Chen Changfeng had finally managed a rare moment of ease in his tent. Seeing through Xu Qinghuan's scheme was, after all, a deeply satisfying affair.
Just then, footsteps approached from afar. Qin, leading a few close attendants, trotted up to him and bowed with great ceremony.
"My lord. The supply train from the northern route has arrived. Several large carts are covered in thick felt tarps, and the wheel ruts run deep." Qin lowered his voice, barely containing his excitement. "Our men sent to receive them have verified the cargo—it's trebuchets! Several hundred army craftsmen follow behind."
Chen Changfeng listened, then turned to gaze toward the northern edge of the camp.
Dawn had not yet fully broken; torchlight formed a long serpentine line, winding its way slowly toward the central camp.
The serpent crept forward at a crawl, each movement accompanied by the dull rumble of wooden wheels grinding against the earth.
On the open ground north of the central camp, more than a dozen colossal wooden wagons, each hauled by eight horses, were slowly coming to a halt. The Hu soldiers clustered around with torches, and the craftsmen who had driven the wagons tore away the felt coverings.
The heavy, rough-hewn throwing arms of the trebuchets were revealed.
The wooden mechanisms, pieced together from massive timbers, exuded a chilling murderous aura in the night.
The frustration of two days of failed assaults had been pressing down on every general in the camp, nearly suffocating them. Now, with such siege engines arriving, the surrounding Hu commanders began to talk animatedly.
"Blessings of the Eternal Heaven! With such divine instruments, those Southerners' precious stone walls will be a joke!" a chiliarch shouted, slapping the shaft of a wagon.
"Come daylight, we'll smash Fendong Pass to bits! And at night, let Zuo Bamu tunnel right through their foundations from below!"
The soldiers gathered around the heavy machines, pounding each other's shoulders and shouting in their native grassland tongue.
The morale dented during the day was swiftly rebuilt.
With such engines to batter the walls, that grey stone fortification, no matter how hard, could hardly withstand the repeated bombardment of thousand-jin boulders.
Chen Changfeng paused to watch for a moment, then turned to Qin and ordered: "Go to the central command tent. Ask the Gully King to come and decide on the placement of these engines. Make sure the soldiers don't accidentally damage the mechanisms."
Qin acknowledged and hurried off.
Before long, Ashina Dubi strode over, surrounded by a cadre of personal guards. The night wind whipped at the fox-fur robe draped over the Left Luli King.
The supreme commander of the central army did not advance even half a step further, nor did he trouble himself to inspect the conspicuous siege engines.
Instead, he turned and fixed his gaze on Chen Changfeng.
Ashina Dubi stared at those colossal machines, two deep furrows forming on his brow.
"Lord Chen!" Ashina Dubi bit off each syllable. "These trebuchets—where were they dispatched from? I am commanding this campaign here, and yet I heard nothing of this?"
Earlier, when the central army had run out of provisions, pleas for aid had indeed been sent back to the royal court. But by all reason, what should have arrived were wagonloads of wheat and dried meat.
Siege engines requiring hundreds of craftsmen to maintain along the route moved at the pace of a crawling tortoise. How could they have crossed the wilderness to the front lines in just a few days?
"The western army is locked in a hard fight. The royal court doesn't have an abundance of cards to play. Why, then, would these trebuchets be allotted to me?"
Chen Changfeng lowered his head and performed a proper, formal bow.
His reply left no gap for fault-finding, clearly placing himself outside the matter: "To answer the Gully King: this is by the great Khan's own direct order. He commanded the rear craftsmen to work day and night to rush these weapons out and deliver them here."
"I, as a mere official, was only following orders from above, clearing the camp in advance to receive them."
Ashina Dubi let out not another word, but resentment began to brew deep inside him.
His scouts could not report exactly what the situation was at the western army.
But Ashina Gudu, as the supreme ruler of the royal court, had now cast him, the central army commander, aside and forced these heavy weapons straight into his camp.
The most humiliating part was that matters of such military gravity had been disclosed only to Chen Changfeng—an outsider.
Something had entered his own camp, and he, the commanding general, was left in the dark.
Such a move of overstepping authority was, to any prince wielding significant military power, no different from a slap to the face.
On the grasslands, the contest for the Great Khan's seat had always been paved with severed heads and rolling blood.
The uncle and nephew might raise their cups together in public, but stabbing each other in the back behind closed doors was an old, familiar tale.
Ashina Gudu's strike of borrowing strength to apply pressure was nothing more than a warning: the royal court's fingers could easily reach into the very lungs of his central army.
Ashina Dubi did not press the matter.
He swallowed hard, choking down the rage that rose to his lips.
Those words—"by the great Khan's own direct order"—were like thistles scraping down his throat.
The Khan rarely played by the rules. This open move of planting sand into his command was something Ashina Dubi could only grit his teeth and accept for now.
"What the great Khan has personally decided, let the military advisor arrange properly. Tomorrow, at dawn's assault, I want to see this thing work with my own eyes."
Ashina Dubi hurled two curt orders and strode back toward his tent with his guards, all the ease of his arrival gone.
The wind gradually died down. Shortly after the hour of Chou, the sound of creaking wheels came again from the rear of the camp.
Dozens of carts laden with wheat and dried meat rolled slowly into camp from the northern grasslands.
Along with them came supplies of coarse salt and spirits for the various companies.
The arrival of this shipment allowed the central army, teetering on the edge of famine, to breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Campfires were stoked and blazed brightly once more.
Order-issuing voices for the distribution of grain rang through the camp. The Hu soldiers polished their sabers to a sheen, and the Helian men, bellies full and throats wet, felt their fighting spirit reignite.
With siege engines and full provisions, they could raze Zhenbeiguan to the ground by tomorrow.
Zuo Bamu, in particular, ordered a few jars of strong liquor brought out and distributed among his three thousand elite troops, awaiting only midnight to breach the city and claim glory.
Chen Changfeng remained where he stood.
He gazed toward the direction from which the engines and supply carts had entered, then turned his head south toward the Zhenbeiguan fortress, still swallowed by the night.
Let Zuo Bamu probe the hidden tunnel beneath the mule and horse market.
When the zhenbei army has committed all its strength beneath the earth—
The trebuchets on the surface, together with the well-fed main force of the central army, would smash through Zhenbeiguan's defenses from the front.
One in the open, one in the dark. One a feint, one a true strike.
A scheme within a scheme. A plot within a plot.
...
"Give this to your most trusted operative," Chen Changfeng ordered, his tone unhurried. "Absolutely do not leave camp through the main gate. Use the chaos of tonight's supply convoy's return trip to slip it back to the capital."
Qin held the wax-sealed pellet and clenched it tightly in his palm: "As you command."
"When battle begins tomorrow night," Chen Changfeng said, gazing toward the fortress battlements now fully swallowed by pitch-black darkness, "remember what I told you during the day. When Zuo Bamu and his three thousand men meet the Great Qian forces underground, the carnage will be deep. But you are not to send a single Han soldier to their aid."
"And if the central command orders us to fill the trenches..."
"The command tent will not give such an order," Chen Changfeng said. "The Gully King now guards against me more than he does against Tie Lanshan on the opposite side."
"All you need to do is follow the plan!"
Qin, the strategist, bowed once and hurried off to make the arrangements.
And Chen Changfeng, having settled both moves of this chess game in his mind, allowed the final gambit in his heart to take shape.
