Tubu Vintle hammered on his daughter’s door. He could smell the fire. Could see the glow of burning homes. See the heat rise in shocking infra-red brilliance in the cold night. His eyes were capable of seeing far more than most.

“Dad? It’s the middle of the night?!”

His daughter leaned out the window and whisper-yelled down to him.

“Get Mat and Allie. City’s on fire, and it’s spreading south to us. Looks like an attack.” Times like this, he wished he could be more expressive. It was hard enough re-learning how to feel normal emotions, and when he was stressed, he fell back on the quiet.

“Gods!” She looked north and sniffed the air. “Gods. Alright, we’re moving. MAT! UP and at ‘em! Fire!” He heard noises, sleepy protestations coming from inside the house. It took maybe five minutes to get everyone up and into their winter clothes. Well stocked emergency bags were kept under the bed, of course. Any good Bo family would have those, for all that Mat had married in. The fire was a lot closer now, Tubu thought. He could hear screams.

Mat piled out first, a hiking frame lashed on his back, loaded with food. He held a hatchet in one hand, Allie's little hand in the other. “You think it’s an attack?” Mat asked.

“I know it is. Follow Rhea, she knows the best route to evacuate the city. If they are roaming around outside the city gate, she’ll lead you to a good spot to hide inside the walls.”

“Grandpa? What’s going on?”

“Bad people are here and hurting people. Things are on fire. Militia is going to sort them out, but we got to get you safe.” Tubu would give a lot to be able to smile reassuringly right now. But the quietus was coming down hard. He had to remind himself that he loved this little girl, that she was the future of the Bo and the world. That they, and all of this, mattered.

Rhea ran out, equipped like Mat. “Alright, we’re ready. Where’s your pack, Dad?”

He drew a pair of axes from behind his back. They were small, but shockingly heavy. Unless you were a Bo, in which case they were just small. “Got it right here.”

“Dad!”

“Not sure how many there are in the city, but I can hear hoofbeats. Might be even more outside. Likely you will have to go to ground. Anywhichway, fewer of them looking for you, the better.”

“DAD!”

“Grandad?”

“None of that, I’ll be fine. Been in much worse than this. Off you go. Through the Dusty ghetto- they will be kicking off hard, I bet.”

Rhea looked at him angrily. Her fire fell into the still pool of his eyes… and went out.

“Still is the forest, the furnace of life.” She whispered.

“All things change, all things return, I am evergreen.” Tubu nodded. She could hear the quietus now, and it hurt her. She had seen him spend her whole life coming up from that emptiness. Becoming more her father.

“Go.”

They went. Tubal hung out in the street. Nowhere he had to be, really. He looked around. Nice neighborhood, he thought. At least, he remembered thinking it was nice. He considered waking the other neighbors but he couldn’t be bothered. Sounded like some were awake already. Oh, here come some riders with long lances. They don’t look like the Throng. Not that it mattered, really. He whistled loudly and waved an ax at the one in the lead.

The rider took that personally. He crouched over his lance, and accelerated to a gallop, the bright spearhead aimed squarely at Tubu’s chest. Tubu didn’t plant his feet or make any preparations. He just stood in the middle of the street, waiting.

When the lance was less than a meter from his chest, he slapped the lance down and to the side with an ax. The sudden change in direction launched the raider from their cheve. Tubu shifted left out of the cheve’s path, whipping the other ax through the cheve’s leg as it passed. The animal collapsed, screaming and kicking. Tubu couldn’t muster the effort to even find the noise annoying. The raider had smashed his head when he fell. In his medical opinion, death was seconds away. Good. He could add to the little impromptu barrier he was building on the street. The next lance was coming in. He repeated the motions, and his barricade doubled in size and screams. This bandit seemed to be alive, though his legs were broken.

The rest of the bandits quickly dismounted or trotted their cheves towards him. Some in the back drew bows. Inconvenient. Oh well. He ran. Straight towards them.

The bandit looked like he was trying to yell something? Tubu’s back contracted, swinging his powerful shoulder and arms around with a vicious speed as the hatchet decapitated the bandit. The arrows started coming. Missed? At this range? He kicked the falling head up and into one of the archers. Something went crunch. On to the next fellow. Mmm. More coming into the alley. Thirty of them? That might take a while.

He might even die. But He (the person who had, just for the moment, forgotten the name Tubu Vintle) couldn’t seem to care. He just knew he had to keep them from passing for as long as he could. That’s all.

Vintle beheaded a cheve and hooked the rider off of it with one of his short axes. The rider was yelling something, trying to cut him with a saber. Tubu launched him, one handed, at the legs of another cheve. Someone stuck him with a spear. He hacked off the offending arm, then split open the raider's chest. The dying bandit was kicked onto the corpse barricade, as Vintle slapped away two more spearpoints. Once he got a free foot, he used it to tear open some thug's guts. Skin is only elastic up to a point. The point, in this case, was the end of Vintle's boot. He pressed forward, chopping heads, limbs, stomping feet into paste on the cobblestones. His axes rose and fell not slowing as his body accumulated wounds. They were just wounds. Just pain. Meaningless. All that he needed to do was kill.

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He swung those axes until the handles shattered.

The surviving neighbors would later spread the legend. Old Doc Vintle, with his wooden face and sly jokes, standing in the middle of a burning street, saving refugees from the bandits. Every swing of an ax would take an arm, or a leg, or a life. Broken spears and sabers jutted out of him. Enough arrows to fill three quivers. Gashes through his guts, his neck. Stabbed in the heart. But he didn’t die. He didn’t scream. He didn’t even bleed. When he was so loaded with wounds, when the street was so full of bodies that he had nowhere left to stand, he grabbed two of the fire bombs and ripped their cords out. Then he charged into the biggest mass of raiders while they went off.

His body was never recovered, so the story might be a little exaggerated. The heaps of human and animal corpses blocking the street did give some weight to the legend. You could be a real hero, if you were "tough as Vintle."

Rhea and Mat ran through the streets, alternately pulling and carrying Allie. In the end, Rhea just picked up Allie and carried her- she was still small enough for that. Mat was great- fit, strong, but he wasn’t grove born like her. Allie would be strong like her. When she grew up.

They ran through the Dusty Ghetto. Dusty Canton, she knew they preferred that, but… it wasn’t a canton, it was a neighborhood they all lived in and stuck to like glue. Unlike her family, the Dusties didn’t seem to be going out of the city. She did see an awful lot of old timers on the street. Carrying an awful lot of backpacks and stranger devices. They ran on. Along a cross street, she could hear hoof beats.

“Raiders! Coming from that way!” She yelled, pointing.

The old timers near her spun the way she was pointing, and started rigging their strange devices. Hand cranked whirligigs spun rope baskets around and and around, until a lever was pulled and the ropes stopped- but the contents of the baskets shot off down the street. Stones, apparently, smashing into bravos and bouncing up under their cheves to cause havoc. It slowed the raiders down a moment, then they sped up. The old cavalry instinct to close with the ranged attacker. As she rounded the corner, she saw one of the backpack carrying elders lurch out of a doorway.

They had just gotten around the corner when the blast hit. Carried on the wind was a hint of some chemical smell. Not gunpowder.

“Run! Keep running!” Mat yelled. Rhea didn’t have to be told. She wished she could carry Mat too, but she wasn’t quite strong enough. They pushed on for the gate, when the house in front of them collapsed across the street. It was on fire. They were in a box canyon of flames. Rhea looked behind her and saw raiders on their cheves, galloping in and out, trying to get past the suicidal Dusties. Coming towards her. Nowhere to run. She looked around, and all she could see was a shallow gutter. Nowhere to hide.

“Stars preserve us, Rhea. What are we going to do?” Mat hugged Rhea and Allie.

“I always loved you Mat. Always will. Even if I forget for a while.” Rhea looked heartbroken at Mat. With a sudden explosion of strength, she crushed the back of Allie's neck, instantly snuffing the light inside of her. With her other hand, she stabbed into Mat’s heart. He looked so confused as the light left his eyes too. Rhea lay Allie face down in the gutter, keeping her hand firmly on her neck. She lay down on top of her baby, and pulled Mat over both of them, her hand wrapped around what once was a good heart. She was crying. Sobbing. She took the moment, desperate to feel something, anything, for even a moment longer.

“I am evergreen.” She whispered. And her body withered and died.

“Bad enough I have to be roused from a perfectly good bed and some perfectly good concubines, now I have have a bit of slap and tickle with these duck fucking peasants.” Xiatamru grumbled to his batman.

“Unjust and unwarranted, Condottieri.” His batman loyally replied, as he put the finishing touches on Xiatamru’s uniform.

“Quite. Ah well. Nothing a good bit of slaughter won’t clear up, I suppose. And the girls have orders to keep themselves ready for me. Soonest finished, soonest home.” He grinned. His batman didn’t. It would have been inappropriate for a servant to comment or grin. Especially since he knew his master spoke the literal truth.

“Right. Off to it, then.” Xiatamrou strode out of the shack he was changing in, brilliant in white, red and gold. His cheve was waiting, held by his groom. The mercenaries of Drake Company were drawn up in sharp lines, waiting for him. He mounted up.

“Alright! Raiders have breached the city! Don’t know how, do know that Absolom, Brent, and Cooke Companies are going to get a reaming from me when they cycle back in! Our job is to go out and clear away any bandits that are outside the gates, then slaughter anyone trying to flee the city with loot and captives. Once the exterior of the city is secure, or at least our bit of the exterior is secure, we dig in and wait for the all clear. A nice, simple job! So don’t cock it up!”

“Ooooh!” The mercenaries yelled in unison.

“Move out!”

The mercenaries marched out of the drill yard in perfect order, with mounted scouts cantering on ahead. Soon, reports were coming back to the company- paths blocked by burning rubble, where the biggest concentration of raiders were, the militia’s movements, where the refugees had clumped together. Their route was updated and shifted to keep them moving. They weren’t getting paid extra to clear out raiders in the city, after all, and each conflict increased their losses of soldiers, materiel or both. Still, the occasional street battle was inevitable.

A band of raiders came whipping around a corner, facing a mixed company of pavise crossbows with pikes stretching out through their ranks. A few desperate brigands got off an arrow, before being cut down in a swarm of bolts. The arrows they did loose tended to be complete misses, bounced off armor, or bounced off a shield painted with a golden Xia sun shining on brown mountains. The formation was intensely defensive and slow moving. On the positive side, however, it ground through whatever came at them. Xiatamrou breathed deeply through his nose. He loved this. Lived for it. Watching people move, staking their lives, on his orders. Watched them snuff out the lives of others, on his orders. It was his life’s calling, and he would have it no other way.

The city burnt around them. There would be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, homeless. In the dead of winter. Famine and plague would be close behind. It should be a knockout blow. This should be enough to take Cold Garden out of any struggle for the New Territory, perhaps even bring the city under a bigger power. Xiatamrou looked west. With the right senses, you could feel a vortex forming, as though history was gathering and building in ferocity. Xiatamrou grinned, his teeth bloody in the light of burning homes.

It would be a holy war. There would be no surrender, no retreat. The city and its people would swim in blood before it was done, one way or another. And he wouldn’t miss a minute of it.