From the high outpost ridge, the great northern valley was an endless sea of orange flames.
Fort Ironpass’s outer curtain wall was burning along three miles of quarried granite castle walls. Thick, oily smoke billowed from shattered wooden hoardings, while thirty ancient iron siege towers, taller than five-story pagodas and dragged by teams of shaggy war mammoths, were locked against the high low roof walls like leech-like ticks. From the citadel towers, royal trebuchets hurled five-hundred-pound barrels of burning sulfur fire-oil into the valley, exploding in roaring firestorms that lit up the white snowfields in blinding sheets of scarlet.
Around the castle outer edge lay an ocean of ten thousand barbarian yurts, surrounded by swarming cavalry campfires that stretched across the frozen plain to the northern horizon.
Yet five miles south of the castle, in the deep shadow of the dark rock bluffs, a separate tragedy was unfolding.
The Red River gorge—the only southern escape hall connecting Fort Ironpass to the country plains—was jammed with civilian refugees from the outer farming settlements. Women, children, and wounded border rangers were fleeing through the frozen river narrows, desperate to reach the royal expeditionary lines.
Behind them, cutting through the snowdrifts like hunting wolves, rode three hundred mounted barbarian cavalry.
