A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

walk
single file as they left. The vault opened onto one of the tunnels the brothers
called the wormwalks, winding subterranean passages that linked the keeps and
towers of Castle Black under the earth. In summer the wormwalks were seldom
used, save by rats and other vermin, but winter was a different matter. When
the snows drifted forty and fifty feet high and the ice winds came howling out
of the north, the tunnels were all that held Castle Black together.
    Soon,
Jon thought as they climbed. He’d seen the harbinger that had
come to Maester Aemon with word of summer’s end, the great raven of the
Citadel, white and silent as Ghost. He had seen a winter once, when he was very
young, but everyone agreed that it had been a short one, and mild. This one
would be

different. He could feel it in his bones.
    The steep stone steps had Sam puffing like a blacksmith’s bellows by the time
they reached the surface. They emerged into a brisk wind that made Jon’s cloak
swirl and snap. Ghost was stretched out asleep beneath the wattle-and-daub wall
of the granary, but he woke when Jon appeared, bushy white tail held stiffly
upright as he trotted to them.
    Sam squinted up at the Wall. It loomed above them, an icy cliff seven hundred
feet high. Sometimes it seemed to Jon almost a living thing, with moods of its
own. The color of the ice was wont to change with every shift of the light. Now
it was the deep blue of frozen rivers, now the dirty white of old snow, and
when a cloud passed before the sun it darkened to the pale grey of pitted
stone. The Wall stretched east and west as far as the eye could see, so huge
that it shrunk the timbered keeps and stone towers of the castle to
insignificance. It was the end of the world.
    And we are going beyond it.
    The morning sky was streaked by thin grey clouds, but the pale red line was
there behind them. The black brothers had dubbed the wanderer Mormont’s Torch,
saying (only half in jest) that the gods must have sent it to light the old
man’s way through the haunted forest.
    â€œThe comet’s so bright you can see it by day now,” Sam said, shading his eyes
with a fistful of books.
    â€œNever mind about comets, it’s maps the Old Bear wants.”
    Ghost loped ahead of them. The grounds seemed deserted this

morning, with so many rangers off at the brothel in Mole’s Town, digging for
buried treasure and drinking themselves blind. Grenn had gone with them. Pyp
and Halder and Toad had offered to buy him his first woman to celebrate his
first ranging. They’d wanted Jon and Sam to come as well, but Sam was almost as
frightened of whores as he was of the haunted forest, and Jon had wanted no
part of it. “Do what you want,” he told Toad, “I took a vow.”
    As they passed the sept, he heard voices raised in song.
Some men want
whores on the eve of battle, and some want gods.
Jon wondered who felt
better afterward. The sept tempted him no more than the brothel; his own gods
kept their temples in the wild places, where the weirwoods spread their
bone-white branches.
The Seven have no power beyond the Wall,
he
thought,
but my gods will be waiting.
    Outside the armory, Ser Endrew Tarth was working with some raw recruits. They’d
come in last night with Conwy, one of the wandering crows who roamed the Seven
Kingdoms collecting men for the Wall. This new crop consisted of a greybeard
leaning on a staff, two blond boys with the look of brothers, a foppish youth
in soiled satin, a raggy man with a clubfoot, and some grinning loon who must
have fancied himself a warrior. Ser Endrew was showing him the error of that
presumption. He was a gentler master-at-arms than Ser Alliser Thorne had been,
but his lessons would still raise bruises. Sam winced at every blow, but Jon
Snow watched the swordplay closely.
    â€œWhat do you make of them, Snow?” Donal Noye stood in the

door of his armory, bare-chested under a leather apron, the stump of his left
arm uncovered for once. With his big gut and barrel chest, his flat nose and
bristly black jaw, Noye did not make a pretty sight, but he was a welcome one
nonetheless. The armorer had proved himself a good friend.
    â€œThey smell of summer,” Jon said as Ser Endrew bullrushed his foe and knocked
him sprawling. “Where did Conwy find them?”
    â€œA lord’s dungeon near Gulltown,” the smith replied. “A brigand, a