Chapter 386: The False Alarm Incident (Part 2)
After hearing this news, Egger felt both a sense of relief and a growing weight of worry.
He was relieved that the enemy seemingly hadn't realized the supreme commander of the human forces had risked leaving the front lines, leaving the Gift in a brief state of being a leaderless dragon. Had they launched a general assault instead of playing these tricks, they might already have breached the Gorge, destroyed the Gift, and been well on their way down the Kingsroad toward Winterfell to destroy the Seven Kingdoms.
What worried him, however, was that while these movements of the wights might look like tricks, they showed the Night King had a firm grasp on his army's advantages—never eats, never sleeps, never fears death. He had formulated a grueling tactic specifically designed to be difficult for human defenders to counter, and a solution was hard to find.
Egger's reason for forcing a defensive line at the Gorge, despite knowing it would be difficult to hold, was twofold: first, as previously mentioned, to provide warning time for tens of thousands of Gift residents and prevent the enemy from slipping past the Wall to strike the North. But there was another vital factor—he wanted to use the natural barrier of the canyon, which was nearly as formidable as the Wall itself, to achieve a favorable kill-to-loss ratio and grind down the enemy's numbers.
The Night's Watch had one town and twenty fortresses, which sounded like a lot, but at least a third were in ruins with little defensive capability. If the Others bypassed the Wall, Egger would struggle even to stuff forty thousand people behind stone walls, rendering his advantages in manpower and preparation useless. Conversely, by deploying ten thousand men—carrying nearly half of the Gift's dragonglass and wildfire—to the Gorge, he could exploit the terrain. If the Night King truly directed the army of the dead to force a crossing using human-wave tactics, they might break the line, but they would have to pay a price of at least a five-digit number of wights to the wildfire first.
Draining a quarter or a third of the enemy's strength in one battle would significantly ease the pressure when the Watch fought them later within the Gift.
But now, the Night King wasn't playing into Egger's hand with brute force. Instead, he was using small-scale nighttime harassment to drain human morale and materiel—using a dull knife to slowly saw away at the defensive line Egger had so carefully prepared.
Sending several hundred or a thousand soldiers across the Gorge and over the frozen Milkwater every night to die at the feet of the defenders was a tactic no normal army could use; the blow to their own morale would far outweigh the trouble caused to the defenders. But wights had no concept of morale, nor did they fear exhaustion or injury. They crossed the river under the defenders' noses to destroy the weirwoods on the south bank. If the defenders tried to eliminate them all in the dark, they would burn through vast amounts of supplies. If they ignored them... the psychological tension was secondary; the fear was that the boy who cried wolf would repeat day after day. If the defenders at some point grew lax, and the enemy suddenly turned a feint into a general assault, disaster would strike.
"The most important thing right now is to judge the enemy's intent. Do the Others truly fear the weirwoods so much that they 'won't cross the Gorge until they've cleared them all,' or is destroying the forest just a feint? Is their main goal to use exhaustion tactics to drain our energy and supplies?" Egger regained his composure and tapped the table, forcing the conversation from the false alarm into serious military discussion. "Beyond that, we must consider a third possibility: is the enemy using a diversion to keep our main defensive force pinned at the Gorge while the bulk of their army bypasses the Wall elsewhere to launch a sneak attack?"
Warner nodded. "We suspected that, so the day before yesterday, we set aside Master Stark's warnings and risked sending skinchangers to scout the north side of the Wall. The result was that the eagle controlled by the skinchanger at the Gorge failed to return, and the man went mad; he is currently under house arrest at the Shadow Tower. Other skinchangers say he might recover with luck, but it's hard to say how long it will take."
It's difficult enough for a skinchanger to obtain a controllable bird, so that's one lost... let's hope the man is alright.
Egger sighed. "Good. At least we know the Night King is still opposite the Gorge. Stop sending skinchangers across the canyon to sacrifice birds, but flight reconnaissance along the rest of the Wall should continue... even at the risk of losing skinchangers, this is no time for petty bean-counting."
"Understood. I will relay that order to all fortresses along the Wall immediately."
Egger's logic was simple: unless the Night King detached himself from the wight army to act alone, he would be wherever the skinchangers suffered losses. As long as flight reconnaissance continued, an army of tens of thousands of dead could not move silently to another location for a surprise attack. And if one day the skinchangers assigned to a section of the Wall began losing their birds... it would at least prove that the defenders in that sector needed to significantly heighten their vigilance.
"The troop strength at the Gorge has reached the upper limit of what I intended. The paths along the cliffs are narrow and rugged; adding more men won't help. The Wall can block the Great Other's power from seeping south; protecting it is a higher priority than the gain or loss of a single town or territory... No matter how the commanders of the Shadow Tower or Eastwatch exaggerate the urgency, we will not draw basic garrison forces from the Wall to reinforce them, lest we leave gaps in the top-of-the-wall defenses. Other than holding that bottom line... in all other aspects, every department in the Gift must do its utmost to meet the front-line commanders' requirements." Egger took a deep breath. "Alright, is there anything else that needs to be discussed now?"
"Yes." Yam looked at his two colleagues and spoke with hesitation. "The night of the false alarm, when the beacons in the Gorge were lit, the Gift immediately entered the High-Level Alert state you arranged. But in the process, several accidents occurred and many problems were exposed. A riot occurred in the outer district of Queenscrown that night, along with several brawls and at least half a dozen rapes. Robberies were too numerous to count. Some even tried to storm the inner keep in the dark—after we caught the ringleader, he admitted they wanted to 'rescue' Mance Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall whom we have under house arrest, so he could take command of the war against the dead in place of you, who had 'fled before the battle.' The most ridiculous part was... someone actually drowned in that small lake in the center of Queenscrown. No, more accurately, they froze to death. We can't determine if he was shoved into an ice hole or if he thought hiding under the frozen lake would save him from the White Walkers' slaughter."
"Similar situations occurred in many fortresses along the Wall, though it was worst in Queenscrown due to the population density," Warner Buckwell added with a grim expression. "That night of the false alarm, not a single one of us was killed by White Walkers or wights, but internal chaos resulted in double-digit casualties. We held people accountable at dawn; in Queenscrown alone, we hanged over a dozen troublemakers... Many of the culprits admitted they had believed the rumors that 'the Lord Commander had abandoned the Wall and fled,' and thinking we had no hope of winning the war, they acted out in despair."
"Did you catch the people spreading the rumors?"
"No. My Lord, this isn't like typical slander or malicious gossip. The rumors weren't invented by one specific person; they were an evolution of the association people made with the fact of your 'departure from Queenscrown.' There's no way to trace it, and no way to catch a 'mastermind'—more accurately, if you really wanted to pursue it, you'd have to punish far too many people."
"There was also a small tribe assigned to the south of Queenscrown that directly defied the Night's Watch's combat protocols... When the beacons were lit, they abandoned their station and headed south along the Kingsroad to flee the Gift for 'warmer places.' They didn't even use their brains to think: how would a group of over a hundred people, including women and children, pass through the North unnoticed? If I hadn't personally led cavalry to bring them back the next day, they likely would have died at the hands of the Umber army before ever seeing a White Walker... They aren't worth pitying, but the North will likely blame this 'poor management' on you, my Lord," Warner said coldly. "The leader of that tribe has been thrown into the dungeon; his fate is for you to decide."
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