When Jizhou City was first built, Great Chu intended it to be the most important military fortress in the north — a bulwark against the powerful enemies beyond the northern frontier.

This was the single center of the entire northern region. If the smaller cities scattered across the north were like stars across the sky, then Jizhou was the largest star of all.

What made such a great city so difficult to take was simple: ordinary siege ladders were useless, because they weren’t long enough to reach the top of Jizhou’s walls.

To assault walls this height, purpose-built siege ladders had to be made — so long that even raising them upright was an enormous undertaking in itself.

Without large siege equipment, any hope of climbing the walls was pure fantasy.

—

To signal to Luo Jing inside the city that the forces outside were in position, Liu Li ordered the Yuzhou forces to attack the eastern wall of Jizhou — and this attack could not be a mere show of force.

By comparison, the Yuzhou forces were the more battle-hardened of the two armies.

Liu Li had once been one of Prince Wu Yang Jiju’s most capable generals. In his earlier clashes with Prince Yu’s forces, he had pressed Yang Jixing so hard that Prince Yu could barely lift his head. Had Prince Wu not flanked him from behind, Liu Li at this moment would have been the most triumphant man on the board.

What the foreign peoples called the Central Plains was a broad term; the Central Plains people themselves divided the region roughly into five territories — east, west, south, north, and center. The center was the Yuzhou region — historically prosperous and fertile, and with a fierce, vigorous people.

“Sound the drums!”

Liu Li turned and gave the order.

Some ten feet behind him, a row of bare-chested powerfully-built men began hammering a bank of great oxhide war drums. Those massive drums all sounded at once.

The thunder of the drums rolled out, and the Yuzhou forces began to press toward the city wall. From high above, they looked like a great black mass of swarming ants.

On the city wall, Liu Ge saw the Yuzhou forces advancing and shouted: “Signal arrows!”

On his command, a hundred or more archers raised their bows and loosed in unison with a hissing rush — the arrows arcing outward in a spreading fan.

These signal arrows were different from ordinary combat arrows. To make them more visible, their fletching had been dyed red.

The signal arrows rained down on the ground outside the wall in a line. This marked the maximum effective range of the archers on the wall. Soldiers used the signal arrows as a reference: until the enemy reached that line, there was little point in shooting.

“All bed crossbows — aim at the siege ladders.”

Liu Ge shouted, his face set hard.

The military engineering of Great Chu had reached a remarkable level. The bed crossbows mounted on the city walls could now be adjusted vertically and horizontally, even if the range of adjustment was limited. Compared to fixed-mount crossbows, they were far more effective.

But this kind of adjustable bed crossbow was not found on every city wall. The cost was enormous, the engineering complex — and in later years, as the Chu court crumbled, even the craftsmen of the armaments workshops lost any motivation to do careful work.

In its later period, Great Chu’s armaments workshops produced weapons and armor in which the materials were routinely skimped and the workmanship shoddy.

“Loose!”

Liu Ge swept his long blade outward.

The bed crossbows on the wall fired first. A row of heavy bolts went shrieking out.

The heavy bolts, when they landed among the Yuzhou troops, did not seem like bolts at all — they were like great iron plows, and each one plowed a straight red furrow through the earth.

The Yuzhou soldiers charging forward chanted silently to themselves with every stride: I am lucky. I am lucky. I am lucky.

They didn’t dare look up at the massive bolts — thick as a leg, raining down from the wall above. They just wanted to keep their heads down and run.

Behind them stretched a long chain of comrades carrying the specially constructed extended siege ladders, all making the same movements, all bowing their heads at the same angle.

Perhaps each one was thinking the same thing: I am lucky.

A heavy bolt flew straight from the wall and by chance punched clean through the neck of the soldier at the front of the line. A bolt that size going through a neck left nothing — the neck was simply gone.

As the head flew upward, the bolt buried itself in the chest of the second man — and in a fraction of a second had passed through the chest of the third, through the belly of the fourth, through the lower abdomen of the fifth—

Behind the dense charge of soldiers, one massive siege tower after another and one crossbow cart after another were being pushed forward.

When the first rank of charging soldiers stepped past the line of signal arrows, Liu Ge’s shout rang out.

Then the archers on the wall let fly. The arrows rose from the wall like a dark cloud, traced a perfect arc through the air, and rained down on the heads of the Yuzhou troops.

With a great rushing sound, the dense barrage of arrows descended. Soldiers charging forward fell by the dozen, by the score.

This kind of saturation arc-fire placed enormous pressure on the attacking side.

“Loose!”

Liu Ge shouted again, his voice already going slightly hoarse.

A second wave of arrows flew out — another dark cloud, another curtain of death.

The sensation was like a sudden rainstorm hitting the surface of a lake: countless impacts, countless pockmarks, and each pockmark might be a man going down.

The bodies on the ground began to accumulate, slowly repainting the earth in a different color.

Within the inner side of Jizhou’s walls, countless Jizhou soldiers were stationed several feet back from the wall itself, waiting for orders.

As the Yuzhou forces closed to within range of the wall, Liu Ge relayed the command through a series of short, sharp horn blasts.

Hearing the signal, the Jizhou soldiers inside the wall raised their bows as one, and together loosed their arrows upward and over.

The arrows flew over the wall and fell just outside it, a short distance below. They had drilled this countless times — the exact distance to stand, the exact force to use, to clear their own troops on the wall without injuring them while still striking the enemy pressing against the base.

Under this dense interlocking arrow defense, the Yuzhou casualties were beyond counting.

But a battlefield is a battlefield, and soldiers are soldiers.

Through the rain of arrows they came, and still they reached the base of the wall — straining to hoist their siege ladders upright and lean them against the stone.

“Concentrated fire!”

Liu Ge roared.

The archers on the wall took direct aim at the men raising the ladders. At that range, the arrows were lethal.

The Yuzhou soldiers carrying the ladders died faster than any of the others.

But just at that moment, after paying for every foot of advance with lives, the Yuzhou crossbow carts had also rolled within their firing range.

They adjusted their elevation. At a single command, the Yuzhou crossbow carts began to return fire.

Great bolts hammered into the city wall, and the scene grew suddenly more savage — and at last, it was no longer only one side dying.

A heavy bolt struck a battlement with a sharp crack, blasting a chunk of stone loose; trailing sparks, the bolt deflected and buried itself in the skull of a Jizhou soldier on the far side.

The Yuzhou crossbow carts were more numerous. Their bolts naturally couldn’t match the range of the fixed wall-mounted crossbows at elevation — but once they were within range, their force was no less devastating.

And among the varieties of crossbow cart, there were volley crossbows.

The bolts from volley crossbows were smaller — roughly wrist-thick, four to five feet long — but fired in a sweeping horizontal rack, they scythed through ranks of soldiers like a sickle through wheat.

Shards of stone flew across the wall, sparks erupted from every bolt impact, and screams rang out amid the chaos.

“Suppress those volley crossbows!”

Liu Ge ordered the bed crossbows to re-angle their aim, and the heavy bolts began concentrating on the Yuzhou crossbow carts.

A battlefield is not a single point of death, not a single line of death — it is countless points and lines overlaid upon each other.

Men who fell to arrow fire were vanishing points scattered across the field. Men who died at the base of the wall were falling in lines, one after another.

At the very foot of the wall, many of them had no choice in the matter: the comrades behind had pressed them up against the stone. They couldn’t retreat, and they couldn’t climb.

“Drop the spike boards!”

A command rang out. The heavy nail-studded boards hanging from the wall dropped, plunging down — and where they landed on a man’s head, they drove straight through.

As the boards were hauled back up, blood dripped from the long iron spikes, falling one drop at a time.

No one could say how long this went on. The Yuzhou dead at the base of the wall had piled up into a significant mound.

At last, a retreat signal came from the rear.

The Yuzhou forces that had pressed so fiercely for so long slowly drew back — like a great wave that had hammered a shoreline in its fury, now receding with a trace of dejection and reluctance.

A city like Jizhou — to take it through conventional assault was something close to impossible.

The attack had not been limited to the eastern side. To the north and south, enemy forces had also pressed large-scale assaults.

Only to the west was there nothing — Luo Geng’s Youzhou forces held that position, and they hadn’t moved.

—

That night.

Zeng Ling summoned Jinzu and Liu Ge, and in the main camp of the Jizhou forces — with only those commanders who weren’t currently on wall duty present — he addressed them.

“Three-sided assault, and the west untouched.”

Zeng Ling paced the tent as he spoke: “The friction between Luo Geng and Cui Yanlai and Liu Li cannot be smoothed over easily — and that, precisely, is something we can use.”

He stopped, looked at Liu Ge, and asked: “Given the situation, what would you do?”

Liu Ge had been turning over a single question in his mind, ever since this all began: if Tang Pidi were here handling this, what would Tang Pidi do?

Both he and Jinzu had admired Tang Pidi’s abilities without reservation during their time guarding Jizhou.

“Sow discord?”

The idea came to Liu Ge suddenly.

Zeng Ling asked: “How?”

Liu Ge said: “Tomorrow, have men on the wall shoot arrows down toward the outside. Tie letters to the arrows — and have soldiers on the wall shout loudly that General Luo should come and collect his letter.”

Zeng Ling considered this for a moment, then nodded slowly: “This plan can work. Even if it doesn’t win Luo Geng over to our side, it will make Cui Yanlai and Liu Li even more suspicious of him.”

He glanced at Liu Ge and continued: “But the plan, as it stands, is still a little short of what it could be.”

Liu Ge said: “If… there were someone willing to die — to go out to Luo Geng’s camp after a soldier from the Youzhou forces retrieves the arrow letter… the effect of this plan might be considerably stronger.”

Zeng Ling’s brow furrowed slightly.

“Anyone who goes on this errand is unlikely to come back.”

He paused, then looked out through the tent entrance at his personal guards.

He walked to the doorway, gathered himself, and said: “Is there anyone among you willing to risk your life, go out of the city, and carry a letter to Luo Geng’s forces to the west? Whoever goes — I will take good care of his family…”

“My Lord!”

The captain of Zeng Ling’s personal guards, Shi Kuan, stepped forward: “My Lord — let me go.”

Zeng Ling said: “You… you understand, this mission…”

Before he could finish, Shi Kuan saluted and said: “My Lord, I understand. There is no need to say more. I’ve already made my peace with not coming back. I have only one request.”

Zeng Ling said: “Speak.”

Shi Kuan said loudly: “I have an elderly mother at home. I ask only that my Lord look after her.”

Zeng Ling asked: “And nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

Shi Kuan said: “My life has always belonged to my Lord. I have merely been keeping it safe on your behalf. Now that you have need of it, my Lord — take it.”

Zeng Ling stood on the step and looked at Shi Kuan for a long moment. Then he clasped his hands together and bowed, low and deep.

Behind him, the assembled commanders gave a full military salute in unison.

—