The wall in the second half of the night was colder still. The north wind seemed to cut straight through stone and armor alike, driving its chill deep into the marrow.

Li Chi woke wrapped in a heavy cloak — whether from the wind’s unbearable bite or from the watchfulness that never fully left him, he could not say. He rose and worked the stiffness out of his limbs. At least there had been the oilcloth and the cloak; without them, he thought he might have shriveled up entirely.

And for a man, shriveling up was really no good at all.

He gripped the battlements and looked out. The land beyond was pure black, not a single torch in sight. It appeared the Black Wu would not attack again tonight.

Appeared — but the moment he looked out, the corner of his eye twitched upward, ever so slightly.

The night wind was especially fierce, and a fierce wind brought a biting cold. But it was not the cold that put Li Chi on alert — it was the smell of dirt riding on the wind.

“Fire arrow,” Li Chi said, and held out his hand.

An imperial guard pressed a fire arrow into it immediately. Li Chi touched the oil-cloth wrapped around the arrowhead to a torch and released the shaft out over the wall.

With the strength behind his draw, the arrow flew far — a single tongue of fire tracing an arc before it fell.

As the fire arrow dropped toward the earth, a cry went up from the soldiers on the wall.

“Enemy attack!”

The shout was followed at once by horn blasts. Soldiers who had been sleeping on the stones scrambled upright, grabbing the quivers and bows they had kept at their sides.

The fire arrow landed. In the light it cast, the wall’s defenders saw them — a mass of Black Wu soldiers.

The Black Wu army had come again in the frozen night, without torches, some of them with cloth wrapped around their boots in an effort to muffle their footfalls.

But there were too many of them. Movement at that scale could not help but stir the ground underfoot, and tonight the wind was strong.

Strictly speaking, a faint taste of dirt on the wind was not unusual. But then, Li Chi was not usual.

“Loose!”

At the command, a volley of arrows swept out from the wall. Among them, the heavy bolts of the siege crossbows stood out — faster, heavier, and unmistakable. That first volley met screaming from below. Untold numbers of Black Wu soldiers fell.

“Quivers — more quivers.”

At Li Chi’s order, the imperial guards brought them over one by one, setting them within arm’s reach.

Li Chi did not reach for his iron-limbed bow of over three shi — tremendous in power, but too costly in effort. With that bow, the number of arrows he could loose was far too low.

He had strips of leather wound around his fingers. These past days he had shot so ceaselessly that without them, the bowstring would long since have cut him to ribbons.

A quiver held thirty arrows. Even a well-trained archer who loosed an entire quiver would feel the ache in his arm afterward.

But when other soldiers had shot seven or eight, Li Chi’s first quiver was already empty. By the time a soldier had emptied one quiver, Li Chi had emptied three.

Any general who witnessed this arm-strength and endurance would have had no choice but to feel humbled.

In Ning’s later campaigns, there had seldom been call for Li Chi to fight with his own hands. The generals who had risen through those years had few chances to see what the Emperor could truly do.

Most of them had heard only that the Emperor might be formidable — but had no real sense of what that meant in practice. Three quivers emptied in that span of time: no one on the wall that night could match it.

With those three quivers spent, the Black Wu had reached the base of the wall. They surged forward in a crush, as though death itself held no meaning for them. Scaling ladders were hoisted up, raised to the rising swell of the Black Wu battle cry.

Li Chi took aim at the soldiers trying to hook the ladders onto the battlements — at this range, with torchlight on the targets, his shots were even more precise. Every arrow found its mark in a killing spot.

Before long, his fourth quiver was empty too. A guard held out a fifth, but Li Chi’s eyes had already gone to the javelins nearby.

The javelins used for a static defense were different from those carried by Ning’s infantry in the field — those were costly iron-shafted weapons, not something to be flung off a wall by the armful. The wall-defense javelins had wooden shafts, shorter by half than a spearman’s spear, with smaller, rougher heads.

Li Chi pointed to them. A guard immediately gathered up an armful.

Li Chi took one, aimed at a cluster of soldiers near the nearest ladder, and threw.

One javelin, one skull. Unerringly accurate.

Not far away, a ladder had already hooked onto the top of the wall. Li Chi called out immediately, “Ye Xiaoqian!”

“Your servant!” The voice came from some distance away, but Ye Xiaoqian was already moving — he reached the ladder in moments, swept his blade sideways, and cut it through. A single stroke.

No ordinary soldier could manage that cut, nor summon the force to do it. Scaling ladder timber was tough; most men would have needed a dozen chops to get through the stave.

More and more Black Wu soldiers raised their ladders. Ning soldiers on the wall fought back with grappling hooks — long poles with outward-facing hooks, using the pole’s length to lever and push the ladders back.

This worked because a lodged ladder, weighed down by the men climbing it, could not simply be shoved sideways. It had to be pushed outward and toppled. The grappling hook made that possible.

The midnight assault came without warning, and with savage intensity.

Arrows flew so thick they could not be counted. To a distant observer, it might have looked as if the Milky Way itself had fallen on the wall — torchlight catching arrow-flicker after arrow-flicker in the dark, too dense to distinguish one from the next, a shimmering brighter than any constellation.

Black Wu soldiers fell in waves below. Ning’s border warriors fell too, one after another, on the wall above.

“Your Majesty, the Black Wu below the wall are packed too close!”

Someone shouted toward Li Chi. Through the dense press of soldiers he could barely make out the shape — far away, half-seen — but the voice was likely Jia Ruan’s.

Jia Ruan, senior disciple of the Hung Blade Sect, had been transferred into the imperial guard after Li Chi’s coronation, serving as a guard general under Xia Houzhu.

“Pour oil and fire!” Li Chi shouted back.

Jia Ruan heard it and shouted in another direction: “Junior Brother! Junior Brother! His Majesty says pour oil!”

Junior disciple Zhen Gen, who had long been standing ready, immediately had his people haul forward the iron cauldrons. The oil inside was boiling, bubbling at the surface.

Zhen Gen had been transferred into the Ministry of War after arriving at Chang’an, and had followed the army north on imperial order.

The first cauldron cascaded over the edge. The Black Wu below erupted in chaos. Boiling oil on bare skin — a touch of it and a layer of flesh peeled away.

Cauldron after cauldron followed, and torches were flung down as well. Within moments the fire along the base of the wall had spread and joined into something that looked, from above, like a dragon of flame coursing the length of the fortification.

The Black Wu soldiers packed below clawed at each other trying to raise their ladders. Dense as a kicked anthill — and so in an instant, an uncountable number of them were swallowed by the fire.

The stench hit those on the wall moments later: the sharp, nauseating smell of burning human flesh. And through it came the sight of Black Wu soldiers wreathed in flames, staggering wildly, throwing themselves to the ground and rolling.

The fire drove the Black Wu back. The pressure on the wall’s defenders eased considerably.

“Loose! Keep loosing — drive them back!”

Li Chi’s voice had gone hoarse, but he called out anyway.

The arrows from the wall thickened again, chasing the retreating Black Wu.

Li Chi had just hurled his last javelin, arm pulling back, when an arrow flew in and grazed his helmet.

A shower of sparks and a grinding shriek of metal.

“You bastard!”

Li Chi’s temper ignited. He grabbed a spear from beside him and hurled it out over the wall with everything he had. The shaft blurred through the air like a dark streak — and skewered three Black Wu soldiers through in a line.

In that moment, the jianghu spirit in him blazed up raw and uncontained.

But the sight sent both Yu Jiuling and Ye Xiaoqian into a panic. They rushed in and pulled Li Chi backward.

“Your Majesty, please, please calm down.”

Yu Jiuling’s face had gone white. He was genuinely terrified that Li Chi, in a fit of rage, might vault straight off the wall and start cutting through the crowd below with a sword in each hand.

Both of them were frantic with worry for him, yet here they were telling the Emperor to please not be angry, please calm down, please—

The life they led standing at Li Chi’s side was no easy one.

Li Chi’s fury was not spent. Near at hand he spotted the rolling logs set out for defense against climbers — heavy things, each weighing dozens of jin. He picked one up and flung it.

An object that heavy, flung that fast, hit like a falling boulder — it struck a Black Wu general square in the head. Or rather, it seemed to drive the general’s head down into his chest.

Li Chi of course aimed for the officers. Whoever was better dressed, whoever wore iron armor — that was his target.

The Black Wu horns sounded, but not a retreat — it was a rally call. They were regrouping, waiting for the fire at the base to die down before throwing themselves forward again.

Li Chi gauged the distance. The Black Wu had fallen back into darkness, like a pack of wolves — concealed by the night, not retreating, only waiting.

“Damn it all, startling me like that.” He swore, then pointed out over the wall. “Fire arrows — volley!”

A wave of fire arrows swept out.

As that spreading light fell across the field, Li Chi caught sight of a Black Wu officer on horseback, riding in from the rear lines, just arriving at the front.

He didn’t care that the man had just arrived. Anyone still mounted at this stage had to be someone important.

Old Li will give you a fright right back.

He reached out and took the iron-limbed bow — three and a half shi of draw weight.

He steadied his aim and released. The iron-headed arrow flew.

But the fire arrows had already spent themselves by then, and the field beyond the wall fell back into total darkness.

Li Chi set the heavy bow down and picked up an ordinary war bow, waiting for the next Black Wu assault.

It never came.

Dawn arrived and still nothing came. No explanation for it.

Of course there was an explanation. Li Chi’s arrow had found the throat of Kuo Ye Baobao, the commanding general of a Black Wu army two hundred thousand strong — a single shaft straight through the windpipe.

Bad luck: Kuo Ye Baobao had been at the rear this entire time. He had only just ridden up to the front — his horse hadn’t even stopped yet.

If he could have known how he died, he surely would have had one thought: which fool gave the Ning Emperor a fright? It was their doing that dragged me down with them.

—