Around the dried-up well in the Mule-and-Horse Market, the fire that had raged for most of the night finally began to weaken.
Yang Cang stepped out from behind the collapsed wall ahead, hurried to the side of Tie Lanshan’s horse, and dropped to one knee:
“Commander!”
Yang Cang looked up, his voice barely containing a barely suppressed excitement.
“The tunnels are fully cleared!”
Tie Lanshan sat steady in the saddle, leaned down to listen closely.
“Give me the details.”
“All twelve tunnel exits—not one missed—were sealed off with a hail of arrows by the brothers. We poured in plenty of lamp oil, and the whole thing burned through clean.”
Yang Cang raised the hand that wasn’t holding his blade and wiped a thick layer of black soot off his face with the back of it.
“More than three thousand barbarian soldiers who crawled in—over half were burned or suffocated to death down there.”
“The rest trampled each other, and those who managed to retreat number no more than two or three hundred.”
That news spread through the night wind, and among the armored ranks in the rear, a low, hushed stir immediately broke out.
Tie Lanshan listened, and that blackened face of his—tight as a drum for days, drained of all human warmth—finally showed a trace of life.
“Good!”
The old commander slapped his palm on the saddle, threw back his head, and burst into loud laughter.
“Hahahaha!”
The booming laugh shot straight up into the sky. The immense burden that had weighed on him like a thousand pounds for days had, in that moment, been flung off his shoulders entirely.
“That Han Poison Snake, Chen Changfeng—he’s been scheming against us for five years! Tunneling in? Tonight, I’ll show him whose bones are buried under the very ground of Zhenbei Pass!”
When the commander laughed, the nearby guards and soldiers reacted with him. The taut formation loosened. Some drove their spears straight into the ground, yanked off their heavy helmets, and sat down without care on bloodstained steps.
“Finally crushed those damned rats.”
“I haven’t had a proper nap in two days—kept one ear to the ground, afraid some barbarian blade might come poking up from the floorboards.”
“This time the merit is solid. After this war, back in the northwest, I can trade it for three acres of paddy field.”
Suppressed cheers spread rapidly through the ranks. The soldiers exchanged quiet words in twos and threes, letting out long, relieved breaths after days of stifled tension.
Tie Lanshan stopped laughing, pulled on the reins, and the warhorse turned half a circle on the spot.
He raised his riding crop and pointed at the ruins ahead.
“Convey my order!”
The murmur below died instantly. Everyone fell silent, straightened their backs, and stood at attention.
“Third Battalion stays here to finish up! Call in laborers from the city arsenal. Bring yellow earth and stone, and fill all twelve well openings from top to bottom. Don’t let a single rat through!”
Yang Cang clasped his fists and answered in a loud voice: “As ordered! And what of the other brothers?”
“Scrape the blood off your blades and reform ranks!” Tie Lanshan’s crop shifted to the north. “Zhao Heng is holding off the barbarian feint at the North Auxiliary Gate.”
“The rot on our side is cut out. Now, the whole army pushes forward!”
But before the words had even left his mouth, something went suddenly, violently wrong.
The Western-region warhorse beneath Tie Lanshan turned frantic without the slightest warning.
“Shriek—!”
The horse threw its head up, let out a piercingly loud snort, and its front hooves clawed madly at the ground. The glossy mane along the back of its neck stood up bristling, strand by strand.
Tie Lanshan frowned and yanked hard on the reins, trying to force the horse’s head down.
This old horse had carried him through a dozen years of carnage and blood. Even facing walls of blades and seas of fire, it had never once thrown a fit like this. Yet now the beast seemed possessed, paying no heed to its rider’s pulls, only backing up desperately on all four legs.
Before Tie Lanshan could bark out a reprimand, the very earth beneath everyone’s feet began to tremble.
Yang Cang suddenly noticed that the surface of the pooled blood on the ground was rippling in fine, concentric circles.
“What’s going on? Could there still be a large number of survivors digging down there?”
Yang Cang gripped the steel blade he had just sheathed, his voice going shrill.
Tie Lanshan didn’t answer. He abandoned calming the horse and swung himself off its back in one motion.
The old commander strode quickly to the center of the open ground, tilted his head to one side, and turned his ear to the north wind.
The wind carried the distant battle drums from thirty li out and the barbarian war horns, but beneath all that noise, there was another sound.
That sound came with no rhyme or reason, yet it was so vast it overwhelmed the war drums in the distance entirely.
Yang Cang heard it too. He looked up, his face full of vigilance and bewilderment.
Tie Lanshan spun on his heel, climbed in long strides onto a raised platform nearby, and fixed his eyes on the night sky to the north.
Above the pitch-black dome of the heavens—which had shown not a single star—something else now intruded.
Nine massive dark shapes tore through the upper layers of cloud, arranged in a half-moon formation, hurtling straight for Zhenbei Pass.
They moved so fast their outlines were barely visible.
“What is that?” Yang Cang shouted, pointing up at the sky.
The dark shapes carried with them a terrifying force of a plummeting weight, cutting several stark parabolas across the air.
Boom!
A colossal crash erupted right on the northern city wall.
The newly built stretch of gray-white wall, struck by that crushing force—
A violent hum blasted outward in every direction, and every door and window inside Zhenbei Pass rattled in that very instant.
Even the ground at the Mule-and-Horse Market jumped hard once.
As for Tie Lanshan, the triumphant look on his face didn’t last half a stick of incense before it vanished entirely.
…
On the northern horse-path battlements.
A fierce wind whipped thick smoke and sparks back and forth between the crenellations.
The old soldier Wang Shuan braced his hands against a length of rolling log studded with splinters, gritted his teeth, and shoved it forward hard, rolling it straight off the parapet.
From below came a rapid series of snapping sounds as wooden ladders broke, mixed with the screams of barbarian soldiers tumbling into the moat.
He let go, stepped back two paces, and leaned his back against the wall.
He took in huge, ragged breaths of the blood-tinged air, panting heavily.
But he had barely exhaled half a breath when the bricks beneath his feet began bucking like mad.
Caught completely off guard, Wang Shuan’s legs gave out. The force threw him clean off his feet, and he slammed hard onto the horse-path two steps away.
The impact knocked the wind out of him and sent a spike of pain through his body.
He instinctively wanted to curse, but the moment he looked up, the words died in his throat.
Out of the darkness beyond the gate, a boulder the size of a millstone came whistling through the air with a ferocious gust and slammed into the crenellation directly above him.
“Crack—!”
This new wall—which the garrison commander had praised as unbreakable—held against the stone’s penetration, but it didn’t absorb the sheer, brutal force of the impact.
The merlon at the point of contact shattered on the spot.
Huge chunks of brick, razor-sharp stone shards, and a cloud of white dust blasted out like a storm, raining down on the defenders holding the horse-path behind it.
Three or four soldiers holding spears nearby didn’t even have time to scream, before the shockwave lifted them clear off the ground.
Their internal organs ruptured from the violent tremor. They flew backward, collapsed onto the horse-path, black blood oozing from their mouths and noses, twitched twice, and then went still.
Wang Shuan got lucky. Where he had fallen was a few feet off to the side.
A chunk of flying debris grazed past his scalp, slicing open a gash at his brow. Hot blood instantly blurred his left eye.
At this moment, he could no longer afford to care about much else. He could only lie sprawled awkwardly on the ground, shielding the back of his head with his hands, using the depressions in the earth to dodge the deadly stones whipping wildly through the air.
All around him was choking dust—so thick he couldn't make out a single figure three steps away.
Wang Shuan gritted his teeth and crawled forward, using both hands and feet.
He finally made it to the edge of the ruined crenellation, which had been completely smashed apart. Carefully, he poked half his head out, squinting with his one still-functional right eye, and peered out toward the open wilderness beyond the city walls.
In the distance, on that barren plain that had earlier shown only scattered sparks of fire, nine massive silhouettes had somehow appeared.
They were nine towering trebuchets, the kind the infidels called "Huihui catapults."
Their colossal wooden throwing arms had just completed a single launch, and now beneath them, hundreds of bare-chested barbarian craftsmen were hauling on ropes, pulling the arms slowly but steadily back down.
More barbarians pushed carts loaded with boulders, parking them beside the leather slings.
Wang Shuan understood in an instant what the Helians intended to do.
He lay at the gap in the wall, quickly counting those carts.
But he'd only counted halfway when his fingers uncontrollably began to shake violently.
