Diemao felt as though death were barely a hand’s reach away. That he was still alive was owed to his own fighting ability, the more than a thousand elite Black Wu light cavalry at his back — and, above all, his luck.

An arrow had wedged itself into the gap of his shoulder pauldron without piercing through, but the arrowhead caught there, and every bounce of the saddle sent a fresh slash of pain across his shoulder. Blood ran steadily down his armor; he could feel the sticky warmth coating his body.

He had come in too great a haste, and in his rush to save time, he had worn only a set of light armor. There was no chain mail protecting his neck. Had that arrow strayed even a fraction to one side, it would have found the artery. A fraction — that was all the margin between life and death.

Of the thousand-plus elite light cavalry, fewer than thirty or forty had cut their way out, and when Diemao looked back, every last one of those survivors was bleeding.

Only when the pursuing Ning soldiers had fallen somewhat behind did Diemao allow himself a ragged breath — and only then did he have the presence of mind to wrench the lodged arrow free and fling it away.

He had ridden without pause through day and night to get here, yet now he felt not the slightest drowsiness, not the faintest fatigue. His only thought was to escape this place as swiftly as possible. When a man is terrified of dying, what room is there for exhaustion? Nothing can slow a man fleeing for his life.

Besides, they had to ride back with their news at the greatest possible speed, for they had seen it with their own eyes: the Ning army was changing into armor.

Unless he was wrong, the Ning forces would don Black Wu armor and launch a surprise attack on Yuwai Ridge. He had to deliver this intelligence before it was too late — or the entire battle would turn.

While these thoughts raced through his mind, a column of Ning cavalry suddenly charged in from an angle. They were unlike any of the soldiers he had faced on the previous battlefield.

These men of the Central Plains wore black armor and scarlet capes — immediately conspicuous.

From what Diemao knew of the Ning army, these were Tingwei officers — the Emperor’s judicial enforcers. He had heard the stories: every Tingwei in the Ning army was a hand-picked expert, a martial master, the Ning equivalent of the Black Wu’s own elite Qingya fighters. If those tenacious men ran them down, the message would never get through.

“Hold them off!”

Diemao gave the order at once. His thirty or forty utterly spent Black Wu cavalrymen knew that to turn back meant certain death. Yet Black Wu discipline was iron, and Black Wu soldiers were fierce. At the command, they halted, dressed their lines, and waited for the charge bearing down on them.

Diemao alone spurred his horse and rode on, glancing back now and then.

His loyal men were swallowed by the black iron tide in moments and vanished from sight.

The harder the Ning army pressed their pursuit, the more certain Diemao became that his judgment was correct.

As he fled, he kept turning to look — the Tingwei column clung to him without relenting. It was only because Diemao’s stamina was extraordinary, and because he had brought two prime warhorses, that he gradually managed to open a gap of some distance after dozens of li.

But before he could even catch his breath, a Ning light-cavalry patrol appeared on the diagonal — not a deliberate ambush, merely a roving screen unit sweeping the perimeter of the battlefield. His bad luck had simply placed him squarely in their path.

He had no choice but to veer away and keep flogging his horse, trying to shake everyone off.

If his luck was bad, it was genuinely bad: enemies behind, enemies ahead. And yet if his luck was good, it was also genuinely good: six or seven li later, he ran into a Black Wu patrol of his own.

“Block the pursuers behind me! I am General Diemao — I must ride back to Yuwai Ridge to report to His Highness the Prince!”

Diemao’s voice tore out of him hoarse as wind screaming through a broken bellows. The Black Wu patrol of roughly a hundred riders, hearing his cry, split off a dozen men to escort Diemao north while the rest wheeled to meet the Ning cavalry head-on.

With those riders throwing themselves heedlessly into the path of the pursuit, the Ning soldiers behind finally slowed.

For the next two days, Diemao dared not slacken for a single moment. He grew so exhausted he could doze in the saddle — yet still he did not stop to rest. When he truly could not hold on any longer, he had one of the escort riders take the reins, and clung to the man’s back for a brief, fitful sleep.

By the time he reached Yuwai Ridge — barely four days later — he looked like a different man. He teetered on the edge of complete collapse; the light had gone out of his eyes. Whether from the layers of road dust on his face or something deeper, he appeared ashen and hollow.

He forced himself through the report — twenty thousand Ning troops destroying the southern expedition, the enemy changing into Black Wu armor and preparing an ambush — and then he toppled face-forward onto the ground and did not rise.

The camp physicians rushed to carry him away for treatment.

When Kuoke Diyelan received word that the two hundred thousand soldiers of the southern expedition had been wiped out to the last man, he felt as though his chest had split open.

This was utterly beyond anything he had anticipated. How had Tang Pidi dared to divide his forces and send them back so openly?

Think it through as he might, the answer came down to reading minds — and easy as that sounded, how impossibly difficult it was in practice.

Tang Pidi had seen through his opponent’s thinking with perfect clarity. He had wagered that the Black Wu forces at Yuwai Ridge would not dare counterattack. He had known that Kuoke Diyelan would take his frontal assault on Yuwai Ridge as a race against time.

So how could any Black Wu officer have imagined that Tang Pidi would wheel back with a hundred and fifty thousand men? Not Kuoke Diyelan himself, and certainly not the two hundred thousand Black Wu soldiers battering at the Ning frontier passes — none of them could have conceived of it.

At least, Kuoke Diyelan told himself, he had a loyal and brave subordinate like Diemao, who had delivered the news in time.

Had Diemao also died in the south, Yuwai Ridge might well have fallen before long. Imagine it: Tang Pidi leading a column dressed in Black Wu armor, feigning an attack on the Ning army from behind. Kuoke Diyelan on Yuwai Ridge would have taken it for Diemao’s return and marched out to join the charge. The moment he left Yuwai Ridge, getting back would be nearly impossible — and those nearly a hundred thousand men would have shared the same fate of total annihilation.

“Issue the order,” said Kuoke Diyelan. “Tonight we withdraw. Leave five thousand men to cover the retreat, and set plenty of torches on Yuwai Ridge to confuse the Ning army.”

He had no more desire to continue fighting Tang Pidi here. This campaign had grown stranger and stranger as it dragged on.

His million-strong army had spent more than ten days besieging those two-hundred-thousand-odd Ning soldiers — and still no good news had come.

Now Kuoke Diyelan finally understood how Tang Pidi had dared to do such a thing — something that violated every rule of warfare. To send more than two hundred thousand Ning soldiers out as living bait required not only Tang Pidi’s own confidence but his absolute trust in every man under his command.

He had been certain his people could hold, no matter the cost, until he had gained the upper hand elsewhere. That trust ran both ways: had even one link in the chain — commander or soldier — wavered, the situation could never have held this long.

So Kuoke Diyelan had decided to wait no longer. He had to lead his army back and take personal command, putting down those two hundred thousand Ning soldiers as swiftly as possible.

If this went on much longer, even he could not predict how the battle would end.

But just as he prepared to march, a messenger galloped in from the rear to report that their main base camp had been raided by the Blood Floating Tower bandits.

No one could explain where that gang of horsemen had found such reckless courage. Though the several thousand raiders had been wiped out to a man, the Black Wu encampment had suffered grievously — and most critically, the food and supplies that fed more than a million soldiers had been more than half consumed by the fire.

At this news, Kuoke Diyelan nearly vomited blood. He trembled with fury.

He regretted now that he had not simply destroyed those bandits from the start — that he had thought to keep them around and make use of them someday.

What he could not have known was that those raiders had not been recklessly brave at all. Xu Suqing had planned it deliberately.

That night, Kuoke Diyelan took the great bulk of his force and retreated in haste, desperate not to be slow enough for Tang Pidi’s army to swing back and cut them off. The night’s headlong flight was nothing short of a rout.

On the road back, Kuoke Diyelan studied his maps carefully. The nearest Black Wu force was the army of his subordinate general Luo Linlan, which had a force of fifty or sixty thousand Ning soldiers encircled. Since returning to the main base camp would take too long, he resolved to go directly to Luo Linlan’s encampment and press him to finish off that Ning force at once.

Three days’ hard riding brought him there — but what he found was a battlefield carpeted with corpses.

He could not fathom how Luo Linlan, with two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, had been defeated in so baffling and total a fashion.

He dispatched men to search the battlefield and found a handful of wounded who had not yet died. From their account he learned that just after nightfall the previous day, a Ning army unit had arrived wearing Black Wu combat uniforms.

General Luo Linlan had sent men to inquire which unit this was — but before those men even left camp, riders from the arriving column had already appeared at the camp gate. They delivered a single letter and rode back at once.

The letter said that Kuoke Diyelan was furious: so much time had passed and that Ning force was still not destroyed. He had lost all confidence in Luo Linlan. And so he had dispatched this detachment to attack the Ning army tonight. If the Ning force was not wiped out by morning, Luo Linlan’s command would be stripped from him.

It had never occurred to Luo Linlan that these “friendly troops” were Ning soldiers in disguise.

According to the latest military dispatches, Tang Pidi’s Ning army was still being held at Yuwai Ridge. And even if they had broken through, how could the Ning forces possibly have acquired so many Black Wu military uniforms?

Luo Linlan had not imagined — could not have imagined — that the two hundred thousand men of the southern expedition had been annihilated.

He led his own assault on the Ning forces of Tantai Yajing’s division that night, genuinely resolved to throw everything into it. More than two hundred thousand men attacked from all four sides.

Who could have guessed that the newly arrived “friendly force” would suddenly drive a blade into the back of Luo Linlan’s central command?

In that night of slaughter, the Black Wu army was thrown into utter confusion. By the second half of the night, even a genuine fellow soldier charging from the front was enough to shatter their nerves in that pitch darkness.

Command collapsed entirely. More than two hundred thousand Black Wu soldiers dissolved into a pile of loose sand.

Tang Pidi led his forces of over one hundred thousand, coordinating with Tantai Yajing’s counterattack, and cut Luo Linlan’s division in half.

The remaining Black Wu soldiers simply could not fight on. In the dark, they could not tell who was a true comrade and who was a Ning soldier in disguise. Of two hundred thousand men, half fled.

The moment Kuoke Diyelan heard this, he knew it was over. Tang Pidi had struck last night; by now he would certainly be racing to relieve the next encircled Ning unit. The Black Wu forces farther back might not yet know that one column among them was Ning soldiers in disguise — Tang Pidi might fool them just as easily.

Which meant Tang Pidi could use this single force of over a hundred thousand men, blow after blow, to shatter every encirclement in sequence.

Now Kuoke Diyelan was genuinely frightened.

An arrangement of a million soldiers, ruined like this — even if he could stabilize the situation now, when this news reached Black Wu, the Great Khan would be incandescent with fury. His post as Supreme Marshal of the southern campaign was surely forfeit.

Even now, at this moment, what occupied his mind was his own position. One could only wonder whether his panic had entirely robbed him of all sense of proportion.

—