Chapter 421: The Defense of the Shadow Tower
Despite his criticisms and wait-and-see attitude regarding the new Lord Commander's methods and political leanings, Denys Mallister had to admit: Egger's title of Other-Slayer should probably be changed to Other-Bane.
He truly seemed to have anticipated the enemy's every move.
For thousands of years, the Night's Watch had focused its defense on the Wall; Egger insisted on opening mountain paths and establishing a new line of defense on the southern side of the gorge—and the enemy eventually came by crossing that very gorge.
Since its founding, the Watch had never built walls around its castles to show the Seven Kingdoms they had no political ambitions; Egger broke tradition and ordered every keep to prepare for a defense independent of the Wall—and now the Others had indeed bypassed the ice.
When he accepted the wildlings a year ago, nearly half the Watch opposed him. After taking office, Egger would rather hide in Queenscrown to push his policies than back down. In the end, facts proved him right: he could sustain the New Gift population and make them useful in the war...
Though he thought this way, Denys's reason told him that Egger hadn't so much predicted every move as he had considered every possible strategy the enemy might take, arranged the countermeasures, and informed everyone.
He now had to admit that even with his own legendary caution, he could not have done better than Egger. To serve such a strong and brilliant Lord Commander in the final stage of his life's journey made his defeat in the election feel justified. He even felt fortunate for his eventual choice to cooperate.
Everything was written in the defense protocol. All Denys had to do now was execute it faithfully. The Shadow Tower was primarily responsible for the easternmost quarter of the Great Gorge defense. The moment the beacons in the gorge were lit, the castle gates swung wide. Under the orderly direction of the soldiers, the eastern half of the passage was used for Gift residents living outside the walls to seek refuge, while the western half was used for the fortress's reserves to move out with supplies to reinforce the front.
A reserve force of over four hundred men set out from the Shadow Tower toward Gorgeview, continuing until they met the reserves coming from the other direction. Since the entire gorge line was under attack, they supported all defensive sections rather than a single point. At every engaged section along the way, the reserves left behind half a squad of soldiers, a crate of wildfire, and bundles of arrows. This level of reinforcement wasn't massive, but its tactical significance and the psychological comfort it provided the defenders were staggering.
The defenders in the eastern gorge were neither more numerous nor more brave than those in the west... but because they knew there were people behind them and that they would not be abandoned, they held out much longer as a whole, forcing the wight army to pay a steeper price.
It wasn't until news arrived that the western section had fallen and the front-line commanders agreed that further resistance was meaningless that the reserves began a disciplined withdrawal toward the ends of the line. After a few tense but small skirmishes, they successfully retreated most of the defenders safely into the fortress.
Westbridge-by-the-Bridge, consisting of only a single tower, was abandoned directly. The Shadow Tower, having completed all preparations, slammed its gates shut after the last civilian scrambled inside, quietly awaiting the enemy's next move.
The defenders who had retreated into Gorgeview ultimately did not escape; the fires of their battle were visible from the top of the Wall half a gorge away. However, their sacrifice provided the final warning and precious preparation time for the entire Gift. The full length of the Wall had completed its evacuation and final combat readiness. Denys panted as he walked along the walls of the fortress he had commanded for decades, checking preparations, calming the recruits, and offering defensive pointers.
The sentries watched the west for hours. They saw the fires along the gorge gradually dim, but not a single wight appeared. Midnight passed, and the defenders had even finished a hot late-night meal. Everyone began to wonder if the enemy had bypassed the Shadow Tower to attack other castles or head straight south. Then, they finally appeared.
...
Without the obstruction of terrain or the cover of forests, the arrival of the wight tide was exceptionally conspicuous. Even the sound-absorbing effect of the thick snow could not stifle the vibrations caused by tens of thousands of undead puppets trampling the earth. First came the muffled thunder of footsteps, and soon the sea of corpses emerged from the western mountains—like ink spilled across white paper—surging toward the Shadow Tower across the snowy wilderness.
How many wights were in that dark mass? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? More? No one could tell. When numbers reach a certain scale, the human brain loses its ability to judge. In the black of night, the defenders couldn't even estimate; they could only describe it as a sea of corpses stretching from the visible edge back to the dim mountains and forest, with no end in sight.
The ink did not strike the Shadow Tower directly from the west. Instead, it flowed past the southern side, keeping a slight distance from the Wall, until it had painted all three visible sides of the Shadow Tower black, completely surrounding it as an island before beginning the assault.
If the gorge defenders had been a levee blocking the tide, the Shadow Tower was a reef on the beach. While the total number of enemies was the same, the gorge defenders only had to face a linear attack from one direction. The Night's Watch in the Shadow Tower, however, had to face the dead coming from every direction over a 270-degree arc!
They required no rest or food. There was no reading of a declaration of war, nor any envoy calling for surrender. The Night King was even more committed to action over talk than Jaime Lannister. The tens of thousands of wights, controlled by a dozen Others, did not waste a second. The moment the encirclement was formed, they launched a simultaneous, all-out assault from every direction, showing a determination to take the Shadow Tower at any cost.
Successive blasts of horns rang out. Signals of attack and calls for aid were transmitted via sound, beacons, ravens, and messengers galloping along the top of the Wall, surging like electrical signals through a nerve toward the other seventeen castles and Queenscrown.
Sentinel Stand, Greyguard, the Nightfort, and other nearby castles were already prepared. They had sent redundant weapons and reserve forces to wait atop the Wall hours ago. No one could guarantee the enemy wouldn't bypass the Shadow Tower to hit other points, so concentrating manpower couldn't be done in advance. Only now, with the attack confirmed, did the mobile forces who had been shivering in the cold wind begin to march along the broad transport highway atop the Wall toward the besieged fortress.
...
"Fire!"
"Light them up!"
"Burn them all!"
The well-established fortress had far more tricks up its sleeve than the hastily built gorge line. A defensive zone cleared of snow already lay outside the high stone walls, packed with wooden stakes and fences tipped with dragonglass. Further out, a trench had been hacked into the permafrost and filled with non-volatile pitch.
Denys Mallister, over seventy years old, was far more composed than any other commander in the Watch. He strictly forbade any soldier from wasting a single scrap of material until the tide entered the kill zone—the thirty meters closest to the wall. But the instant the wights stepped into that space, the old man gave the order. Countless fire arrows and wildfire jars were shot and hurled with precision. The high heat of the green flames quickly ignited the less-flammable wood and pitch. Within seconds, a massive field of fire several meters wide formed around the Shadow Tower, so bright it could be seen miles away.
Anyone wishing to approach the Shadow Tower had to first undergo a baptism of fire!
But this field of fire only delayed the tide for a moment. This was a charge across a plain, not a climb up a gorge cliff; a mere twenty meters could be crossed in seconds. Even the most fragile wight wouldn't be incinerated instantly. The Others didn't bother wasting magic to space out their puppets to reduce casualties; they relied on sheer numbers, choosing to simply move through the sea of flames!
The living dead rushed forward wave after wave, using their bodies to crush the stakes and fill the flaming trenches. Countless wights fell, their bodies becoming fuel for the fire, but even more charged through the flames, glowing with embers as they reached the base of the walls!
Wights do fear fire, but only because the corpse oil—the carrier for the cold magic—loses its link to the Others once consumed. They do not fear heat or pain themselves, and the flammability of corpse oil is only comparable to pitch, nowhere near that of gasoline or wildfire. The Watch had been stockpiling wildfire for years, even acquiring the Mad King's entire remaining stock from the Alchemists' Guild in King's Landing. The supply was large, but certainly not enough to pour a moat around the entire castle. To ignite the fire quickly, the defenders used small amounts of wildfire as an accelerant, but the primary fuel remained wood and pitch. It was easy to maintain the flame, but the temperature wasn't high enough to kill wights instantly.
The wights did not fear death; they only wanted to reach the wall and complete the assault!
With a series of muffled thuds, the wights slammed into the walls of the Shadow Tower, snarling as they began to scale the stone... A stone wall was not as easy to climb as a gorge slope, especially since the defenders had poured water over it earlier to create a slick coating of ice. Wights were incapable of complex operations like stepping on shoulders or forming human pyramids, nor did they need to. What they did was use the bodies of those shot down, crippled, or crushed beneath them as stepping stones, building a mountain of the dead to crawl upward at all costs!
One by one, group by group... the tide of wights that had crossed the fire began to pile up at the base of the wall. The height grew from one meter to two, then three and four, rapidly approaching the top. The soldiers on the wall loosed arrows frantically, only to realize they were drinking poison to quench thirst: wights killed by dragonglass fell and immediately became stepping stones for others. The more they killed, the more stable the mountain of the dead became. Without needing orders from Denys Mallister, everyone knew what to do.
The large shipment of solidified wildfire from King's Landing could finally be put to use.
This wildfire, passivated into a gel-like state for safe long-distance transport, was nothing like the pitch burning on the wood. Once passivated by the Night's Watch industrial technicians, its stability was extremely high, and it couldn't be transformed back into liquid form once it reached the Gift. Because of its high ignition point and lack of explosiveness, it wasn't suitable for grenades or projectile weapons, so it had sat in the magazines of various castles. But its essence remained unchanged: once ignited, the heat released by solidified wildfire was equal to or even higher than that of fresh wildfire.
Crate after crate of aged wildfire from the era of Aerys Targaryen was smashed onto the heads of the climbing wights. Amidst the clatter of breaking jars, thick, viscous, ghostly green liquid splashed over the besiegers. A single torch was dropped, and a towering green flame roared up instantly, burning like a volcanic eruption!
At the foot of the wall, there was no thick snow to sap the wildfire's strength, and there were piles of wights acting as ready-made firewood and racks. The wildfire burned with a vibrant, ferocious intensity, instantly swallowing every wight surrounding the castle. The mountain of corpses, already four or five meters high, looked like a soft-bodied monster trying to scale the wall; under the searing heat, it rapidly shriveled and sank, falling away from the top of the wall.
Wildfire ignited corpse oil, and corpse oil ignited flesh and bone. Every combustible organic component of the wights became part of the blaze. Amidst the hissing of the wights in the smoky inferno, strange popping sounds rang out—the body cavities and organs of the more intact wights bursting under the extreme heat.
The stench was nauseating, but the situation looked excellent. Everyone was heartened. At this rate, as long as they held out until wildfire from other castles arrived via the Wall, the dead wouldn't set a single foot over the walls before dawn.
The new problem was that the fire was too large. The towering tongues of flame scorched the men at the edge of the wall, making it impossible to stay close and observe the situation below.
...
"Move all the flammable and explosive materials further in! Don't let them be scorched! Watch out for burns! Tell the kitchens to send more water up to the wall!"
Denys ran about, shouting orders. He couldn't blame the soldiers for acting on their own; this was, after all, the standard response in the defense protocol. Burning the fortress was better than letting the wights inside. But now he had to consider the threat the wildfire posed to the walls—not that the heat would crack the stones and cause a collapse, but... the godsdamn gates were made of wood! Thick and sturdy as they were, they could never withstand prolonged exposure to wildfire!
"Move all the caltrops and chevaux-de-frise to face the gates! Go to the training ground and bring any useless stones you can find—if there aren't enough, tear down the houses! Start with the barracks; no one is going to need to sleep tonight anyway!"
Despite his old age and frail body, the commander of the Shadow Tower still had plenty of fire in his lungs. He stood in the open courtyard facing the gates, directing the chaos with a voice loud enough for those on the walls to hear. Thanks to the perfect execution of the protocol—which provided refuge for local residents and covered the retreat of hundreds of gorge defenders—there were nearly three thousand people in the Shadow Tower. Even without the mobile forces from the Wall, and excluding the elderly, weak, and wildling spearwives, there were still over a thousand male defenders. Such a number would be spread thin over a ten-mile stretch of the gorge, but on the three-sided walls of the Shadow Tower, it was enough to pack every section of the wall and still have plenty of men inside for logistics and reserves.
Denys assigned the boys who were too young to have much strength to carry water and tend the fires, the women to move war materiel and junk on carts, and those with medical experience to handle the wounded. A massive amount of non-combustible junk was piled behind the gate to act as a secondary barrier if the wooden doors were burned through. Just as everyone in the fortress, from the men to the women, was busy with their tasks, the defenders on the walls flanking the gate suddenly cried out in unison.
"Gods, mammoths!"
"Damn it, giants too!"
"Don't just stand there, shoot!"
"Why aren't the arrows working?"
"The hides are too thick... use the bombs! Use the bombs!"
"Don't use the bombs! Those are for the White Walkers!" Denys Mallister roared, his temper flared by the shouts of these fools, but his voice was completely swallowed by the rising screams and shouts. Just as he called a soldier over to run up the wall and order them not to waste the precious trump cards, a thunderous boom—as if struck by the hammer of the gods—slammed into the gates. The entire fortress shuddered, and the very ground seemed to tremble.
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