Up on Jizhou’s city walls, Zeng Ling was directing his soldiers in the preparations to receive the assault when he heard someone calling out behind him. He turned to see a sweat-drenched captain come running up.

“Your Excellency!”

The man shouted breathlessly. “We’re under attack! The Yanshan Camp is launching a fierce assault on the northern gate! They’re barely holding — please come at once!”

Zeng Ling shouted furiously, “Where is the northern gate’s commander? Where is Lu Guangyuan?!”

The captain answered, “General Lu is there, Your Excellency, but the enemy’s strength is overwhelming. Our casualties are severe — we need reinforcements.”

“Liu Ge!”

Zeng Ling looked around urgently and shouted out the name.

“Where is Liu Ge?!”

No one had seen Liu Ge. Zeng Ling sent men to find him, but search as they might, there was no trace of where Liu Ge had gone. And it was not just Liu Ge — the three-thousand-plus garrison troops under his command had vanished along with him.

Word came that Liu Ge, in recent days, had been leading his entire force on city-wide patrols each day, sometimes not returning until the small hours of the night. No one had thought anything of it.

Zeng Ling sent men fanning out through the city streets in every direction, but the search parties sprinted through the streets and saw no sign of either Liu Ge or a single soldier under his command.

By this time, the Yanshan Camp’s assault had reached a critical moment. Zeng Ling had already noticed that Liu Li’s Yuzhou army on the southern front was attacking without real force — a great deal of noise with very little bite, purely for show. So he rushed to the northern gate.

When he arrived, there was no longer any room to be consumed by anger over Liu Ge’s absence.

Outside the wall, over a hundred enormous and crudely constructed siege tower wagons were nearly pressing up against the battlements. The ground outside was carpeted with Yanshan Camp soldiers’ bodies — even with the shield formations for protection, they had still fallen in vast numbers.

Yet it was this relentless attrition that had allowed them to push the tower wagons forward.

The archers on the tower wagons traded volleys with Jizhou’s soldiers on the battlements. At such close range, the losses among both sides’ archers were beyond counting.

Green-Browed soldiers on the tower wagons fell in batches and were replaced in batches, while the Jizhou soldiers they suppressed took relatively fewer casualties, protected as they were by the crenellations.

Once the tower wagons nearly touched the city wall, Yanshan Camp soldiers could thrust ladders across the gap and onto the battlements, then charge forward across them.

But the most fearsome thing was not the tower wagons — it was the ramp that five days of labor had pushed into existence.

Perhaps one-third of its base was made of corpses.

Those who died had no time to be pulled back. A layer of sandbags was piled over them, and when more died, more sandbags were piled on top.

Chang Dingzhou, one of the Yanshan Camp’s chief lieutenants, saw that the ramp had nearly reached the right height. He turned and shouted, “My men — follow me up and seize the first glory of this battle! The chief has promised: the first to reach the battlements will be richly rewarded!”

He charged up first, shield in one hand and long blade in the other. Behind him, a numberless surge of Yanshan Camp soldiers rushed forward with their shields raised.

Watching this, Zeng Ling’s eyes went red.

“Loose arrows! Loose arrows at them!”

He did not stop shouting.

Jizhou’s archers, to shoot at the men on the ramp, had to step out from behind the crenellations. The angled slits in the merlons were too narrow — they could fit only two men at most. Such a level of defense could never stop the Green-Browed Army.

So they had to step into the open, and in doing so they exposed themselves to the archers on the tower wagons.

Men were dying everywhere. In this moment the true face of war lay bare for all to see.

“Up! Up!”

Chang Dingzhou bellowed like a lion hurling itself at its prey.

He led his men sprinting up the ramp, but the ramp did not quite reach the height of the battlements — there was still roughly the height of a man remaining.

After ascending, the shield in front of Chang Dingzhou quickly bristled with white-feathered arrows until the shield itself grew heavy with their weight.

Arrows continued to pour down, so thick there was barely room between them. Yet there was no smooth way to leap onto the battlements — Jizhou’s soldiers held the high ground, and had no intention of letting anyone up.

“Come up! Hold your shields! Pack the ramp higher!”

Chang Dingzhou charged ferociously to the base of the wall. Standing beneath the battlements, he raised his shield above his head.

The Jizhou soldiers above jabbed down with grappling hooks and long spears in a frenzy, shouting and roaring — as though the noise alone might drive the enemy back.

Those who were stabbed down tumbled away, and their bodies raised the ramp another fraction.

Chang Dingzhou’s personal guards followed him to the wall and, imitating their commander, stood upright and raised their shields overhead.

Those behind them began to crouch, then squat lower still, using their shoulders to brace the shields from below — forcing the last section of height into existence through sheer human effort.

“Charge up! Don’t worry about us — just go!”

Chang Dingzhou bellowed from beneath the shields. “Give me everything you’ve got and get up there!”

The Green-Browed soldiers who came after planted their feet on the shields and charged up. The men below the shields clenched their teeth and held firm.

At last, someone made it onto the battlements — only to be cut down by a storm of blades almost immediately.

The first man up was a hero, yet he was destined to die without his name being known by anyone.

But with the first came the second. Those on the ramp who might have hesitated found that hesitation was no longer possible.

The men pressing up from behind shoved them forward with brute force, packed together so tightly the whole mass was like a pillar driving against a mountain.

So long as the force behind was sufficient, the end of the pillar driving against the mountain would crumble and break apart without cease — but it was not the mountain that moved. It was the pillar that kept shattering, piece by piece.

The fragments that broke away were the Green-Browed Army soldiers tumbling down again and again.

As long as the speed of dying did not outpace the speed of pushing forward, in the end more and more men would still fight their way onto the battlements.

“Pile a wall! Block this point!”

Zeng Ling screamed, pointing at the ramp.

Crowds of Jizhou soldiers began hauling sandbags and stacking them on either side of the breach point on the battlements.

This way, the Green-Browed soldiers who clawed their way up were boxed between two sandbag walls. To expand their hold on the battlements, they had to clamber over the sandbag walls first.

What seemed like merely one extra obstacle brought casualties that were utterly staggering.

“Don’t stop — stack more walls!”

Zeng Ling’s voice had long since gone raw; it sounded as though each word caused him pain.

On one side of the sandbag wall, the Green-Browed soldiers who had gained the battlements tried to climb over. On the other side, Jizhou’s men fought back with bows and spears.

Who could have imagined that before long, the space between the two sandbag walls would be packed with bodies stacked to the height of the walls themselves.

Green-Browed soldiers pushed forward layer by layer, and with each sandbag wall they overcame, the dead numbered beyond reckoning.

But the thrill of a victory that seemed so close drove those behind to press on with a madness that could not be stopped.

The stretch of the northern wall controlled by the Green-Browed Army grew longer and longer. And in that same moment, the soldiers aboard the tower wagons began crossing the ladders onto the wall.

It was like a solid, mighty dam. It seemed as though any wave, no matter how great, could be held back — the dam looked as though it could never fail.

And then a hairline crack appeared in the dam, and the flood rushed through and tore it apart in moments.

“They’re up!”

“Our men are up!”

A wave of cheers broke out through the Green-Browed Army’s ranks below.

Standing in the rear of the army, Yu Chaozong watched through his far-seeing glass. He saw his men fighting and killing across what looked to be several dozen *zhang* of the battlements, and something blazed to life in his eyes.

“Chang Dingsui!”

Yu Chaozong pointed toward the city wall. “Go reinforce your brother!”

Chang Dingsui, another of the Yanshan Camp’s chief lieutenants, had long since been unable to contain himself — he was terrified his elder brother was in danger. He led his own troops forward to the relief.

Once that section of wall around the gate had been secured by the Green-Browed Army, the battering ram was brought up outside the city.

A massive, thick log slammed into the gate with a deafening crash; even the wall seemed to shudder. But the gate itself barely moved.

The Jizhou army had long since packed the gate passage solid. Even if the battering ram broke the doors apart, there was no way through.

But they did not stop — because once the door planks were smashed in, the material packed inside could be cleared away.

Roughly half an hour later, Chang Dingsui finally pressed his way up to the battlements. He looked around desperately.

“Big brother!”

Chang Dingsui cried out. “Big brother, where are you!”

No one answered.

Chang Dingsui grabbed a Green-Browed soldier and demanded, “Have you seen my brother?”

The man shook his head. “Haven’t seen him.”

Chang Dingsui noticed a wounded soldier not far away, slumped against the wall with a low, pained moan. He pushed through to the man, grabbed his shirt, and demanded, “Have you seen my brother?!”

This man was one of Chang Dingzhou’s personal guards — Chang Dingsui recognized him.

The man had a deep cut across his shoulder, blood flowing freely. Being grabbed by Chang Dingsui sent a spasm of agony across his face.

“The chief… the chief should still be down below, holding up the shields.”

At those words, all color drained from Chang Dingsui’s face. He tore through the crowd like a madman, forcing his way back the way he had come.

To those charging forward, they saw a man with a terrifying look on his face fighting his way upstream.

To Chang Dingsui, he saw a limitless tide of men with terrifying looks on their faces charging toward him, one face after another.

He could not say how long it went on, but an exhausted Chang Dingsui could not make it back down. The ramp was so densely packed it was as if every man were fused to the next — there was no forcing a way through.

Drained of strength, he was pushed and jostled until he ended up near the gate tower and was then pushed and jostled again until he came down the gate’s sloping walkway into the city.

Out of the press at last — at the very least, not that unbearable crush of shoulder against shoulder.

Chang Dingsui raised his head and looked up at the battlements. Green-Browed Army soldiers were still streaming down. Those men — they shouted with excitement, and every one of them looked as though something savage inside them was tearing through the skin trying to get out.

Chang Dingsui found a spot against the wall and slumped down. He had no heart for charging ahead. He simply sat there in blank, agonized stillness.

He had not found his elder brother. But he already knew, roughly, what fate his elder brother had met.

Time passed, moment by moment. The Green-Browed soldiers streaming down from the walls had thinned considerably.

Nearby, fresh cheers erupted — the Green-Browed troops attacking the gate head-on had finally broken through the packed passage. Great numbers of soldiers began pouring in from outside.

Chang Dingsui pushed himself up along the wall and looked. On the ramp, Chief Yu Chaozong was coming down with a look of elation, a crowd of men around him.

“Well done! I will reward you and your brothers handsomely!”

As Yu Chaozong passed Chang Dingsui, he clapped him on the shoulder — then was swept along by the crowd into the city.

Chang Dingsui, expression blank, steadied himself against the wall and made his way back. He went up to the battlements, back to the place where the ramp met the wall.

He jumped down from the battlements, and began turning over the bodies on the ramp one by one. He did not leave them where they fell — he pushed each one away, turned the next, pushed it away too.

The wall had been breached in the early afternoon.

Now the slanted light of evening fell on Chang Dingsui.

From a distance, someone watched as he turned over a shattered shield. Threads of blood stretched and clung between the pieces. Chang Dingsui stopped. He stared. Then he knelt down, and went rigid.

“Ah!”

He began to howl — one cry after another, over and over.

—