Chapter 424: The Cold Magic Manifests
In a siege between the living, if the attackers find their assault failing to make immediate headway, they would undoubtedly choose to withdraw temporarily to avoid meaningless casualties. They would rest, regroup, deliberate on new plans, and rotate out bloodied units before striking again with better coordination.
The army of wights, however, followed no such logic.
Despite the Shadow Tower's defenders wielding weapons that completely countered them, the sea of corpses only slowed its pace slightly (and even that was largely an illusion born of the defenders' growing confidence). They had not the slightest intention of ceasing their suicidal advance. The outer ring of the first annihilation zone—maintained by burning wood and pitch—had been trampled nearly to extinction. The ratio of living dead successfully crossing this zone to reach the walls grew steadily. Wave after wave of wights surged like a rising tide, endlessly battering the defensive line formed by wildfire and high stone.
Though a few scattered wights, wreathed in flames, finally began to scale the battlements and force the defenders to use their dragonglass spears, they remained, for the most part, like water droplets hitting a red-hot iron plate—vanishing into steam with a sharp hiss. The human line remained firm.
However, because the attack never faltered, and due to the dual effect of the blind spot caused by the glaring fires and the urgency of the wights clawing at their very feet, no one could see the internal redeployments happening within the dark mass of the undead host. Not until the tide of battle at the gate shifted once more.
...
Because the gate had been breached, the defenders had poured far more wildfire and nearly all their dragonglass bombs into this area than any other section of the wall to shore up the weakness. In other sectors, the fires were confined to the base of the walls, burning only the wights already attempting to climb. But at the gateway, they had forcibly created a sea of fire spanning a dozen meters. To conserve wildfire, the defenders continuously hurled timber into the inferno to keep it roaring.
Looking down from the top of the Wall, this brilliant ring of fire was as conspicuous as a pigeon-egg diamond set in a platinum ring—shining and dazzling. Let alone ordinary wights; even if several more mammoths appeared, they would have been scorched to the bone trying to wade through that hell.
The roaring flames seemed to dispel the winter chill, making the temperature inside the Shadow Tower feel significantly higher. The apocalyptic tension began to ease as the enemy took heavy losses. Two scorpions had been manhandled into position inside the courtyard and aimed squarely at the gateway. With the supplemental line of reinforcements established, nerves began to fray less, and the reserve soldiers tasked with cleaning up the stray wights that managed to lunge through the gate even began to worry about other things.
"Hey," one reinforcement from Sentinel Stand asked, "you think the wildfire might bake the permafrost until it gets soft? Could the wall tilt outward and collapse?"
"Stop overthinking," a Shadow Tower man replied. "We dug those foundations ourselves last year. We had to build fires to thaw the ground just to dig it out section by section. Luckily it wasn't this cold then. Once you get past the surface, it's manageable. Under Ser Denys's personal supervision, everyone—craftsmen, stewards, even the 'noble' ranger lords—took turns on the shovels. We laid a foundation four times wider than the wall is thick! Instead of worrying about the wall falling, you should worry about the wildfire melting the Wall itself and the ice crashing down south to crush us all!"
It was a cold joke, but it served to break the tension. The nearby soldiers laughed, and one of them casually loosed an arrow to finish off a wight that had somehow crossed the fire and cleared the barricades, stumbling into the courtyard wreathed in flames.
Compared to the brothers on the battlements who were scrambling to defend against the horde while being scorched by the heat of their own wildfire, the gate felt almost comfortable.
Then, a blast of cold wind swept through. The flames on the surrounding torches flickered violently, and the snowflakes drifting from above suddenly thickened.
The men who had been laughing felt their skin crawl as goosebumps erupted. Before they could crack another joke to settle their nerves, a scream from the battlements made their blood run cold.
"What? Why isn't the fire burning? Add more wildfire! It's still not working! The bombs! Where are the bombs?!"
Three of the commanded Priests of the Cold God had reached the edge of the fire under the cover of the giants and mammoths. They began to channel their cold magic at close range.
Due to the suppression field of the Wall, a spell of normal potency now had to be cast from a much shorter distance and required far more magical energy. This was why the Night King had sent them as a trio for this single task. With a magic recovery rate of only 1%, spells had become consumables as precious as the humans' bombs. They had never intended to reveal this card so early in the first battle for the Wall.
After tonight's casting, these three priests would either have to return north of the Great Gorge to replenish their magic or remain mere observers in the critical battles of the next two to three days, reducing the Cold God's active servants by three.
It was a heavy price, but a heavy price brought swift and terrifying results. As the spells were channeled and magic was rapidly consumed, the most brilliant diamond on the ring protecting the Shadow Tower suddenly dimmed!
The three priests had joined forces to lock the flow of air within that small space at the gateway. By halting the convection of air, they cut off the oxygen required for combustion. Once the flames died, they plummeted the temperature in that zone, forcibly smothering the defensive inferno that was vital to the defenders. A massive gap was exposed in the defense of the ruined gate!
Shadow-bears, shadow-wolves... these specialized breeds of the Cold God, far faster than humanoid wights because they ran on all fours, lunged from the sea of corpses the moment the flames died. They roared as they surged into the dark maw of the gateway.
The panicked defenders on the wall immediately used the reserve bombs from Sentinel Stand to plug the entrance. Black powder contains its own oxidizer, so a lack of oxygen could not stop the explosions. Thunderous roars indeed hindered the swift wights, but limited dragonglass fragments could never match the all-encompassing reach of a wall of flame. Because of the innate agility of predators, the fallen wights at the front could not stop the wolves and bears following behind. Amidst flying flesh and bone, even if only half of the swift wights made it through, they were an endless nightmare for the defenders.
"Loose!"
The moment the first shadow-wolf cleared the gateway and leaped over the barricades toward the defenders, the gate-watch began a slaughter with intense fire. The dense pack of dragonglass arrows left the enemy no place to hide, and the scorpions fired with thunderous thuds, their spears often transfixing several enemies at once, pinning wight-kebabs to the stone walls of the passage.
For a moment, the scene was encouraging: it seemed the new breeds of wights could not break the line either. But human archers have gaps between their shots, and scorpions are agonizingly slow to reload. They could not maintain the initial density of fire. As the shadow-wolves and bears slammed into and overturned the hastily built barricades, and as the newly arrived bombs were exhausted, the explosions ceased. The frenzied enemies began to push the front line deeper into the fortress.
One hundred and seventy seconds after the three Priests of the Cold God risked the front line to extinguish the fire, the first shadow-wolf broke into the human ranks. It took three soldiers with dragonglass spears working together to kill it before it could reach the archers, but only seconds later, a shadow-bear—still active despite an arrow in its shoulder—finally lunged over a barricade. Before other soldiers could put it down, it crushed the head of a luckless Night's Watchman in its jaws. The first victim of the gate defense was claimed.
...
In a war between the living, if an enemy breaches the walls, the defenders can still drive them back through a heroic and bloody counter-charge. That possibility did not exist in this war of Ice and Fire. When the living fight the dead, there are only two outcomes: near-zero casualties, or total rout. There is no middle ground.
When the defenders' firepower is greater than the enemy's rate of entry, and as long as the Others do not intervene, the defenders can ideally achieve zero casualties until their weapons run out. But once the firepower drops below the enemy's speed, casualties begin to appear and mount. Each death further reduces the firepower. In this vicious cycle, the only thing waiting for the living is total defeat—at best, they might exchange their lives to take down more enemies before being wiped out.
Amidst screams and pleas, the death toll broke zero and climbed from one to two, from two to three... ten... twenty. Even then, the situation did not look beyond saving; two hundred soldiers held the gate, and as one fell, another stepped up. More logistics personnel could join at any time. But with the disappearance of distance and depth, and the start of hand-to-hand combat, the end was a foregone conclusion.
Even at this moment, at other points along the wall where the fires had not been extinguished, the wights' attacks never ceased. The seven or eight hundred soldiers on the battlements were struggling to save themselves, with no chance to look back at the interior of the fortress, let alone descend to reinforce the gate.
"My lord, your life is more meaningful to the Watch! Retreat to the stairs at once! I will take command here!" shouted Ben, who had taken over the two dragonsteel arrows from Qhorin Halfhand. "I'll stay here. If any White Walker shows his face, I'll cut him down with Lightbringer!"
In contrast to before, when it took several men pulling him to get him to move, Denys Mallister did not stubbornly persist this time. He nodded silently to Ben—without a single word of ceremony—and, protected by his personal guards, retreated toward the stairs at the rear of the Shadow Tower.
He was not running. He was going to execute the darkest, most cold-blooded part of the Wall Defense Protocol, a section known only to the commanders of the castles.
[When the fall of a fortress is inevitable, the commander must destroy the stairs to the Wall at all costs. This takes priority over everything else.]
He had already assigned this task to Qhorin Halfhand, who was always reliable. Even if something went wrong there, if the few defenders atop the Wall were quick-witted enough, they could destroy the stairs from above. But after witnessing the inconceivable magical powers of the Others, Denys decided to act personally. He would form a triple-insurance policy with his second-in-command and the sentries atop the ice, ensuring that under no circumstances would the stairs remain.
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