Mule and Horse Market, around the dry well.
The stench of blood was as thick as undiluted ink.
Behind the crumbling walls, Yang Cang watched the wellhead with cold, calculating eyes.
After several volleys from the repeating crossbows, the arrows had already turned the bricks and stones into an inverted thicket of steel thorns.
But the barbarian soldiers at the bottom of the well had long since been cornered into maddened dogs.
Those in the rear blindly pressed forward, while those in the front had no room to retreat—eyes bloodshot, trampling the slippery corpses and severed limbs of their own comrades, they desperately fought their way outward against the rain of arrows.
The tumbling, stacking mass of flesh nearly burst the well frame apart.
"HAHAHAHA! Now! Pour the fire oil!" Yang Cang raised his blade, the tip pressing down coldly.
The armored soldiers moved at the order.
More than a dozen soldiers, working together, heaved a waist-high clay jar open and poured the bituminous liquid down along the rim of the well.
The pungent reek of oil instantly overwhelmed the smell of blood.
The black liquid, like a deadly viper, slithered through every crack, greedily seeping down into the depths of the earth.
"Ignite! Seal the opening!"
A sulfur-tipped arrow was struck against a flint, trailing a firefly-like tail of flame as it released from the string and plunged into the deep pit.
BOOM—!
Fire met oil, and a pillar of flame erupted from the ground like an enraged dragon!
The wild night wind rushed in with a vengeance, forcing the ten-foot-tall blaze back down into the well.
In that moment, all twelve tunnel exits simultaneously transformed into spewing, black-smoke-belching hellmouths.
This deep-buried underground thoroughfare had become nothing less than a blood mill, grinding flesh and bone to pulp.
Deep in the tunnel.
Zuo Bamu found himself half-submerged in the filthy blood of his fallen comrades.
Suddenly, an intensely scorching blast of wind poured down from above, and tongues of fire, like clinging corruption, greedily licked onto the fur hides of the soldiers in the front rank.
Terror seized Zuo Bamu's face!
"Fall back! Push to the rear!!" Zuo Bamu's roar was hoarse and desperate, nearly splitting his throat.
But where was there any room to retreat?
Three thousand elite soldiers, packed end to end, were crammed into this passage barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast.
The troops further back had no idea the front was already an inferno; they just went on, eyes wide, shoving against the spine of the man in front.
The two opposing forces—one pushing forward, one forcing back—collided like ramming rams in that suffocating underground space.
The result was that scores of barbarian soldiers, squeezed in the middle, were crushed to death on the spot, ribs snapping with sickening cracks, vomiting blood mixed with gore.
The fire spread wildly on the oil, scorching through armor plates and melting flesh.
Some men had become living torches, wailing in agony in the narrow passage, swinging their curved sabers in wild frenzy, cleaving off the heads of their own comrades.
Others, worse, were blinded by the poisonous smoke, reduced to screaming, gnashing wraiths.
What made it even more fatal, the smoke choked off all breath.
Their bloodcurdling screams could not escape the earth, all smothered into muffled, grinding groans.
Zuo Bamu was pinned beneath several charred, blackened corpses.
He could feel with every breath that he was swallowing knives, his skin cracking and blistering inch by inch, and he could only stare through blood-shot, weeping eyes, choking out the words:
"Zhenbei City... how did this happen... WHY!"
...
Those agonized screams, of course, could not carry to the camp thirty li away.
Out on the wilderness beyond the city, the landscape was drowned in thunderous war drums.
Ashina Dubi sat astride his blood-sweat heavenly steed, standing at the very front of the central formation.
His gold-threaded wolf-skin mantle whipped madly in the bitter wind. The full flower of the Helian central army was now unleashed.
Horn reeds sounded grim, and thousands upon thousands of barbarian foot soldiers pushed towering siege towers and battering rams—a black, surging sea of menace—surging like an avalanche toward the northern postern gate of Zhenbei Pass.
"First man to stand on the wall: ten thousand gold! Everything living inside that city: your sheep and cattle!" Ashina Dubi roared like crackling thunder, his curved blade pointing at the ramparts.
A sky-darkening swarm of arrows blotted out the stars and moon, crashing down like hail on the defensive positions atop the wall.
Scaling ladders hooked one after another onto the city walls, and the vanguard of barbarian soldiers, biting their sabers, swarmed upward like blood-crazed insects.
"No matter how many you send, I'll bury every last one of you! I'll nail these bastards to the base of the wall!"
Zhao Heng wiped a smear of blood from his face.
Two arrows still protruded from his shoulder plate, buried deep into the flesh, but he didn't even seem to feel them. His arm swung down like a cleaver.
"RELEASE!"
Rolling beams thick as a man's embrace and boulders weighing a hundred pounds poured down from between the merlons.
CRACK! SNAP! The wood and stone came down with the weight of thunder and lightning, crushing skulls, grinding man and ladder alike into paste.
The Helian assault was savage as wolves, but the rested and ready Zhenbei army held them fast at the wall's edge, preventing them from crossing that line of death even a single step.
...
On the high slope behind the Helian main camp.
Chen Changfeng stood alone in the shadows, hands clasped behind his back.
Along the southern horizon, thick columns of black smoke rose from the direction of the Mule and Horse Market, piercing the night sky, dimming even the stars and moon.
The firelight flickered across his scholarly, composed face, yet failed to raise a single ripple of expression.
The strategist Qin trod through the night frost, rapidly climbing the slope, and halted half a step behind him, speaking in a low voice:
"My lord. Fire has sprung up within the city. From the looks of it... Commander Zuo's three thousand elite are likely all lost in there."
"As expected." Chen Changfeng's voice was flat, his gaze not shifting so much as a hair.
"Your subordinate is slow-witted." The strategist's brows knitted tightly. "Since you knew all along that Xu Qinghuan had prepared a fire trap, why not warn him in advance and save General Zuo?"
Chen Changfeng's pale, slender fingers idly toyed with a jade pendant at his waist.
"Xu Qinghuan's heart is venomously clever. Once she had seen through Hunchback Zhang, she was certain to set up this death trap of luring the tiger in."
He rubbed his fingertips.
"If Zuo Bamu hadn't waded into that swamp, how would the main force of the Zhenbei army have been drawn away to the Mule and Horse Market and the northern postern?"
He turned around, facing the biting wind, and at last let a faint, mocking smile curl at the corner of his mouth.
"The timing is right now. Without feeding Xu Qinghuan's appetite on the bones and blood of these three thousand men—how would this chess game ever reach the final move?"
"By now, Tie Lanshan must believe that as long as he lances this abscess of the tunnels, his Zhenbei Pass remains impregnable as iron and mountain."
Chen Changfeng flicked a speck of dust off his sleeve, said no more, and turned his cold eyes once more toward that lone city howling with the sound of slaughter.
...
Inside the city, Tie Lanshan sat astride his horse, his personal guard holding high torches that turned the night around them bright as day.
The old marshal stared at the wellhead—now completely sealed by the raging fire—as the flames gradually subsided. Yet the nauseating stench of charred flesh boiling up from the earth below still made his war steed snort and stamp restlessly, again and again.
"Pass the order!"
Tie Lanshan drew his sword with a sharp ring, its blade glinting coldly in the firelight: "Leave five hundred armored soldiers to hold this opening! The rest of you, form ranks in waves."
"The moment the fire dies down, we follow me into the tunnels and open them one by one! Take long spears in with you and sweep everything clean—anything that draws breath, cut it down on sight!"
His gaze swept over the assembled officers, his voice booming like a great bell: "This abscess that has festered for five years—tonight I'll have it carved out clean and hollow!"
"AT YOUR COMMAND—!"
A chorus of blood-curdling oaths tore upward into the night, killing intent ripping through the clouds.
Yet, thirty li away, far from the main battlespace.
A dull groaning of wooden joints and mortise-and-tenon locks, masked perfectly by the drums of distant war.
In the depthless dark, nine trebuchets—vast as primordial beasts—had already raised their great throwing arms high and silent.
Hundreds of Helian soldiers, gritting their teeth, stripped to bare skin, were straining at the thick hemp ropes and winches.
The enormous special leather sacks were loaded with a single load: grave stones weighing over a thousand jin.
Their target, of course, was the city of Zhenbei itself.
