Kobo

A fortified provincial capital with three-hundred-million-jin grain stores — enough to overwinter the entire Norton convoy and a hundred thousand refugees. Fatty Shi shuttles the column here from Vanandes in twenty-nine days.

Illustration: Photo via Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain). Real-world photograph chosen for atmosphere — the novel itself has no canonical illustrations.

Kobo is the centre of Drelmuk Province, the chief grain-growing land of the Madrass Principality, and at once a military fortress and a vital storehouse. The city is double-walled: an outer wall of about ten metres, an inner wall twenty metres back rising to twelve; both bristle with towers, the siege engines hidden inside them, and at the centre stands a five-storey keep into which the defenders can withdraw even if both walls fall. Before the walls runs a moat five or six metres wide. The city is nicknamed 'iron' — easy to defend and very hard to take.

From the border to Kobo is about a hundred and forty li, and to the lower Mitoburo crossing over three hundred more. All the grain the Grand Duke of Madrass gathers in Drelmuk is stored here — at the time over a hundred and twenty million jin (with earlier stores, more than three hundred million).

Winter catches the northern convoy at Vanandes, and Lorist chooses Kobo to overwinter: it has both grain and nearness to the Northern Lands. Because Kobo admits neither noble nor mercenary into its inner city, no assault from within is possible. Lorist gathers his best Silver-rank fighters and leads them on a night raid in a snowstorm — in a thousand years of Galentean warfare no one has stormed a fortress in a blizzard. Roped together so none gets lost, the raiders cross the moat on a sheepskin raft, seize the gatehouse towers of both walls, and let the army in by the principle 'break through at one point, bloom at the centre' (ch 158).

Fatty Shi shuttles the column here from Vanandes and arranges the wintering: refugees are housed in snow huts with tents inside (ch 160). The Second Prince, however, instead of holding the city handed to him, dismantles Kobo's walls and takes the grain — he had made bait of the convoy. Lorist must hurriedly haul out the stores and march for the crossing (ch 162).

Once the Third Prince, leading the Royal Guard Corps with over six thousand men, was routed beneath Kobo's walls — the battle that made the Iron Guard legion famous.

Lorist took the idea of snow huts with tents inside from the journal of the previous century's great traveller, Keimen Pritt.