The cavalry had become a creature of dust. It lived in the fine, golden powder that coated their tongues, gritted in their teeth, and hid the green of the grass.
It moved to the rhythm of its own hunger, a thousand-legged centipede flowing through the empty places on the map. For a month, they had been gods of the hinterlands—unseen, omnipotent, and cruel. They left a trail of sour smoke and whispers that curdled the blood in northern villages.
Young Kuo rode in the gritty wake of the gods, his medic's satchel slapping a hollow rhythm against his thigh. It was light. The clean bandages from the south were gone, replaced by rough-spun linen stripped from a Jin quartermaster's store.
The honey was a memory; he had a clay pot of foul-smelling bear grease that stank like a tannery. His hands, once so careful with a suture needle, were now permanently stained with dirt and other men's dried blood. He had learned the new rules. He splinted Song legs. He turned his face from Jin groans.
The idealism that had carried him from the penal battalion had been scoured out, grain by grain, by the endless, wind-scoured plains. He was not a healer anymore. He was a function. A repairman for the machinery of war.
They were at a reedy, brown-watered pond, the men dismounted and letting the horses drink in nervous snorts, when the dust cloud appeared to the south. Not the wide smear of an army, but the thin, desperate plume of a single rider pushing a beast to its death.
The horse came on, a lathered spectre, its eyes rolling white, foam flying from its bit. Twenty paces from the picket line, its forelegs folded. It went down with a soft, final crunch, throwing its rider into the mud. The man did not move.
Niu Gao was there before the dust settled. He hauled the rider up like a sack of grain. The man wore the torn, mud-caked green of a headquarters messenger. One side of his head was a mask of black, clotted blood. He fumbled inside his tunic, his fingers blue with cold, and produced it: a bamboo message tube, its end sealed with a daub of jet-black wax stamped with the fierce, simple mark of a soaring eagle. The Generalissimo's personal seal.
A silence fell over the pond, deeper than the absence of sound. It was the silence of the world holding its breath.
Niu Gao cracked the seal, unrolled the thin rice paper, and read. His face, a landscape of permanent, aggressive fury, went flat and still. The boisterous curses, the jokes about the brown water, died in the men's throats.
"Captains," Niu Gao said, the word a stone dropped into the quiet. "To me." He looked at the nearest man. "Get him water. And find him a horse that isn't dead."
On a stretch of dry ground, Niu Gao smoothed a map. It was not a Song map; it was captured Jin hide, painted with their familiar yet strange, angular script. He weighted its corners with four river stones. His thick finger, the nail black with grime, stabbed a point.
"Yancheng," he grunted. "The siege is at the gate. The city is ripe." His finger then slashed northeast, to a mark by a river ford. "But here. Wanyan Wulu. The Iron Prince. Tens of thousands men. Horse and foot. He crossed the Yellow River at Zhenzhou Ford four days ago."
A veteran captain, a man named Lao whose face was a web of old scar-tissue, spat a stream of brown liquid. "So the mouse leaves his golden palace. Good. We've been eating his grain and burning his toys. Time to knock out his teeth."
Niu Gao's finger did not linger. It traced a swift, savage curve on the hide, a scything arc that swung wide around the marked position of Wulu's army, cutting between it and the distant safety of the Jin heartland.
"We are here," he said, tapping their current location, a speck in the vast emptiness. "He moves here," his finger drew a line southwest, toward Yancheng. "He will not attack the siege lines. He is not a fool. He will go for the soft belly. The supply train. The hospital."
The word hospital landed in Kuo's gut like a lump of cold iron. Lin Wei. Ox Li. Scholar Zhang. The rows of clean cots. The smell of boiling water and herbs. His mind recoiled, constructing an image of that orderly world overrun by the iron tide of Wanyan Wulu.
Niu Gao's finger completed its arc, hammering down on a point directly east of Yancheng, on the opposite side of the approaching Jin army from the Song siege camp. "We move here. We let him commit. Let him fix his eyes on the prize, let him stretch out his neck to bite."
He looked up, and his eyes were chips of flint in the dusty light. "And when he is extended, when all his might is pointed at our brothers' backs… we hit him. With the sunrise at our backs. We are not raiders today. We are the hammer. We break his army on the anvil of his own ambition."
The plan was a thing of brutal, beautiful simplicity. A classic stroke, but on the canvas of a kingdom. The order rippled out. The camp exploded into a frenzy of purposeful motion—not the chaos of a raid, but the grim, checked ferocity of a wolfpack turning to face a bear.
Kuo stood frozen, his satchel suddenly weighing a thousand pounds. A real battle. Not a skirmish in the dust, not the murder of a garrison. A field battle against the Iron Prince. His kit was a sick joke. He saw the veterans checking their bowstrings, running thumb-pads over edges that were already shaving-sharp, their eyes alight with a cold, professional hunger. He saw the other junior medics, boys from farms and fishing villages, their hands shaking as they tightened saddle girths, their faces pale beneath the grime.
Lao clomped over and cuffed Kuo on the back of the head, not roughly, but with a grim familiarity. "Cheer up, Sawbones. Today, you stop playing in the dirt. Today, you earn your place with the gods." He grinned, revealing a mouth of brown, broken teeth. "Try not to fall behind."
The cavalry force swung its great, dusty body to the south, then west. The pace was not the wild gallop of a raid, but the ground-eating, mile-devouring trot of a predator running down doomed prey.
Kuo clung to his saddle, the map seared into his mind. Somewhere ahead, an army of tens of thousands was marching toward his home. And somewhere, in the desperate shadow of that army, the only place that had ever felt like a sanctuary since the world ended, was waiting to be devoured. Its survival was now a race against time, measured in the beating of ten thousand hooves.
Within the coiled beast of the Song siege lines, a strange, feverish duality took hold. It was the stillness of a drawn bow, the string taut, the archer's eye fixed on two targets at once.
The first target, Yancheng, was breaking. Lin Wei saw it not as a soldier, but as a physician diagnosing a dying body. The symptoms were clear. The furious, defiant counter-volleys of stones and fire from the city's walls had dwindled to a sporadic, phlegmy cough.
The shouted insults that once greeted each new Song trench had been replaced by an eerie, watching silence. One morning, a banner—a stained white sheet, perhaps a surrender flag—was raised on a parapet. It wavered for ten heartbeats before a Jin officer in gilded armor stormed onto the wall, cut the rope, and kicked the cloth into the city below. The argument was visible, even at a distance. The body was turning on itself. Hope, then despair, had become a gangrene in the city's soul.
But this imminent death-throe was a academic concern. All energy, all fear, in the sprawling camp was siphoned toward the northeast.
Lin Wei's world had shrunk to the hospital compound, which was undergoing a grotesque, desperate metamorphosis. The directive in his mind was a screaming scroll of logistics:
"[DEFENSIVE PREPARATIONS: 68% COMPLETE. MORALE OF MEDICAL PERSONNEL: COLLAPSING. PROJECTED CASUALTY RATE IF PERIMETER BREACHED: 94-97%.]"
He moved through the chaos, a calm, hollow-eyed ghost.
He oversaw the distribution of tools that were no longer tools. At a long table, scalpels, bone-saws, and amputation knives were laid out. Orderlies filed past, each taking one, their faces sick as they felt the weight of a blade meant to save lives now meant to take them. "Aim for the eyes, the throat," Ox Li was barking, demonstrating a clumsy, overhand stab with a scalpel clenched in his massive fist. "You are not fighting. You are cutting. Do you understand?" Nearby, the precious stores of strong alcohol were being decanted not into surgical basins, but onto rags stuffed into empty ceramic jugs. Fire pots.
Scholar Zhang stood before a small, pathetic pyre—his life's work, his treasure. Scrolls of anatomy, diagrams of pressure points, his carefully copied herbal compendiums. He held a trembling lamp. "They cannot have this," he whispered to no one. "They cannot learn from us how we save our own." He touched the flame to a corner. The knowledge of generations curled black and vanished into smoke.
Ox Li was a force of tectonic will. Walking wounded who could sit upright were propped against the inner barricade of wagons, supply crates, and sacks of earth. They were handed spears, which they held like unfamiliar, deadly toys, their faces pale with the dual agony of wounds and terror.
The two hundred infantrymen were a thin, grim line digging a last, shallow ditch around the perimeter. It was a gesture. A child's defiant line in the sand against the incoming tide. Lin Wei watched a young medic, her hands still stained from a morning's surgery, trying to sharpen a stake with a kitchen knife, her tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
The worst was inside the main tents.
Here, in the dim, hushed light, lay the unrecoverable. Men with gut wounds slowly poisoning themselves, men in the fever-grip of gangrene, men whose skulls he had opened to relieve pressure they would never survive.
Evacuation was a fairy tale. Lin Wei moved down the rows, meeting the eyes of the condemned. A boy, not yet twenty, whose leg he had amputated two days prior. The boy's eyes were clear, too clear. He understood the shouting outside, the panic. He looked at Lin Wei and gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. A soldier's acceptance.
Lin Wei placed a hand on the boy's damp forehead, a useless, physician's gesture, and moved on. He had given the order: the critically wounded were to be moved to the very center of the compound. They would be the last to see the enemy. It was the final, brutal calculation of his triage: to spare them the terror of the breach, if not the fact of it.
As the sun began its decline, bleeding the sky with the spectacular, garish colors of a wound, a cry went up from the makeshift watchtower—a ladder lashed to the highest supply wagon.
"DUST! NORTHEAST! A CLOUD LIKE A MOUNTAIN!"
Lin Wei climbed the rungs, the brass of a commandeered eyeglass cold in his hand. He raised it, his world narrowing to a circle of magnified, hazy distance.
There, at the very edge of creation, the horizon was sick. A great, brown smear blurred the line between land and sky. And as he watched, the dying sun, sliding toward the earth, performed a final, cruel miracle. It caught on tens of thousands points of light.
A slow, glittering carpet of reflected fire—the tips of lances, the rims of helmets, the bosses of shields. It was not a cloud. It was a galaxy of malice, creeping forward with the dreadful, geological patience of a glacier.
Wanyan Wulu. The Iron Prince. His army.
They did not rush. They marched. Confident. Inevitable. The distance made them silent, which made them more terrible. The directive in his mind provided the last, sterile notation:
"[ENEMY VISUAL CONFIRMATION. ETA: 4-8 HOURS. DEFENSIVE PROBABILITY: 8.9%.]"
Lin Wei lowered the glass. The world rushed back in—the groans from the tents, Ox Li's roared orders, the acrid smell of Scholar Zhang's burning library. It all seemed muffled, distant, like sounds from the bottom of a well.
The breaking city before him was a painted backdrop. The only truth in the universe was that glittering, silent line on the horizon, inching forward to extinguish the small, stubborn flame of order he had sworn to protect.
He climbed down, his movements precise, automatic. He walked to the surgery table, picked up a scalpel he had used that morning to remove an arrowhead. He tested its edge against his thumb. A perfect, hair-splitting line of white appeared on his skin. He slid the blade into his belt.
He was a surgeon. But tomorrow, he would perform his final operation on the living body of his corps. The prognosis was terminal. All that remained was to see how much of the disease he could cut away before the heart stopped beating.