Chapter 223: The Relief Column
Six days of hard riding put them in the hills above Northreach at dusk on the seventh, and the fortress, when Xuan finally laid eyes on it, killed the last of his hope that this would be simple.
It was not a walled town. It was a fist of grey stone clamped over a river valley, three rings of wall stepping up the slope to a keep that watched the only bridge for forty miles in either direction. Every cart of grain that fed Tianlong’s northern armies had to roll across that bridge and under those walls, and whoever held Northreach held a hand around the throat of half the war. He understood, looking at it, why Xinhua wanted it. He also understood why nobody had simply taken it already.
Behind him, two provinces’ worth of allied strength had gone to ground in the folds of the hills, waiting. Frostmoon, Skyedge, Thunder Lotus, Phoenix Mirror, banners furled, fires cold, a host holding its breath for a signal that would only come once the gates were his. Qingyue was down there somewhere in the dark at the front of it. He’d said his goodbye already and wouldn’t cheapen it by saying it twice, but he picked out her camp on the hillside anyway before he turned to the work.
"Stop staring at your fiancée’s tent and look at my fortress," Xinhua murmured beside him, amused. She’d traded imperial indigo for the plain leather of a mercenary sword-for-hire, and it suited her disturbingly well. "How does it read?"
"Like a place that eats armies for breakfast." He nodded at the walls. "Three rings. That gatehouse alone would cost your host a thousand men to storm, and by the time they’d bled through the first ring, Tianlong’s relief would be on top of them. You were right. There’s no taking this from outside. It has to open from within."
[ Garrison’s about two thousand, ] Mira supplied, her attention crawling over the battlements. [ Bannermen of the Cang clan, one of the ones Tianlong bought. Regulars, mostly, nothing above Qi Refining on the walls that I can see, which is exactly why I don’t like it. Two thousand mortals and Qi Refining soldiers do not hold a fortress this important in a war this big without something stronger lurking in that keep. They’ve hidden their teeth. Assume there’s a mouth to go with them. ]
’Xinhua said as much. Something my sword won’t like.’
[ Then let’s hope hers likes it instead. Now. How do you plan to walk two people through three rings of a paranoid garrison? ]
Xuan was already smiling, because this was the part he was good at. "We don’t sneak. Sneaking is how you get caught. We walk in the front gate looking like we’re supposed to be there." He turned to Xinhua. "That fortress rotates its watch. A place this size, this nervous, cycling men on and off the walls every few days, and half of them wouldn’t know their own sergeant’s face in this light. So we don’t break in. We join the relief column. Tired soldiers reporting for a rotation nobody wants to double-check at the end of a long march."
Xinhua’s grin was pure delight. "You want to walk up to the gate of the most important fortress in the north and ask them to let us in for our shift."
"People argue with a blade at the wall. Nobody argues with paperwork and exhaustion." He shrugged. "Hao taught me that. The most dangerous thing in the world is a man who looks like he’s just doing a boring job you don’t want to think about."
Getting the uniforms took an hour and a small, quiet violence Xuan didn’t enjoy and didn’t dwell on: a genuine relief detail, a dozen Cang bannermen coming up the valley road to start their rotation, waylaid and bound and left sleeping in a gully with lumps on their heads and their kit gone. He made very sure none of them stopped breathing. They were mortal men doing a job for a lord who’d bought their loyalty, and he had no argument with them worth a life.
So it was that, an hour past full dark, a weary column of grey-clad soldiers trudged up to Northreach’s outer gate with the road-dust of a long march on them, an officer’s tally-token in Xuan’s hand and a princess of the empire slouching in the ranks doing an uncannily good impression of a bored spearman who wanted her supper.
The gate sergeant barely looked up. "You’re late."
"Landslide on the low road," Xuan said, in the flat, aggrieved tone of every soldier who has ever been late through no fault of his own. "Had to go the long way round the ridge. My feet are one enormous blister and I would trade my sword arm for a bowl of something hot."
The sergeant snorted, ran a bored eye down the token, and waved them through. "Barracks in the second ring. Report to the duty officer for your posts. And tell your quartermaster the low road’s his problem, not mine."
The first ring swallowed them without a ripple.
’That,’ Xuan thought, as the gate boomed shut behind them and two thousand enemy soldiers went about their evening around him none the wiser, ’was almost insultingly easy.’
[ Which is the exact thought that gets men killed, ] Mira said. [ You’re inside. Good. Inside is where the something they’re hiding lives. Eyes open, mouth boring, and get us toward that gatehouse mechanism. ]
They moved through Northreach like men who belonged there, and it was strange to walk unhurried through the heart of the thing they’d come to break, past soldiers dicing by torchlight and cook-fires and a knot of off-duty men arguing about a woman none of them would ever meet. Xinhua drifted at his shoulder, and quietly, without appearing to, she was reading everything: the guard rotations, the strength of the inner gates, how the traffic thinned as they climbed toward the keep.
"The main gate winch will be in the second gatehouse," she said under her breath, nodding up the slope. "Standard Cang design. Two men can drop the counterweights and open the outer gate in the time it takes to boil rice, if the two men know what they’re doing and nobody’s stopping them." Her eyes flicked to his. "The trick is the third part of your own plan you haven’t said aloud yet. Once those gates are open, the garrison knows. Two thousand of them, between us and the wall, all at once. Opening the gate is easy. Living long enough after for it to count is the hard part."
"That’s what the host on the hill is for. The moment the gate’s down, they come screaming. We just have to hold the winch room until they arrive." He glanced at her. "You did say you’d handle whatever my sword couldn’t. I’m choosing to believe you meant it."
"I meant it." And there was iron under the mercenary slouch now, a Golden Core cultivator wearing a bored soldier like a coat.
They came up into the wide torchlit yard before the inner keep, and that was where it went wrong.
A voice rang out across the yard, warm and delighted and utterly, catastrophically familiar to the woman at Xuan’s side.
"Well, now. Of all the tired little soldiers to wander up my hill." A man stood on the keep steps, tall and unhurried, a curved blade at his hip and the banked weight of real power rolling off him into the night air. His eyes were fixed on Xinhua, and they were bright with the pleasure of a hunter who has spotted something he’d given up hoping to find. "You’ll forgive me, Your Highness. You wear a common uniform beautifully, but I’d know how you carry your shoulders from across a battlefield. It’s been years."
Beside him, Xuan felt Xinhua go rigid, all the easy slouch draining out of her in an instant, and when she spoke her voice had lost every ounce of its warmth.
"General Cang Yuwen," she said quietly. "They gave Northreach to you."
[ Xuan. ] Mira’s voice had gone very flat and very fast. [ That is a Golden Core, mid-stage at least, and she knows him by name. There’s your hidden mouth. This just stopped being a break-in.]