As the first light of dawn broke, wind swept across the mountains of the southwest, and above the pass-fortress of Jiange, fire still burned.

The wooden gate tower had already been scorched black through and through by the earlier blaze; beams and roof tiles crumbled and flaked away under the flames’ relentless licking. Though the open fire had gradually diminished, searing, choking black smoke still coiled upward; the morning wind carried that smoke to smother the southern half of the fortress completely, while behind the northern parapet the surge of heat was somewhat less severe, and it was along this narrow, cramped passage that the soldiers of both sides now clashed and killed one another.

Once the two sides had closed to melee range, ranged support temporarily lost its usefulness. The Jurchens formed a shield wall and charged forward; from behind them, lit fire-thunder bombs were thrown, while the Huaxia Army answered in kind with hand grenades.

Explosions bloomed atop the wall; men sought cover amid the scorching air, waves of searing heat rolling over them, raising ghastly blisters on their faces. Some Huaxia Army soldiers, seizing the moment, pressed forward, hurling grenades down the stairwell behind the gate tower; the shockwaves from earlier explosions had already shaken the structure, already dried and brittle from the fire, and support beams came crashing down, burying soldiers beneath charred wood and stone, great sprays of sparks rising into the sky.

“Follow me, charge—”

The sound of the bugle’s call spiraled high and clear on the morning wind. Below, on the ash-covered slope, the soldiers of the Huaxia Army still surged upward toward the scorching heights of the pass.

The pass-fortress, wrapped in swirling flame, was a fearsome sight — yet breaking through it did not, in the end, take very long. The Huaxia Army soldiers who reached the top of the tower had no way to retreat; grenades in hand, they pushed forward through fire and black smoke. Behind the gate tower, the fire’s effect was less thorough, and while the fresh Jurchen reinforcements found it easier to climb up, they suffered heavier losses from the grenade blasts. After several exchanges, the Huaxia Army began hurling grenades from the tower down into the small plaza inside, while the Jurchens withdrew to a distance and answered with volleys of arrows.

The small plaza behind the pass-fortress was not large; beyond it wound the mountain road. After a bout of fighting, the Jurchens gradually withdrew, and the Huaxia Army surged forward in pursuit. Mao Yishan led the first company up onto the wall, pushing through into the small plaza within the fortress; as over a hundred men climbed onto the wall, part of the force descended to the rear — and it was only then that Balishu’s true counterattack finally came.

More than a dozen cannon positioned in the mountains behind the pass fired almost simultaneously, and the shells and explosions engulfed the fortress and the plaza alike. By now the fire was already spreading across the wall; the gate itself had long since been sealed from within with heaped stones, so that the entire fortress had become, in effect, a great enclosed pen. Though more than a dozen iron cannon could not cover the entire area, under this heavy bombardment more than a dozen Huaxia Army soldiers were killed outright.

Balishu had even prepared two small trebuchets in the mountain road behind, hurling wooden barrels packed with explosives at the still-burning gate tower, setting off a fresh round of violent explosions.

The mountain wind blew past; Mao Yishan pulled himself up from the ground, his ears ringing. He hauled up a soldier tumbling nearby and began moving toward the rear, shouting, “Get the wounded! Find cover—”

There was no cover in the small plaza, but there were, at least, blind spots the cannon fire could not reach. He had just managed to help a wounded comrade stagger into one such blind spot below the wall when the second round of bombardment already began; smoke and the smell of gunpowder filled the air everywhere. Someone came to ask whether they should retreat back onto the fortress wall; Mao Yishan shook his head. “Save the wounded! Ready the grenades! Watch for arrows!”

Amid the swirling smoke, no more than a dozen or so Huaxia Army soldiers had made it back beneath the wall; several of the wounded still writhed and struggled on the ground ahead, and there was nothing to be done for them now. As Mao Yishan’s words fell, a rain of arrows came sweeping down from the sky ahead.

A group of soldiers raised their shields, and a rattling clatter of impacts followed; through the swirling smoke ahead, the Jurchens came charging forward.

“Grenades — ready to charge—”

At Mao Yishan’s roar, several grenades were hurled toward the advancing Jin soldiers; from the opposing formation, lit fire-thunder bombs were thrown back in turn, aimed at the blind spot beneath the wall — but Mao Yishan had already moved first, charging forward with everything he had.

A wounded Huaxia Army soldier still on the battlefield struggled to stand, swaying, only for a Jin spear to pierce straight through him. Mao Yishan charged past the man’s side before he had even fallen, roaring as he crashed into the Jin formation, itself already scattered by the grenades. The rest of the Huaxia soldiers surged forward as well, madly, locked in scattered melee with the Jin troops.

With cannon fire sealing off the way ahead and fire-thunder bombs raining down from behind, choosing to fight in close, tangled combat — each side interwoven with the other — was the only way out left to them. Those able to follow Mao Yishan into this initial assault were, for the most part, veteran soldiers, most of whom understood this situation clearly: use grenades to scatter the enemy into loose formation, then charge, and once inside their ranks, form up in pairs or trios, seizing local advantages of two against one wherever possible. The Jurchens were fearsomely skilled in individual combat, but over the half year of the southwestern campaign, even their most elite units had often come off worse in this kind of chaotic melee against the Huaxia Army.

Amid the fighting, Mao Yishan cut down two Jin soldiers; several more men had already fallen within his field of vision, the smell of blood spreading through the air. Behind him, atop the wall, several Huaxia Army soldiers who had broken through had already come down, firing crossbows before joining the fray. From the Jurchen side, several tall, well-armored warriors charged forward in turn — though they too dared not commit too many men at once, fearing heavy losses to another round of grenades.

Soon after, more barrels of explosives were hurled onto the fortress from above, thick smoke billowing outward on every side, while from the other direction another rocket shell arced over the fortress and struck the cliff face beyond, blasting out a great roll of dense smoke.

The launch mechanism of the Dijiang had already gone through several rounds of adjustment, but without the ability to accurately measure distance, and with the fierce mountain winds working against it, the rocket shells, fired from such a distance, could pose essentially no real threat to the Jin positions in the mountains beyond. After a few shells fired off into the distance to no effect, the effort was abandoned.

The two sides fought on and on amid the churning smoke and flying arrows, no one certain how long it had lasted, until the Jin troops began to show signs of pulling back. Mao Yishan shouted, “Get the wounded out!” — but before long, another furious barrage of cannon fire came pouring down again.

The men withdrew into the blind spot beneath the wall where the shells could not reach; before the wounded could even be moved up onto the wall, the Jurchens’ second wave of assault had already come charging in once more…

Wave after wave of clashing, back and forth, the Jin troops charging in only to be beaten back again and again. The struggle for the small plaza continued for well over an hour; both sides paid a price of over two hundred men each before the fire atop the fortress finally began to die down, and the Huaxia Army, amid a sea of blood, at last managed to secure their hold on the plaza.

Corpses were piled like mountains.

Within this small, hardly spacious open ground, both sides had fed men into the fighting in successive waves, each paying a price of over two hundred lives — a struggle that could already be counted among the most brutal engagements of the war. Even at Xiaocang River in years past, fighting of such intensity had rarely been reached. Mao Yishan’s position had teetered on the edge of collapse more than once, with great numbers of wounded pulled back in the first wave only to fall again in the second — but in the end, the Jurchens never managed to truly gain the upper hand.

This was all within the first two hours after the assault on Jianmen Pass had begun. The Huaxia Army had been pinned hard against the wall before the small plaza, and neither side had managed to advance so much as an inch. The Huaxia Army’s resolve to fight held firm, and Balishu, too, refused to show the slightest weakness. By the end, corpses lay piled within that small stretch of ground, the entire scene brutal beyond measure.

Mao Yishan himself fell in the fighting, collapsing into a pool of blood; a company commander had a soldier carry him on his back, charging up over the wall and sending him to the rear, shouting at the medical corps, “Save our commander!” This was perhaps one of the few privileges he received on the battlefield as a regimental commander — far more of the ordinary soldiers, unable to be carried back in time, had already fallen where they lay.

As the fire atop the gate tower gradually died down and a path opened, the Huaxia Army began attempting to press forward. But along the mountain road behind, Balishu, with his cannon emplacements, held the narrow road as firmly as an iron fortress. It was not until that afternoon that the Huaxia Army, with the support of several more rocket shells, finally managed to knock out the dozen-plus iron cannon behind the pass, and attempted to push forward into the mountain road.

What awaited them there was, once again, resistance every bit as fierce and desperate as before…

Every nation, every people, in a time of crisis, will always see remarkable figures emerge, each fighting in their own way, through wave after wave of reform or resistance.

Or perhaps it is precisely because all voices have otherwise fallen silent that such rare acts of resistance stand out as something so extraordinary.

War horses galloped across the ridgelines and distant roads, past camps thick with banners; when scouts finally brought word of the fierce fighting at Jianmen Pass to Wanyan Zonghan, this Jurchen veteran general — a man who had not shown excessive grief even at his own son’s death — could not help but let two tears of murky sorrow slip from his eyes.

A general dies a hundred deaths in battle — the loss of any great commander on the field of war is, in the end, unavoidable. The fall of even one’s own son is, in the end, simply a matter of fortune. But when great commanders fall in battle one after another, defeated and dying, this signals that a nation’s fate has reached its most urgent, most critical hour.

Looking back to the days when Aguda first rose with only three thousand men — among those three thousand, who among them could really be called irreplaceable? Battle after battle, thousands upon thousands had died one after another, yet the Jurchens’ spirit had remained undimmed; no single death had ever truly shaken the larger course of events. Loushi had later come to be called the war-god of the Jurchens, but in those early years he had been no more skilled in battle than any other man — he had simply survived those decades of campaigning. When Loushi later fell in the northwest, and Cibushi soon after him, the Jin state had felt the loss keenly — which showed, on one hand, just how precious such men truly were, and on the other, simply that no one else could measure up to them.

Now, in this campaign in the southwest, from Eli Li to Sheyema, to Yuyu, to Dalai — each loss had been a source of genuine anguish, a feeling utterly absent thirty years earlier, in the days when they had first risen with Aguda. Back then, anyone’s death had been perfectly ordinary — one commander fell, another simply took his place. But now, each and every one of them had become irreplaceable.

The Battle of Tanzhou had cost them Yinshuke, who, once he and Gushen had departed, should have been one of the commanding talents capable of steadying the field — no one had expected that, dragged down by a wastrel like Wanyan Qingjue, he would fall to a Han commander’s deadly stratagem. After Yinshuke’s fall, the strength of his clan should still have rested on Balishu’s shoulders — this pair of brothers, one fierce and bold, the other steady and supple, had each held a rank higher, originally, than men like Eli Li, Yuyu, or Dalai. But with word now arriving of the fighting at Jianmen Pass, Zonghan understood in his heart: Balishu was not coming back.

And yet there was nothing to be done about it.

Even reasoning it through coldly, the southwestern Black Banner’s forces were already stretched painfully thin — yet from that single encounter before Shiling alone, Zonghan already knew in his heart that the peril of Jiange could not stop that Heart Demon’s determination to break out from the rear.

—Had there not been those twenty-odd thousand men of Qin Shaoqian’s blocking the way beyond the southwestern mountains, the other side might well have played it safe, waiting until the great Jin’s armies had withdrawn before calmly reclaiming Jianmen Pass at their leisure. But precisely because those twenty thousand men now blocked the road, that dark dragon of the southwest would stop at nothing to break through that pass. Though there might well be some backlash to pay for it later, Jianmen Pass could not hold back that Heart Demon’s will, nor could it hold back the assault of those new-model firearms.

Had the man stationed at Jianmen Pass been anyone other than a commander of Balishu’s caliber, anyone else would only have crumbled and fallen even faster — and once the two Huaxia armies joined together into one, the road home for his own great army would only grow more treacherous still.

Reflecting on these several decades of campaigning, a march once thick with brilliant generals, now gradually falling one by one, Zonghan let out a sigh, put on his helmet, and stepped out of his tent. The army had already been mobilized and assembled.

Before Jianmen Pass could be breached, he would concentrate every last ounce of his elite strength for one great decisive battle, to surround and destroy the so-called Seventh Huaxia Army led by Qin Shaoqian.

This was the only reckoning he could offer for Balishu’s sacrifice.

…

When the sky grows dark, people must light fires — and sometimes, on a barren and desolate earth, all a person can do is set themselves alight, and wait for the dawn.

This was a taste the Jurchens had only just begun to experience; the people of the Zhou dynasty had already been drowning in it for over a decade now. If the awareness stirring in men like Zonghan, Xiyin, and Balishu could still be said to carry some scent of reason and clarity, then what burned within Dai Mengwei on the banks of the Han River was, by comparison, a torch far more touched by madness and distortion.

To the north, in Yunzhong Prefecture, the sky hung heavy and overcast. Shi Li’ai stood upon the city wall, the fire he carried within him likewise sustaining the dark pall now hanging over the whole of Yunzhong.

Below the walls stretched a sea of people driven in from every direction — among them Jurchens, and enslaved Han people as well, proof enough that the attackers marching in were not, in fact, Han people from the south. In truth, the cavalry columns and the style of the encampments approaching from a distance had already made this clear — the force that had circled around to break through Yanmen Pass was the steppe people, once bottled up to the west.

The siege had already continued for several days.

The original inhabitants of the nearby small towns and villages had been driven in, group after group, by these steppe raiders. This human sea of cannon fodder gathered below the walls could not, in itself, threaten the city — but for the Jurchens, what stung most, perhaps, was the loss of pride and face suffered in facing such a situation for the first time. The sons of noble families within the city clamored again and again to be allowed to sortie out and fight, but Shi Li’ai held such impulses firmly in check.

On the second day after the steppe vanguard reached the city walls, Shi Li’ai had once ordered the small cavalry force within the city to sortie out and test the enemy’s true strength. This steppe cavalry appeared reckless and rash, retreating in disorder after a single exchange of arrow fire. This was the first clash between the two sides at Yunzhong; as warriors of a Jin state that had all but conquered the realm, fearlessly exchanging arrows and driving off the enemy should, by rights, have been the natural and expected outcome. And yet Shi Li’ai sensed, however faintly, that something was not quite right — it was only as he sounded the gongs to call his men back that he realized his own cavalry had, whether by intention or not, been drawn out much further than he had meant them to go.

It was an exceedingly subtle distance. This cavalry force, elite troops among the city’s defenders, returned at once upon the order; the enemy did not pursue with any further attack. And yet Shi Li’ai could never quite shake the feeling that, beneath the walls, many eyes were watching him in quiet silence, waiting patiently for some opportunity yet to come.

Over the following two days, the old man observed that cavalry’s movements carefully from atop the wall, and only then did he begin to sense, however faintly, that although this force appeared wild and unruly, it in fact possessed remarkably fine martial discipline — subtly different from its performance during that earlier charge and retreat. Had he sounded the recall even a little later, the enemy force might well have followed his own cavalry in a swift charge straight toward the city gates — and setting aside whether they could have slipped into the city amid the chaos, the men under his own command, at the very least, would certainly never have made it back.

He was a man who had lived through a lifetime of war and turmoil; even having noticed all this, he said nothing of it to the younger men in private. For one thing, his authority was already considerable, and he had no need to explain himself over such small matters; for another, preserving a measure of youthful rebelliousness and edge in the younger generation was, in many circumstances, entirely necessary as well.

The siege continued in this fashion for several days, with skirmish after skirmish, large and small, breaking out in the region around Yunzhong. The Jin state’s fourth southern campaign had drawn away the vast majority of its elite forces, but this did not mean the Jin state’s own heartland had been left entirely undefended. Garrison troops stationed in every region, local security forces, even veteran soldiers — all could, at need, be mobilized into a sizable army. Ever since Yanmen Pass had been breached and the steppe forces’ spearhead had swiftly reached Yunzhong Prefecture, unit after unit had begun setting out from every region, converging swiftly toward this front.

Along the way, they met wave after wave of arrow-fire ambushes. The steppe warriors’ bows were fearsomely powerful, their horsemanship extraordinary; with the main Jin forces already committed to the south, at least in terms of cavalry the Jin troops could no longer match these steppe riders, who, moreover, refused outright to engage the Jin army in any direct pitched battle. Whenever they encountered infantry, they loosed volleys of arrows from a distance; once the infantry formed up defensively, the riders would withdraw, only to return before long to harass them again — from day into night, and from night back into the dawn.

The Jurchen reinforcements marching to relieve the city mostly found themselves bogged down, largely unable to reach the walls of Yunzhong at all; only two cavalry units managed to break through the blockade on the thirteenth and fifteenth of the fourth month, only to be swiftly encircled and hunted down by the massed steppe cavalry, far beyond sight of the city.

Shi Li’ai held his forces in check, making no move.

By the seventeenth of the fourth month, several crudely built, lopsided trebuchets had already been raised before the enemy’s position; as they were wheeled forward in preparation to launch, the defenders atop the walls of Yunzhong likewise readied their counter-response. Wanyan Dezhong and others nearby urged Shi Li’ai to come down from the wall, but the old man simply leaned on his cane and moved instead to a nearby tower.

“I personally oversaw the renovation of Yunzhong’s walls. A few rocks aren’t going to break through this stubborn old wall. Let’s see what it is they’re really after.”

The first thing hurled into the city of Yunzhong was not stone at all…