The Five Forts announced themselves long before Hela saw them. The gray clay of the wasteland had given way over the preceding days to darker soil threaded with roots and scrub growth, and the air had thinned and cooled and taken on the smell of pine resin and wet stone. The mountains rose to the south and west behind them, their lower slopes thick with dark conifers, their upper reaches bare and white with snow.
Hela stopped walking at the crest of a ridge and looked down.
The valley below was broad and green and bisected by a river that ran east, its water catching the afternoon light. Beyond the river the land flattened into a wide plain of hard-packed earth and scrub, and rising from that plain, spaced at intervals of perhaps five miles, stood the Five Forts.
They were colossal, each fort a single square structure of fused black stone, half a mile on each side, rising from the plain in sheer faces that climbed seven hundred feet before they met the battlements. The Wall in Westeros was roughly as tall, but the Wall was a ribbon of ice. These were blocks of fused stone, each one large enough to hold a city within its walls. The walls were smooth and jointless, and the stone itself had a faint oily sheen that shifted color when clouds moved overhead. Towers climbed from the corners of each fort and from the centers of each curtain wall, their tops crenellated with merlons large enough to shelter siege engines behind them. Between the forts, lower curtain walls of quarried granite reinforced with buttresses of the same fused black stone linked each structure to the next, and beyond the flanks of the outermost forts the land rose into mountains too steep and too wild to march an army through.
The entire line stretched across the northeastern frontier of the known world.
Hela studied the fortifications for a long time. The stone was the same. The same oily black stone that had built the walls of Yeen in its dripping jungle, the same stone that formed every tower and wharf of Asshai, the same stone that had lined the streets of Stygai where the dead dragons lay in their bone-dust. She'd walked through three sites built from this material across two continents, and none of them bore tool marks, because no tools had made them. And she'd grown up with a fourth. The Seastone Chair on Pyke was carved from the same stone, a throne older than the Ironborn themselves, sitting in its hall since before the First Men set foot on the islands. Someone had fused this stone with fire and sorcery thousands of years before the Valyrians learned to shape Dragonstone, and here on the northeastern edge of the world whoever had mastered that craft had raised five fortresses that dwarfed anything the Freehold had ever built. The maesters in Westeros attributed the Five Forts to the Pearl Emperor of the Great Empire of the Dawn, but Hela doubted any mortal emperor had commanded the forces necessary to fuse this much stone. Whoever built them had been afraid of something that warranted it.
Soren stepped up beside her and looked at the forts and said nothing for a while.
"How many men to hold that line?" he asked.
"Thousands," Hela said. "Tens of thousands in a full mobilization."
"Against what?"
Hela turned and looked north, past the forts, toward the horizon where the sky flattened into the colorless distance of the Grey Waste.
"Everything."
She descended the ridge and crossed the valley floor with the Einherjar behind her and Fenrir walking at her left with his wings furled and his head swinging slowly from side to side. The river was shallow enough to ford at a gravel bar, the water cold and clear, and on the far bank a road of packed earth ran northeast across the plain toward the nearest fort. The road was maintained. Its surface was graded and its ditches were clean and its edges were lined with posts carved from dark wood and painted with characters in Yi Tish script that Hela read through All-Speech as distance markers and warnings.
She'd left the Draugr in the foothills two days prior. They stood in the pine forest on the eastern slope of a ridge twelve miles southeast, arranged in their rows among the trees, their green eyes dim in the shade, waiting. She'd given no command other than to remain.
The road curved around a low rise and the nearest fort filled the sky above them. Up close the scale of it was staggering. The wall face rose in a single plane of fused black stone that climbed seven hundred feet into the air, blocking the afternoon sun entirely and casting a shadow that stretched a quarter mile across the plain. Hela placed her palm flat against the surface. The stone was warm beneath her hand, and the oily texture was the same as Yeen's walls and the streets of Stygai, that faint greasy quality that never seemed to wear off. Fine grain ran in crystalline patterns, and whatever heat lived in the stone came from somewhere that had nothing to do with the sun.
A gatehouse jutted from the base of the southern wall, its arch sixty feet high and thirty wide, flanked by towers that rose another hundred feet above the battlements. The arch was open. The gate itself, two doors of black iron each two feet thick and banded with the same fused stone, stood pulled back against the interior walls, and behind the arch a tunnel ran through the wall's full thickness, a hundred feet of black stone overhead, lit by oil lamps set in niches at shoulder height.
Guards stood at the gate.
Twenty of them, arrayed in two files of ten on either side of the arch, wearing lacquered armor in plates of deep blue and silver that covered them from throat to ankle. Their helmets were open-faced, with flared neck guards and cheek pieces that framed their features in steel. Each man carried a halberd with a blade shaped like a crescent moon, its edge bright and its haft wrapped in cord dyed the same blue as the armor, and short swords hung at their hips in lacquered scabbards. Their boots were soled with hobnails that had worn smooth grooves into the stone beneath them.
The commander of the gate detachment stepped forward as Hela approached. He was a tall man with a weathered face and a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his jaw, and his armor bore additional markings at the shoulder, gold leaf pressed into the lacquer in characters that identified his rank. He raised his right fist to his left breast, and his eyes moved from Hela to the Einherjar to Fenrir and back to Hela.
Fenrir stopped walking and lowered his head, and his nostrils worked at the air. The guards in the files shifted their weight but held formation and kept their halberds level.
The commander spoke in Yi Tish. All-Speech caught it and laid the meaning across the sounds.
"You approach the First Fort of the Wall of Heroes. Identify yourself and your company and state your purpose."
Hela stopped ten paces from him. The Einherjar halted behind her in their column, and fourteen pairs of boots struck stone in unison, and the sound echoed off the gatehouse walls.
"Hela Greyjoy," she said. She spoke in Yi Tish, and her pronunciation was clean, and the commander's eyes widened for a fraction of a second.
He stared at her. The scar on his jaw pulled as his mouth tightened.
"Peerless Under Heaven," he said.
The words moved through the gate detachment in a murmur that ran from man to man down both files, and the halberds straightened and the postures shifted.
The commander's fist pressed harder against his breast, and he dropped to one knee. The lacquered plates of his armor clicked against each other, and the halberd's haft rang against the stone where he set it down. Behind him, the gate detachment knelt as one, twenty men in blue and silver going to the ground together.
Hela watched them kneel.
The commander looked up. "Forgive the formality. We were told the champion of Wudang had gone west beyond the Jade Gates. We didn't expect to see you here; certainly not from the east."
"I have been on an adventure," Hela said.
The commander rose and looked past her at the Einherjar, their black armor and their necroswords and their still faces, and at Fenrir, who'd settled on his haunches beside the road and was watching the soldiers.
"I am Captain Shan Wei-Lin of the Azure Company, Third Watch of the First Fort. I serve under Garrison Commander Zhuo Bai-Feng." He paused. "The commander will want to receive you personally. Will you permit me to send a runner?"
"Send your runner."
Shan Wei-Lin turned and spoke to one of his men in rapid Yi Tish, too fast for casual conversation, the clipped cadence of a military order. The soldier rose, handed his halberd to the man beside him, and ran through the gate tunnel at a sprint.
Shan Wei-Lin turned back and gestured toward the arch.
"If you would follow me. Your company is welcome within the walls. Your dragon..." He hesitated. His eyes went to Fenrir and came back. "There is space in the outer bailey. The ground is stone and the walls are high. He will not be disturbed."
Hela looked at Fenrir, and the dragon flicked his tail once and rose and padded toward the gate without prompting, his claws clicking against the road. The guards in the files pressed themselves flat against the gatehouse walls as he passed. One man's halberd trembled in his grip. Fenrir ignored them.
They walked through the gate tunnel, and the oil lamps threw pools of amber light across the fused stone, and the air inside was cool and dry. Their footsteps multiplied in the enclosed space, the Einherjar's measured tread overlapping with the click of Fenrir's claws and the lighter step of Shan Wei-Lin's hobnailed boots.
And then the tunnel opened onto the outer bailey.
The outer bailey stretched half a mile across, paved in flagstones fitted so tightly that no weed grew between them, bounded on all four sides by the fort's interior walls of fused black stone. Buildings lined the inner walls, stone structures with tiled roofs in the Yi Tish style, their eaves curved upward at the corners, their doorways hung with cloth screens dyed in military blue. Barracks and storehouses and a smithy whose chimney trailed thin smoke against the sky, and a stable block built for horses but currently empty, its stalls clean and its hay racks filled.
Soldiers filled the bailey. They moved between buildings in groups, carrying supplies and equipment, and they wore the same blue and silver lacquered armor as the gate detachment. Some trained in an open yard near the eastern wall, pairs of men working through forms with wooden halberds in a synchronized pattern that clicked and clacked in steady rhythm. Others sat on benches outside the barracks, cleaning weapons and eating bowls of rice from their laps.
They stopped what they were doing when Hela walked in. The training pairs broke their forms and the men on the benches set their bowls down and a smith appeared in his doorway with a hammer in one hand and tongs in the other. The bailey went quiet in a slow wave that spread from the gate to the far wall, and by the time Hela reached the center of the yard every face was turned toward her.
Shan Wei-Lin walked half a step ahead and slightly to her left.
Fenrir split off without prompting and crossed the bailey toward the eastern wall, where a corner of flagstone caught the afternoon sun. He circled the spot twice, lowered himself to the ground, and tucked his head beneath his wing. Within a minute his breathing had slowed and his flank rose and fell steadily.
A door opened in the main building on the bailey's north side, a structure larger and more ornate than the barracks, its lintel carved with characters and its doorframe inlaid with strips of bronze. A woman walked out. She was in her sixties, her hair white and pulled back from her face in a tight knot held with lacquered pins, and she wore armor that set her apart from every other soldier in the bailey. The plates were enameled in deep indigo rather than the standard blue, and gold filigree ran along the edges in patterns that depicted mountains and rivers and a stylized wall of five towers. A sword hung at her left hip in a scabbard wrapped with gold wire, and she walked like she owned the ground.
Behind her came two officers, both younger, both armed, both watching Hela carefully.
The woman stopped ten paces away and studied Hela's face. Her gaze was direct and appraising.
"You are smaller than I expected," she said.
"Most people are surprised," Hela said.
"I am Zhuo Bai-Feng. Garrison Commander of the First Fort. I held this post when you fought at Wudang, and I watched a messenger ride four hundred miles in five days to bring us word that a woman from west of the Jade Gates had defeated every champion in the tournament without taking a wound. My officers didn't believe it. I did."
She looked past Hela at the Einherjar, who'd formed up in their double column and stood in silence.
"Your men carry strange swords," Zhuo Bai-Feng said.
"They carry what I give them," Hela said.
The commander's mouth moved slightly. She turned to Shan Wei-Lin and gave a series of instructions in the fast military cadence, and Shan Wei-Lin bowed and moved off at a jog toward the barracks. Then she looked back at Hela.
"You came from the east. Through the Mountains of the Morn."
"Yes."
"Well, that’s certainly never happened before."
"I’m special."
Zhuo Bai-Feng let the silence sit for a moment. Her two officers exchanged a glance behind her. Then she gestured toward the main building.
"Walk with me," she said. "I'll show you what we guard and why."
They walked together, and Zhuo Bai-Feng set a brisk pace and spoke as they moved, pointing with a scarred hand toward each feature of the fort as they passed it.
The barracks housed ten thousand soldiers in the First Fort alone, the full complement that each fort was built to hold. Each man served a rotation of six months on the wall, then six months in the training camps to the south, then six months on the wall again. The cycle had continued unbroken for centuries upon centuries, and the garrison records, kept in a stone archive beneath the main building, stretched back over four thousand years in an unbroken chain of names and dates and watch reports.
"Four thousand years," Hela said.
"The forts are older," Zhuo Bai-Feng said. "Our scholars say the Pearl Emperor of the Great Empire of the Dawn raised them in the age before the Long Night, when the Maiden-Made-of-Light still ruled the heavens and the Lion of Night prowled beyond the borders of the world. Others say they are older still, that the Pearl Emperor merely garrisoned what he found. The truth is buried with the empire that died."
They climbed an interior stairway cut into the wall's thickness, the steps worn smooth and shallow by centuries of booted feet. The stairway rose in a long straight incline with landings at intervals where arrow loops pierced the outer wall, and at each landing a guard stood watch, silent and armed. The guards saluted Zhuo Bai-Feng with fist to breast and stared at Hela as she passed.
The top of the wall was wide enough for six men to walk abreast. The parapet on the north side rose to chest height, its merlons carved from the same fused black stone, and through the crenels the land beyond the forts opened up.
It was different. The green of the valley stopped at the wall's shadow. Beyond, the ground rose into broken hills covered in scrub and dead grass that lightened to gray as the distance increased, and the hills flattened into a plain, and the plain stretched north until it dissolved into haze. The Grey Waste.
Zhuo Bai-Feng stood at the parapet and looked north.
"Every ten years, or twenty, or fifty, something comes out of that," she said. "It varies. Most of the time, it is men. Wild people driven south by hunger, armed with stone and bone, desperate enough to throw themselves at the wall. We kill them or we turn them back. Sometimes it is not men."
She turned from the parapet.
"Three generations ago, in my grandmother's time, something came in winter. The garrison commander at the Third Fort wrote a single report before the attacks began. He described creatures walking upright in the snow, pale and silent, with weapons of a material that shattered steel on contact. The report was carried south by a rider who nearly killed his horse getting it to the capital." She paused. "The Third Fort held. It cost them eight hundred men in nine days. The bodies that fell on the north side of the wall did not remain where they fell. They rose and joined the enemy, and the garrison had to burn everything that dropped beyond the parapet."
Hela said nothing.
"The histories call them the demons of the Lion of Night," Zhuo Bai-Feng said. "My soldiers call them ice demons. The scholars in Yin have longer names and longer arguments about what they are. None of it changes what they do."
They walked the wall's length from the First Fort's eastern tower to its western tower, a distance of nearly half a mile. The battlements were maintained with obsessive care. Every merlon was intact, every crenel clear of debris, every stone fitted and sealed against the wind. Weapon racks lined the interior side of the parapet at regular intervals, holding halberds and crossbows and bundles of bolts with heads of obsidian and bundles with heads of forged steel. Oil cauldrons sat on iron frames at the base of every third merlon, cold now but ready to be lit.
Hela stopped at one of the weapon racks and lifted a crossbow bolt with an obsidian head and turned it in her fingers. Volcanic glass, knapped to a leaf-shaped point, the edges sharp enough to cut skin. She set it back.
"You know what obsidian does to them," she said.
Zhuo Bai-Feng looked at her. "You know about them?"
"I know about many things."
The commander studied her face for a long moment. Then she walked on, and they descended a second stairway on the western side and emerged into a lower courtyard that connected the First Fort to the curtain wall stretching toward the Second.
The courtyard was an armory. Racks of halberds and swords and polearms lined the walls. Crates of crossbow bolts stood stacked in rows. Barrels of pitch and lamp oil filled one corner, and against the far wall, sealed in waxed leather and bound with iron straps, were long bundles that Hela identified by shape as siege-scale crossbow limbs, disassembled for storage.
"We keep enough to arm every man in this fort twice over from this courtyard alone," Zhuo Bai-Feng said. "Each fort maintains its own supply. The total armament across all five positions would equip an army of a hundred thousand."
She opened a door at the end of the courtyard and led Hela down a corridor that smelled of old stone and dry paper. They passed through a second door and into a room that stretched fifty feet in every direction, its ceiling vaulted, its walls lined with shelves that ran from floor to ceiling. The shelves held scrolls and bound books and loose sheaves of parchment tied with cord, thousands of documents arranged in a system that Hela couldn't immediately parse.
"The archive," Zhuo Bai-Feng said. "Every watch report, every engagement record, every observation from every garrison commander who has served the Five Forts since record-keeping began."
She walked to a shelf near the center of the room and drew out a scroll bound in red silk. She unrolled it on the reading table and held it flat with both hands.
"This is the oldest document in the collection. It was written in a script that predates Classical Yi Tish by at least two thousand years. The archivists translated it three centuries ago and have been arguing about the translation ever since."
Hela looked at the scroll. The script was angular and dense, written in vertical columns with a brush that had been cut to a fine point. All-Speech caught the underlying language and pulled it apart, and the meaning came through clearly.
It was a construction record – materials, dimensions, labor counts – and at the bottom, a purpose statement.
"Built to hold the line between the warm lands and the cold," Hela read aloud. "Against the servants of the one who sleeps in ice."
Her fingers pressed flat against the reading table, and the wood creaked under her grip.
Zhuo Bai-Feng's hands tightened on the scroll's edges. She looked at Hela with a sharp expression.
"The Lion of Night," the commander said quietly. "That is what the archivists believe 'the one who sleeps in ice' refers to. You read the old script as easily as I read a quartermaster's ledger."
Hela lifted her hands from the table.
"I have an interest in reading," she said. "And I know what sleeps in the ice. Your archivists are closer to the truth than they realize."
The commander rolled the scroll and returned it to its shelf. She stood with her back to the shelves and her arms at her sides and looked at Hela.
"Why are you here, Peerless Under Heaven? You didn't walk through the wasteland and past the corrupted lands and through my gate to admire our armory."
Hela looked at the shelves, at thousands of years of records, thousands of years of men standing on a wall and watching the north and killing whatever came out of it and writing it down and training their replacements and doing it again.
"I wanted to see what lies beyond the Five Forts," Hela said. "I want to see the very edge of the world."
“In the Grey Waste and in Mussovy beyond, you will find only death, darkness, and desolation.” The commander said. “These are lands ruled by demons.”
Hela grinned. “Worry not, commander. I will make these demons scream.”