The outer wall garrison had never sent a general report in nine years and it sent four in ninety minutes. The last one gave a frontage of forty kilometres, a bearing out of the north-east, plus a figure the wall commander had stopped believing before he wrote it down.
Vell reached the north gatehouse at the sixth hour of the evening.
He came with Luna, a crisis map on a roll of accounts paper, plus a secretariat that had spent the afternoon losing an argument. The wall commander is a woman named Ester Vane, who has held that garrison for eleven years.
"Say what you are seeing," Vell said.
"Beasts," she answered, "ordinary ones, in numbers I have no procedure for, and every single one of them is running rather than hunting."
That distinction is the whole of the night, and nobody in the gatehouse understood it for two hours.
