“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, though. 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 hardly have been 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 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 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.”