Batu POV

The tumen completed its curve around the inner defenses while Dorbei’s smoke was still rising from the western regions.

The encirclement kept its radius at four hundred meters from the earthwork’s base, ten thousand riders dressed across the perimeter, and the palisade walkway above was manned along its entirety, the defenders having spent the morning watching the formation position itself and knowing what it meant.

The smell of burning grain from the western raiding work crossed the open ground on the light wind.

Subutai was at Batu’s left.

"Now," he said.

Batu raised his arm to the relay rider.

Torghul POV

The signal reached the encirclement’s full curve simultaneously and every bow went up.

The shafts rose from four hundred meters in a dark mass and came down into the palisade walkway along its full length, and the defenders who had been standing when the fire opened went down in the first volley.

The ones who had been crouching behind the rail crouched lower and rose to shoot and crouched again, but the interval between rising and taking a shaft from the encirclement had tightened to something most of them miscalculated once.

A man on the south face rose with his bow drawn and took a shaft through the jaw before his release, the impact sending him backward into the rail and over it. Another man rose, released, and went back against the rail with a shaft through his shoulder, still alive, no longer able to draw.

The suppression had compressed the walkway defense into what the most experienced defenders could maintain from cover, and those men were still shooting, and their retaliation was going to cost men on the advance.

Torghul looked at the assault wedge formed south of the ditch’s near bank. Sixty riders wide, six ranks deep, with axemen distributed through the front two ranks.

"Forward," he said to the relay rider.

The rider repeated the order, and the wedge moved at a canter toward the ditch.

The suppression fire went overhead as they advanced, the shafts passing above and continuing into the palisade walkway.

At eighty meters a walkway defender rose in a gap between suppression cycles and released into the advance, and a rider in the outer left of the wedge took the shaft through the upper chest and came off his horse.

Two more riders in the second rank lost horses in the last fifty meters, animals going down from walkway fire, the riders clearing the saddles and running forward on foot.

The wedge reached the ditch’s near bank and dismounted.

Nameless Rider POV 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

He was in the third rank when the men ahead of him jumped on the ditch.

He could see the ditch’s width from there, wide enough that the far bank showed only as the start of the earthwork’s base, and the earthwork rose from there to the palisade above. He went forward and dropped.

The drop was two meters. He landed on both feet and his knees bent deep and he ran across the ditch floor.

The floor was firm autumn clay under a surface of mud that pulled at his boots with each stride. The earthwork’s mass above the far wall blocked the walkway’s line of fire from reaching the ditch floor, and the men crossing had that cover for the seconds it took to get across.

He reached the far wall and found the earthwork’s earth with his hands and started climbing.

The slope was compacted clay at forty degrees. He drove his boots and his hands in and worked upward, and the front rank was visible above him near the palisade base. Two of the walkway defenders who had survived the suppression were leaning over the rail and shooting down at the men on the slope at a line that cleared the earthwork’s mass.

A man three positions ahead of him took a shaft through the upper back, entering below the left shoulder blade and driving forward through the rib structure. The man locked his hands into the clay and climbed two more meters before stopping. He slid back past the rider below him.

He kept climbing.

Four axemen were working at the base posts of the nearest palisade when he reached the top. The axes went into the base timber and each stroke drove the cut deeper. The walkway defenders directly above could see the axemen over the rail and were shooting down at a near-vertical line.

Two of the axemen had taken shafts through the shoulder before he arrived. One was still working with his other arm, his wounded shoulder pressed against the post to stay upright. The other had gone to his knees against the timber.

A rider behind the kneeling man picked up that axe and kept working.

The post gave on the eleventh stroke. The section leaned inward and the men at the base put their shoulders to it and pushed and it fell into the compound interior. He went through the breach with the men pressing in behind him.

The garrison had organized at the barrack block doorways on the compound’s eastern side, defenders with spears set correctly, men who had used the morning to decide where they wanted to be when the breach came.

The fighting in the compound ran for less than ten minutes because the breach kept letting riders through it and the number inside kept growing against a defensive line that was fixed in size. The last organized point was at the granary entrance, four defenders in a doorway with spears ready. They held the doorway until their bodies were mangled by dozens of arrows.

Torghul POV

He came through the breach after the compound’s fighting was done. The relay rider had the count ready.

"Forty-three dead," the rider said. "Seventy-one wounded and riding. Twenty-two horses."

Torghul looked at the tally. Twenty-seven of the forty-three had come from the advance ,the ditch and the earthwork slope, the men in the open ground with the suppression fire’s effectiveness reduced by the closing distance, the walkway defenders finding them as they committed to the crossing.

The ditch was where the assault had paid most of what it owed.

He gave the order for the grain stores and walked to the northern palisade and climbed to the walkway.

Suvar was two hundred meters from the captured position. Its walls were timber throughout, heavy log construction at the lower courses and lighter framing above, the watchtowers set at intervals along the wall’s full run.

The gate on the south face was closed. The cavalry that had spent the day in the forest east of the agricultural zone was back inside, and everything that had retreat when the previous positions fell was behind those walls now. Three thousand men had been in the inner defense garrison. The inner defense was gone.

The ground between them and the city’s south wall was flat and open. Nothing stood on it.

"Tomorrow," Torghul said.