"Corpses?"
"Beyond the Wall?"
"Were they those wildlings'?"
Hearing the report, Tywin Lannister and Kevan Lannister exchanged a brief look, then seemed to recall something.
Back when these Lannister convict soldiers had been dispatched to Castle Black, Jeor Mormont had been preparing to organize a party to go beyond the Wall to investigate the disappearance of Ser Waymar Royce during a patrol.
The one leading that party was Benjen Stark, brother of Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell, the First Ranger of the Night's Watch.
Jeor Mormont believed there was a high probability that the wildlings were behind the incident, so part of the mission's purpose was also to investigate the movements of the wildlings beyond the Wall.
After all, news of the so-called "King-Beyond-the-Wall," Mance Rayder, and what he had been doing had long been known, even among the men of the Night's Watch.
Such movements naturally could not escape the eyes of those black-cloaked crows. Regarding the threat posed by Mance Rayder, Jeor Mormont maintained a high degree of vigilance.
The Night's Watch was severely undermanned. As the Lord Commander, he had to guard against dangers before they arose and make preparations in advance.
It was only that, after the sudden war came to an end, and faced with the several thousand convict soldiers dispatched by the realm, Jeor Mormont was forced to abandon his original plan.
So when they heard a foot soldier report that bodies had been found beyond the Wall, Tywin Lannister and the other instinctively assumed it was the work of the wildlings.
However, in response to Tywin Lannister's question, the reporting soldier's face still showed nervous unease, his expression flustered.
"Not wildlings. It's our own men—"
"Our own men?" Tywin was even more puzzled. How could their own people have died beyond the Wall?
Such inexplicable news immediately put him on guard, especially under the current tense circumstances, so he pressed on at once. "Is the cause of death clear?"
"Have the bodies been brought back?"
Tywin Lannister followed up with two more questions in quick succession, keenly striking at the key points.
Yet for a question that should not have been difficult to answer, the foot soldier instead appeared somewhat frightened.
Still, he continued: "The bodies have already been brought back."
"When they found the bodies, the men who discovered them preserved the scene immediately, and only then did they come back to Castle Black to get help."
"But when we reached the scene later, we found that they had been killed by their own weapons—woodcutting axes, the daggers they carried, swords…"
He hesitated, his voice faltering. "They… they looked like they were killing each other."
Thinking of the eerie sight he had seen, the soldier's voice was trembling as he spoke.
Yet instead of clearing things up, those words only deepened the doubt in Tywin Lannister's and his brother Kevan Lannister's hearts.
Back then, when Jeor Mormont had been preparing to open the gate in the Wall so that he and Kevan could swear their vows and join the Night's Watch, Tywin, out of curiosity and for the sake of gathering supplies, had not ordered it to be closed again afterward.
Instead, he had sent some men out to the other side of the Wall to fell trees and gather firewood, and to scout the surroundings at the same time.
At the time, it had only been an offhand order, nothing he had paid much attention to.
But he had not expected that only a few days later people would be dead—and from the sound of it, it was some bizarre case of men killing each other.
Faced with the unknown, Tywin fell silent for a few seconds, then leaned more toward the idea that they had run into an enemy.
Only, the enemy was crafty enough to dress up a murder scene as men killing each other.
Even so, thinking that did not stop Tywin from standing up, taking the cloak hanging on the wall, and draping it over his shoulders.
"Have the men who found them, and the men who cleaned up the scene afterward, all come to see me. And you—take me to look at the bodies now."
Determined to see for himself what was really going on, Tywin ordered the soldier to take him to where the bodies were.
Soon after, the group arrived at the training yard.
Then six shocking corpses lay there on the open ground, frozen hard.
Tywin Lannister frowned at the sight. He took an iron sword from the soldier beside him and stepped forward.
He first took an instinctive look at their faces and found that he did not recognize any of the dead men.
But he noticed that every one of the six corpses was covered in fatal wounds and a dense scatter of chaotic injuries.
It was not hard to tell from the shapes of the wounds that they had been hacked and chopped with blades and axes, and torn and raked—one of them had his neck nearly cut off, with only a few tendons still holding it together.
Looking at the wounds on their bodies, and at the bloodstained tools and weapons set aside nearby, Tywin focused for a moment in thought, but did not arrive at the answer he was seeking.
So he crouched down directly and used his longsword to turn over one of the corpses.
The body was already frozen stiff; prodding it with the iron blade felt like lifting a piece of wood.
It seemed they had been dead for quite some time.
And what was strange was that the skin of every corpse was pale as milk, yet both hands had already turned black.
Moreover, aside from the areas around the wounds, their clothes and other parts showed no bloodstains at all.
That was very odd.
"Doesn't look like an enemy attack—"
Just as Tywin Lannister was examining these details and silently thinking through what might have happened, Kevan's voice came from the side.
Tywin turned his head and saw that Kevan was also inspecting the corpses.
He crouched down, his gloved hand reaching out to grasp the head of the corpse in front of him. But just as he was about to show what he had found, he realized that the hair on the head he was holding was falling away in clumps from his hand.
The hair was brittle, like straw.
Kevan cursed under his breath.
He brushed the broken hair fragments from his hand and had no choice but to use his fingers to brace the corpse's head and turn it over.
"Most of these wounds are to vital areas. Some aren't, but they still don't look like injuries inflicted in a fight. And most importantly—"
As he spoke, Kevan released his hand and pointed at a hunting horn hanging at the corpse's waist.
"He was carrying a hunting horn. If there had been an enemy, he couldn't possibly have died without sounding the horn even once."
"We still left men on the Wall. Unless their eyes were blind and their ears deaf—"
"And looking at the wounds on them, unless there were enemies ten times their number who silently approached, captured them, froze them to death in the snow, and only then left these wounds on them to mislead us."
As Kevan finished speaking, Tywin Lannister shook his head.
"But that is clearly unlikely," he said, his gaze thoughtful, before turning to look at the man responsible for them. "From the time they went out to cut trees to the time the bodies were discovered—roughly how long was it?"
"My lord, yesterday morning. Three other teams went out with them at the same time."
"They didn't realize a team was missing until they finished work and returned at dusk. When we went back to search again today, we found their bodies—"
The man in charge was trembling beside them, though it was unclear whether he feared that the dead men were not himself, or that he might be implicated.
"The distance?" Kevan asked.
"How far from the Wall were you cutting trees?"
Kevan seized on the point.
At that, the man looked as if he were about to break down.
"At the edge of the forest right outside the Wall's boundary. Cutting there makes it easier to bring the timber back—"
Tywin and Kevan both fell silent.
"At that distance, if there really were enemies, the sentries on the Wall couldn't have failed to notice them."
Seeing the blame about to fall squarely on him, the man panicked and suddenly remembered the snowstorm beyond the Wall the day before.
"There was a snowstorm yesterday afternoon. It only lasted about an hour. We took shelter until it passed, then stopped work and came back. That was when we realized they were missing—"
"And when we tried to bring them back, the horses and the hunting dogs simply wouldn't go near them…"
His answer did nothing to resolve the issue.
Instead, the deaths of the six men sounded even more bizarre.
"Take him away. And bring in everyone who went out with them yesterday, as well as everyone who was on duty on the Wall during that time," Tywin ordered.
"Hold them all and question them separately. Make them recount everything they saw and heard yesterday."
Seeing that the matter had not only yielded no breakthrough but grown even more murky, Tywin Lannister chose the safest course.
As he issued the order, Kevan added from the side, "If it was wildlings, then we should close the gate. We've gathered almost all the supplies we need. There's no need to concern ourselves with them."
After several months at Castle Black, Kevan naturally understood the deep hatred between the Night's Watch and the wildlings beyond the Wall.
But that had nothing to do with them. Right now, they needed to focus all their attention on the war to come.
Tywin nodded, agreeing with Kevan's suggestion.
Looking at the corpse before him—the one that had died for no clear reason, with a pair of blue eyes—Tywin thought for a moment and decided that less trouble was better than more.
Whether these men had gone mad and killed indiscriminately, or had truly been tortured to death by the wildlings, their corpses desecrated and thrown back to provoke them, Tywin had no desire to waste time on it now.
So he prepared to turn and leave.
The conversation between Tywin and Kevan had not been spoken in lowered voices, and everyone around had heard it.
Thus, seeing that they did not intend to pursue the matter too deeply, an old Night's Watchman who had defected over stepped forward while looking at the corpses and could not help but speak up. "My lord, I suggest that we burn these bodies."
"According to the customs and practices of the Night's Watch, the dead should all be cremated."
Tywin stopped, glanced at the Night's Watchman, then turned his gaze back to the silent corpses on the ground.
Looking at the clothing—which, aside from the wounds, appeared strangely clean—he thought for a moment and then shook his head.
"Have the maester examine the bodies further to determine the exact cause of death. I have never seen deaths like these. If possible, we should still find out what exactly happened to them."
Although he did not want to dwell on the matter, the eerie nature of the corpses still left Tywin uneasy.
He leaned toward the idea that these men had been killed by wildlings.
But for a team of six men, so close to the Wall and under the watch of sentries above it, Tywin did not believe that the wildlings could have accomplished something like this merely by relying on a snowstorm.
So he intended to use this to assess the fighting strength of the wildlings.
Because a thought had suddenly taken shape in his mind, sparked by Kevan's earlier remark about closing the gate in the Wall.
With that thought in mind, Tywin cast one last look at the corpses on the ground and then turned away.
The onlookers in the training yard, having heard the exchange between the man in charge and Lord Tywin Lannister, also felt that these six unlucky men had simply met with bad luck. They did not pay it much heed and gradually dispersed.
After all, they had heard the words of the two lords clearly. If nothing unexpected happened, they would soon be leaving this cursed place.
That thought could not help but lift the spirits of everyone present.
A few unlucky deaths—no one would care too much about them.
In the blink of an eye, night fell.
Of the six corpses from the day, only two were sent to the maester's tower.
The remaining four were casually placed inside a collapsed building.
Whether for later examination or for burning the bodies, it was more convenient to leave them there.
As night deepened, the soldiers who had been busy all day returned to their quarters one after another, lit their fires, and crawled shivering into their bedding, preparing to endure yet another difficult night.
The four corpses that had been casually placed inside the collapsed building slowly opened their eyes.
In the darkness, four pairs of blue eyes gradually lit up.
The corpses—whose chests no longer rose and fell, whose hearts no longer beat—began, at that moment, to move in an eerie fashion.
Bracing themselves against the surrounding rubble and broken stones, the corpses stood there in the pitch-black night.
Only a few scattered campfires cast enough light to faintly outline their shapes.
Then they began to move. Whether deliberately or by instinct, they avoided the firelight, following the darkness as they walked through the night of Castle Black.
Those clusters of warm flesh gathered together drew them with a maddening pull.
Once they closed to a sufficient distance, they could no longer resist that attraction. They suddenly lunged into the light reached by the fire, bursting into rooms filled with the sound of snoring.
At that very moment, the horses penned within Castle Black and the hunting dogs resting in the kennels were all startled awake, as if by something unseen.
The horses neighed wildly; the hunting dogs barked frantically.
The quiet night, in an instant, was like still water suddenly brought to a boil, erupting into chaos.
In the maester's tower, two young maesters were tidying their beds.
With so many people arriving at Castle Black all at once, the not-so-large place now felt especially cramped.
In its heyday, Castle Black had indeed been able to hold that many men.
But after such a long passage of time—after declining from prosperity to neglect—the long-fallen Night's Watch no longer had the strength to maintain such vast structures.
Aside from a few rooms used for daily needs, most of Castle Black had long since fallen into disrepair.
That it could barely accommodate so many people now was only because many areas had been rebuilt bit by bit after their arrival.
So, unfortunately for them, after Lord Tywin Lannister issued his orders that day, two more corpses were added to the small room that had originally belonged to them.
As for tonight, they had no choice but to stay together with those two unlucky bodies.
Of the two unlucky maesters, the younger one patted his pillow, then turned and sat down on the bed. As he took off his shoes, he sighed and spoke.
"Did you notice? Their blood had actually coagulated into clumps, like meat jelly—very thick meat jelly. And their skin was dry and hard, and brittle."
"When the knife cut in, I thought I was slicing day-old bread."
"The flesh was strange too. I really don't know what methods those wildlings used to torment them."
"Hm? Why aren't you saying anything? Have you figured out how we're supposed to report this to Lord Tywin tomorrow?"
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