcass was turning grey, then brown, then falling into a pale powder that blew away on the wind.
The vapour crept out from the second wolf too, and the third. The ground around them was shrinking from the contact, a clean bare circle widening in the grass.
“That,” said Giles slowly, “isn’t in the texture pack.”
Behind them, up on the narrow high walkway, bell three gave a single, soft, nervous ring. Nobody had touched the wire.