“It's working!” said Field Marshall Amberley.

King Leothan felt a great weight beginning to lift from him. He looked out across the countryside. The ravages of war now reached all the way to the walls themselves. Once beautiful trees were now nothing but skeletons of scorched wood, and the soil, damp from unseasonal rains, were churned up by the passage of horse drawn artillery and the detonation of artillery shells. Even the walls of the city themselves had taken damage. The occasional enemy shell had, by some fluke of ballistics, reached all the way to the city and had opened a great cavity in the lichen and moss covered wall. The wall was thick enough that it hasn’t yet been breached, but once the enemy could bring their artillery close enough to hit it reliably and consistently, it would fall within just a few hours. The King felt nothing but a great exhilaration, though. They were in the endgame now. One way or another, the war would soon be over.

“They're occupying our trenches?” he said.

“They are! Not all of them, but enough. Our spies say about a thousand Carrowmen are digging their own trenches to the north, on either side of the Torrich road, and there’s another brigade digging in beside the Ryback sewage works, but by far the majority are occupying the trenches our own men just vacated. Nobody likes unnecessary labour, it seems. Not even in times of war.”

“I wonder whether any of our little booby traps scored any enemy lives.”

“We may never know. Their real function was just to stop them becoming suspicious, though, and it seems to have succeeded. If they killed a few men in the process, that was a bonus.”

The King nodded. “We have much to be thankful for,” he agreed. “So. How long until we can spring the trap?” He turned and looked the other way, over his beautiful city. Almost empty now. Most of the civilians had been evacuated out, along the road the Carrowmen had left open for them. Some had stayed, of course. Mostly old people lacking the energy for an upheaval in their lives, people who would rather die in their own homes than suffer the anxiety of strange surroundings and uncertain times. And, of course, there were criminals who saw the situation as nothing more than an opportunity to loot and pillage. Even as he watched, he saw a man being marched out of a tobacco shop, his hands manacled behind his back, by a pair of guardsmen. Everywhere else, though, the streets were empty. No pedestrians, no wagons or carriages. A great silence hung over the city, broken only by the sighing of the wind and the distant sound of artillery fire.

“That's the question,” said Amberley, his practical mind immune to such distractions. “They're still moving in, so we can't do it yet. We wouldn’t get them all. If we leave it too long, though...” Even as he spoke there came a dull thud from beyond the city walls. A much closer artillery round being fired. The King’s bodyguard ran forward, pressing him down to the stone walkway of the wall's top and sheltering him with their bodies. The shell hit somewhere distant, though, and the crump of the detonation was hundreds of yards away. There were more thuds as more shells were fired, though, and the King was unceremoniously hauled back to his feet and ushered to the stairs back down to street level.

“As I was saying,” said Amberley, as calmly as if they were sitting in the palace with glasses of wine in their hands. “If they get artillery in position to hit the city walls and open a breach, they'll probably all come rushing through into the city and the trap we've laid will be left behind them.”

“Was that...” said the King with sudden anxiety.

“No. Just some eager young Corporal who got his cannon into place earlier than everyone else and thinking to impress his superiors with his military zeal. It won't be long, though. Maybe only a couple of hours. I have people watching them. I'm assuming that their entire army will want to invade the city en masse, to minimise the impact our defences can have on them. If they do, we'll be able to time the strike for maximum effect, take out as many as possible. Ironically, the one thing that could throw a spanner in the works would be if, as a result of poor discipline and bad communications, one division invades the city while the others are still settling into the trenches. It would be a horrid joke if it was the enemy’s ineptitude that became our undoing.”

“Borrell, the fencing master, is reputed to have said that he would rather face the best fencer in the world than the worst,” replied the King. “Because the worst man would be unpredictable. And here we are, facing possibly the worst army in the world. Three times our size and unpredictable in their amateurish incompetence. Are we mad to expect them to behave rationally?”

“In war, rationality can sometimes be irrational. Borrell also said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

The King sighed. “Our survival as a nation depends on barely competent enemy commanders doing exactly what we want them to do. They have to be smart enough to see the cheese but not smart enough to see the mousetrap! How wide do you think that window of intelligence is, George?” He didn't wait for an answer but carried on. “And that’s assuming the trap works! The Carrowmen might walk straight into it in wide eyed innocence, and we might throw the switch to find that nothing happens! Or that not enough happens! Suppose all those explosives don’t have the effect we hope?”

“Then we’re dead.”

The King turned his head to look at him with amusement. “I was hoping you'd say something like ‘Then we turn to plan B, and if that doesn't work we turn to plan C...’”

“There is no plan B. This is it. We win or die here, now. It's too late to think of getting you out of the city. The road’s being watched, and everyone knows what you look like. There'll be no throwing a shawl over you and trying to pass you off as a washer woman.” The King smiled as he imagined it, imagined sitting in a cart of turnips dressed as a common working woman while, behind him, the last of his men fought to the death to cover his escape... The smile froze on his face. No, that wasn't funny. Not funny at all.

They reached ground level and passed through the sturdy wooden door to emerge back onto the street. The King’s carriage was waiting to take him back to the palace and a doorman opened the door for him while he entered. “If the enemy does something unexpected, throw the switch when you think you can take out the greatest number,” he said through the window. “Don't bother asking permission, I trust your judgement. Only contact me if you’re confident enough to wait that long. It would give me a great deal of personal satisfaction to throw the switch myself.”

“If we can, we will, Sire. As I said, it'll probably be a couple of hours. We've already got a wire into the War Room for you to use. We just have to connect it to the detonation circuit. If we don't, then it'll be some Corporal in the bunker who’ll be able to tell his grandchildren how he ended the war.”

“If the plan works.”

“Yes. If the plan works.”

Leothan nodded soberly, than made a hand gesture to the footman standing beside the carriage. The man nodded, shouted an order to the driver, and the King settled back in his seat as the carriage lurched into motion and clattered off down the street. Amberley watched it go, then called for a horse to take him to the command bunker.

☆☆☆

Never in the King’s life had time passed more slowly. He went straight to the War Room, almost empty now except for General Glowen and a couple of junior staffers who were organising the street to street defence of the city, if the unthinkable happened and the enemy found their way through the wall. The King joined the discussion but said little, merely listening in horrified fascination as the two staffers discussed how many men it would take to block the enemy’s passage down such and such street and how long they could hold before being overrun. In the King’s imagination he saw the gutters running with Helberion blood and he vowed that it would never happen. If the trap failed and the enemy got into the city, Helberion would surrender. He himself would try to escape. Not dressed as a washer woman, they had plans drawn up that Amberley knew nothing about. It would be the beginning of a nightmare that would never end for as long as he lived, he knew. The Carrowmen would threaten to execute his citizens if he didn't turn himself in, which he would refuse to do because the good of the Kingdom came first and the King was the Kingdom. He suspected he might go mad with guilt and shame before too many years had passed, but he would continue to hide nonetheless while his people organised the resistance and planted the seeds for the uprising that would, one day, free his country again.

He listened to the General and his aides as they continued to make their plans, though. It gave them all something to do while they waited. He looked around the room, looking for a clock. It occurred to him that, even though he’d been in this room hundreds of times before, he had no idea if there was a clock on the wall. It turned out there wasn't. Probably just as well, he thought. If there had been, he would have been hardly able to take his eyes off it. He would have looked away, determined not to look back until a substantial amount of time had passed, but his eyes would have been dragged back against his will to find that only a couple of minutes had passed, if that, and it would have happened again and again until the two hours seemed like an eternity. They said that a watched pot never boils, and it was equally true that the hands of a watched clock never moved. Some King I am, he scolded himself. I'm supposed to rule a kingdom, and I can't even rule my own eyes!

While looking for the non-existent clock, though, he spotted a hole in the wall through which a pair of thin, cloth covered wires protruded, hanging in coils tied with white string, their ends dangling and ending with two shiny lengths of bare copper. That's where they'll attach the detonator, he realised with a thrill of nervous excitement. If everything goes well, an engineer will come through the door carrying a detonator to which he’ll connect the wires. The appearance of that man would mean that the enemy was doing what they wanted, that they were in the trap and just waiting for him to spring it. If Amberley came through the door without the engineer, though, it would mean that something had gone wrong. Either the enemy had done something unexpected and the man in the bunker had been forced to spring the trap early, to try to get as many of them as possible, or the whole thing had had to be abandoned. One would be bad, but with the chance that they might still be able to salvage something from the mess. The other would be disastrous. He eyed the door, therefore, trying to will the engineer to come through, even though he knew it was still far too early. Only minutes had passed since entering this room. His long wait had only just begun!

He turned his attention back to General Glowen, who had spread a map out on the table and was pointing to various points on it, making comments to his aides as he did so. The map looked strange to the King and he moved closer to get a better look. Ah, of course! It was a map of the Hetin tunnels that lay under the city. Sewers, basements... There was one system of tunnels that an engineer had once told him had probably contained an underground railway system! Many of the tunnels extended for miles outside the walls of the present day city. The Hetin city that had once stood on this spot had been immense, well over twenty miles across! The General was indicating one of those tunnels, and the King wondered whether he’d made the connection between them and the trenches currently being occupied by the invading Carrow troops. The General didn't know the details of the trap they were getting ready to spring, but he was a capable, intelligent man and he no doubt knew the locations of the every trench by heart. Even as he thought this, he saw the General suddenly stiffen, his eyes darting across the map to all the tunnels outside the walls. Then he looked up at the King, staring in wonder. Leothan gave the slightest of nods, and was rewarded by a look of delight and new hope on the aged military man. He stood straighter, and there was a gleam in his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment ago. He rolled up the map and tucked it under his arm, as if afraid that his staffers might come to the same realisation that he’d just had. Not that it would matter if they had. Even if they were traitors, there was no way they could warn the Carrowmen in time to make a difference.

The staffers looked at him in puzzlement. “Return to your duties!” said the General, and the two men glanced at each other before hurrying off, probably wondering whether they'd said or done something to anger him. Leothan watched as they opened the door to leave, hoping to see an engineer in the corridor about to enter, but the corridor was empty. He looked up at the wall, as if he thought that a clock might have somehow appeared since the last time he looked, showing that two hours had somehow, miraculously passed, but the light blue painted wall was still bare. He sighed and tried to relax, to slow his pounding heart.

Once the door was safely closed, the General opened the map out on the table again. “You know, I've never looked at this map before,” he said. “It just occurred to me this morning that the tunnels might be used to house and hide groups of resistance fighters after the occupation. Store supplies, that sort of thing. It seems you had a better idea, though. All those explosives entering the city?” The King just nodded. “Are there enough? To... To do what I assume you intend?”

“Every trench has a Hetin tunnel under it,” replied Leothan. “That's why some of the trenches are in such strange places. We had no choice, we had to put them where the tunnels were.”

“We could have dug new tunnels...”

“No time, and enemy spies would have seen what we were doing. No, this was the only way.”

“But they’re so far underground...”

“Not that far. They might have been when the Hetin folk dug them, but something removed a twenty foot layer of soil and rock from this whole area at around the time their civilisation was falling. Some kind of titanic weapon, of a violence that staggers the imagination. There's apparently evidence that this whole area was poisoned for a thousand years afterwards. I don't know how they know that. The soil we have today was deposited since then. Silt left behind whenever the river flooded and broke its banks, but it’s a thin layer compared to the normal depth of soil across most of the country and that's good for us. It means the tunnels are just a few feet under the surface, the bottoms of the trenches are barely above them, and there’s nothing but solid bedrock under them. Utterly solid and immovable, so that the whole force of the explosion will be directed upwards. They tell me it'll be like standing on an erupting volcano.”

“Did you think of this?”

Leothan shook his head. “The Brigadier. The idea apparently came to him during his visit to Mekrol, while looking for a cure for the Princess. Something Parcellius said, I think he said. I don't really remember. It's not important. We did a bit of investigation to find out whether the idea was feasible. Turned out it was. The biggest problem was getting so much explosives into the city without anyone finding out.”

Glowen nodded. “The army's been complaining about a shortage of explosives for weeks, and we know the munitions factories have been producing the stuff non stop, every factory working at triple capacity. We assumed the enemy had been intercepting the transports.”

“They've been trying to intercept them, and we’ve encouraged them to think they’ve been successful. We blew up a supply wagon now and then, with only a fraction of the amount of explosives in it that there should have been. The enemy spies apparently weren't demolition experts, they didn’t know how big a bang that much explosive was supposed to make. In reality, it were successfully entering the city, disguised as food supplies in preparation for a siege. Into the city and down into the Hetin tunnels...”

There was a huge nearby explosion that shook the whole room. Both men staggered and had to reach out to the furniture to support themselves. Dust fell from the ceiling. More explosions followed, further away, and the King ran to the door, throwing it open and calling for Darnell. The Private Secretary was right there, with a pair of runners. “Find out what the hell that was!” he commanded. Darnell nodded and sent a runner to obey.

“It was an artillery shell,” said Glowen. “The enemy's finally close enough to attack the city itself.”

Leothan stared at him, then ran across the room to the window. Sure enough there were explosions across the city. Even as he watched, the library clock tower collapsed into ruins, surrounded by billowing clouds of dust, and more buildings were exploding as six inch shells slammed into them. The palace shuddered again as another shell hit it and a large patch of plaster fell from the ceiling just a couple of feet from the King.

Leothan ran back to his Private Secretary. “The Queen!” he said. “Where is she?”

“She and the Royal children are in the Ministry Building,” replied Darnell.

“The Carrowmen are targeting it,” said Glowen, ashen faced with fear. “They're trying to put an end to organised resistance. I think it’s just one battery of artillery, but it would only take one lucky hit...”

“Get my family to safety!” Leothan ordered Darnell. “Somewhere away from the centre of the city!” Darnell nodded and sent the second runner.

“We shouldn't stay here,” said Glowen. “The Palace was already structurally unsafe after the earthquake!”

“The structural engineers passed this wing as safe for continued occupancy,” pointed out the King.

“Because you bullied them into it! They weren't happy about it, they knew this wing was bound to have been weakened by the earthquake, and now with this...”

“I didn't bully them! I may have expressed my reluctance to leave the palace...”

“Can we argue about it later? Right now we need to move to a stronger building.”

Leothan looked at the coils of wire emerging from the wall, though. “You go,” he said. “I can't leave.”

“Why the hell not?” As he spoke, another shell landed nearby, shaking the room again. More lumps of plaster fell from the ceiling and the room was filled with dust. A crack opened in the wall, and a horrible grinding sound came as bricks on either side ground against each other. The sound of a collapsing ceiling came from somewhere nearby, together with frightened screams. “Majesty!” insisted the General. “You have to order the evacuation of the palace!”

Leothan stared at the wires again, then nodded. Amberley could detonate the explosives from the bunker. “Order the evacuation of the palace!” he told Darnell. “Get everyone out!” The Private Secretary nodded and began shouting the order to everyone in nearby rooms. As he was doing so, more runners came to replace the two he’d sent off and he sent them to spread the word. “Majesty!” insisted General Glowen, reaching out to take the King's hand. “Let's go!”

“Once we're sure everyone’s out...”

“Now, Majesty! Before I pick you up and carry you!”

Leothan stared at him in astonishment, wondering whether he’d actually do it, then nodded and allowed himself to be led away.

☆☆☆

Field Marshall Amberley tensed up anxiously as the bunker shuddered around him. “How safe are we down here?” he asked.

“Pretty safe,” replied Captain Worrall, the bunker’s duty officer. “There's twenty feet of solid bedrock above us. No shell can penetrate it. The main danger is that the access tunnel might be blocked off by falling debris. We're under a school here, though. It’s not likely the Carrowmen will target it.”

“They built the command bunker under a school?” cried Major Vallory in astonishment.

“The school was built before they found the bunker. This is a Hetin bunker, they found it while digging a sewage pipe for the science block. Three thousand years it had been down here, totally unsuspected by everyone, and when they broke in they found it as perfectly preserved as if the Hetin folk had only moved out yesterday! That was when we learned the name of the Hetin city that once stood here. Krasnoyarsk.”

“We can't be sure how the name was pronounced...” began an eager looking aide, but Amberley interrupted him impatiently. “Could the shelling sever the demolition cables?”

“Of course they could,” said Worrall. “They may have been compromised already.”

“Then we have to detonate now, just in case. Wire up the detonator.”

“Our most recent reports say the enemy hasn't finished occupying the trenches!”

“That report’s twenty minutes old. We have to hope they’re all in by now. Wire up the detonator!”

The Captain nodded and gestured to the engineer. He nodded in turn and picked up a large box with a plunger in the top. He carried it across the room to where wires ran along the wall from the access corridor and down to the floor. One set of wires ran to the War Room in the palace. He ignored them and wired the detonator to another set of wires that ran back up to the surface, to the city wall and then back down into the Hetin tunnels where they branched and rebranched until they reached the waiting piles of explosives, packed and shaped so that the bulk of the explosive force would be directed upwards. The man tightened the screws holding the wires in place, then stood and nodded to the Field Marshall. “Ready,” he said.

“Then let’s not stand on ceremony,” said Amberley. “Do it.”

“Me? I thought that you...”

“Just do it!”

The man nodded and pulled the plunger upwards. Then, after a pause during which he contemplated the magnitude of what he was about to do, he pushed it down again...

☆☆☆

King Leothan emerged from the palace to see the buildings of the city shuddering under the impact of enemy shells. Two shells had landed in the palace grounds, leaving smoking craters in the immaculately manicured lawns. The gardener’s going to have his work cut out for him tomorrow, he thought. Beyond the walls of the palace grounds, he saw an office block exploding as a shell hit it full on, punching right through and emerging from the other side with a spray of rubble, and a moment later another building collapsed as neatly as a controlled demolition as a shell hit it near the ground. There was a sound like a howling banshee as a shell flew through the air directly above him. It hit the palace and an entire wing collapsed in on itself like a falling house of cards. The guest wing, he realised. Thankfully they didn't have any guests in residence at the moment, and the majority of the staff had been evacuated out. Only buildings were being destroyed, and buildings could be rebuilt. He put it out of his mind, therefore, and allowed the General to lead him to wherever it was they were going.

The ground thumped under his feet like the heartbeat of some colossal subterranean monster. Each beat the impact of a shell hitting his city, but then there was another, much larger lurch, large enough to throw both men off their feet. Leothan tore the elbows of his tunic as he landed hard on the gravelled walkway, the sharp stones digging into his skin. Beside him he heard the General give a grunt of surprise as he also hit the ground. Behind him came the rumbling of masonry as another wing of the palace collapsed, and Leothan looked back to see a wave of white dust sweeping towards them. “What in the name of...” began the General.

Leothan picked himself back up, and saw to his astonishment that there was a wall of white cloud rising with glacial slowness all along the horizon, almost completely encircling the city. The ground under his feet continued to shake as if another earthquake had struck. A man made earthquake. Beside him, General Glowen was struggling to stand back up. Leothan reached down a hand to help him. “Was that...” began the General.

“The trenches,” replied Leothan, numb with shock at the magnitude of what he’d unleashed. “Amberley must have triggered it.”

“But it was too soon! Our latest reports said they needed another hour at least to occupy the trenches!”

“Just being near the trenches may have been enough,” said the King as the wall of smoke and dust continued to rise. So silent! He thought in disbelief. It should have made a noise! A bang loud enough to deafen the whole city! Why was it so silent? Because it was an underground explosion perhaps, he thought. The sound would have been muffled by thousands of tons of silty soil. He shook his head to drive out the irrelevant thought. People are dying in their thousands out there, he scolded himself. Enemy soldiers, but people nonetheless, and I’m obsessing over trivialities!

“Your Majesty!” said a voice, and he looked around to see Darnell running towards him, with two runners behind them. All three were covered head to foot in white dust. “Thank Those Above you're safe!”

“My family?” said the King in sudden anxiety.

“Safe, Sire. They’re being taken to Terringham House with a unit of guardsmen. We should get you there as well, Sire.”

“Later.” He turned back to the General. “Get the army ready. The whole army, what's left of it. As soon as it settles down out there, open the city gates and send them out. They are to engage whatever units of the enemy they encounter. Kill or capture them. Hopefully, we can take them before they recover from the shock. Take out their whole army in one fell swoop.”

“Or they'll take out ours. They outnumbered us three to one before the detonation. If we missed them, if there weren’t enough of them in the trenches, and if they recover, get themselves organised again fast enough...”

Leothan nodded. “One way or another, it ends today,” he said. “Send out the army, Ben!” The General nodded and ran off to obey.