Dawn tried to arrive and found the sky unwilling.
The light that crept over the fields was thin and colorless, more a lessening of dark than its opposite. Frost glazed the broken ladders like a last, mocking polish. The bodies that had not yet been dragged from the killing ground lay in careful, accidental rows—Xia armor, Qi armor, soot, blood.
Ziyan's hands ached from holding steel too long. She did not remember when she'd last unclenched them properly. The blue silk at her wrist was stiff with frozen sweat. She flexed her fingers once, quietly, feeling each joint like a small complaint.
"Third day," Wei muttered beside her on the wall. "Third time the wolves test the pen."
"Third time we remind them we have teeth," Feiyan said.
The horns did not come at first light. They came earlier.
A low note rolled from Xia's camp while the sky was still bruise-dark. Men on the wall startled awake, hands fumbling for bowstrings. Torches flared in the eastern ranks, not in tidy lines this time but in scattered bursts.
"Watch the flanks," Li Qiang called. "They're not giving us clean charges anymore."
"They shouldn't," Ziyan said. "We've already shown them what happens to clean."
Movement rippled, not toward the main gate but along the river. Shadows detached themselves from the gloom: small units, light armor, ropes coiled, tools wrapped in cloth to muffle their clink. Sappers and climbers both.
Feiyan narrowed her eyes. "Culverts," she said. "He's going to try the old drains."
"Let him," Ziyan answered. "We've been waiting there since yesterday."
Shuye had mapped the city's underbelly as carefully as he had mapped its streets. The old storm drains and waste channels that once carried rainwater and worse to the river had been the first thing Ziyan asked him about when she decided to stay rather than flee. If she were General Ren, she'd use them.
If she were Feiyan, she'd be waiting.
—
In the tunnel two streets beneath the east wall, the world was reduced to smell and sound.
Damp stone. Old filth. The faint, cold tang of iron on air that had no right to have air at all.
Feiyan pressed her back to the slick wall and counted the oncoming footfalls. "Six," she breathed. "Maybe eight if some of them are light on their feet."
The three men with her—street-quick fighters from the river quarters, more used to knives in alleys than ranks and files—shifted their grips on the short spears Ziyan had put into their hands. One made a quick sign to a kitchen god no one had room to worship anymore.
Torchlight approached, muted by a hood. Xia voices murmured in the dark, the language of the east clipped and soft. A rope hissed, dragged along damp stone.
Feiyan waited until the first torch-edge showed, a pale smear on the slime-slick ceiling. Then she dropped her own hood and smiled without humor.
"Wrong river," she said in perfect Xia.
The shock bought them three heartbeats. Sometimes that was all a knife needed.
Her blade took the torch arm first; the flame tumbled, guttering, painting wild shadows on wet walls. The river-quarter boys moved with admirable lack of artistry—two spears straight to the gut, one to the throat. The cramped space turned every motion into a shove, every strike into a grapple. Men slipped in old filth, went down, drowned face-first in inches of foul water.
A Xia soldier at the rear shoved his comrade forward and tried to flee back the way they'd come. Feiyan let him. "Go," she said in his language, as she wiped her blade on a dead man's sleeve. "Tell your general the drains are full."
He ran. His panic would do more work than his corpse.
—
Aboveground, the attack unfolded in three layers.
At the front, ladders again, but fewer and timed with bursts of arrow fire that targeted specific sections of wall. At the midline, shielded archers in tight formation, their volleys overlapping like woven cloth. At the rear, horse units shifting, probing for any hint of a sally.
"They're fishing," Han said, watching through a spyglass. "Waiting for us to overreach."
"Then we don't," Ziyan replied. "We bend and let them tire themselves on stone."
Her orders went out along the wall: no countercharge, no glorious push through an open gate, no pursuit beyond the arrow's comfortable reach. Let Xia grind against their defenses and pay for each rung of each ladder twice.
It went against every story soldiers liked to tell about battle. It was also the only way the city would survive long enough to matter.
By mid-morning, the snow had turned to sleet. Armor slicked with it. Bowstrings had to be checked constantly, dried against cloaks, kept singing. Men's fingers numbed. Xia's discipline held; their advance did not.
General Ren adjusted.
The next wave changed shape—less emphasis on the walls, more on the minds behind them.
Scrolls wrapped around stone began to sail over the parapets.
One struck the merlon by Ziyan's head. Another landed at Wei's feet. A third skidded to rest near an old woman hauling bucket after bucket of water, her back stooped but unbroken.
"Don't!" Wei barked, when a young conscript bent for it. "Could be fire. Could be worse."
"It's words," the old woman said, stooping before he could stop her. "Words burn slower."
She unfurled it with fingers gnarled from years of scrubbing.
Wei moved to snatch it away, but Ziyan's hand closed on his forearm. "Let her read."
"It's poison," he muttered.
"Then we show everyone what kind," Ziyan said.