The siege and fall of Makam can be considered to mark the end of the prologue to the Great Crusade. What happened there utterly hardened Yujin’s resolve so that nothing could deflect her from her vengeance. The war waged for salvation and liberation was also waged by her for personal hatred and revenge. 

It was a mistake for Heeyeon to place the crux of her holy war in Makam. It was no mountain stronghold; Makam was situated on the floodplain of the valley bearing the same name, amidst wetlands and flat marshes that varied in dryness depending on the season. The city was inhabited primarily by the people of the lowlands, first to fall against the onslaught of the infidels and submit to them. Heeyeon could wrest it back from them, but the logic underpinning its use as her base of operations was flawed, albeit borne out of painful necessity: it sat along the Lun River, flowing from the great glaciers in Alang and passing through the west of the Chwanjeou on its way to join the Great Canal in Bonghwa; Makam therefore served as a forward base to push the front back against the invaders. It had significant amenities, and was the only point by which traffic upstream of the Lun passed downstream into Nanwian. To control Makam was to control the Lun in the Chwanjeou, and enabled Heeyeon to move unprecedented quantities of men and arms to the center of the war. 

The siege of Makam began in winter. To most it seemed like folly; Hwanseong must be out of his mind to begin a siege of an entire city in winter. At the start the defenders of the city derided their terrible foe and saw an easy victory. They thought that Hwanseong must be under immense pressure to complete his conquest of the Chwanjeou, and therefore had no choice but to invest the city and be certain of defeat. The real threat to him was political, not military. 

But as the winter dragged on, the dire predicament of the defenders emerged. The waterlogged ground around the city froze in the dead of winter; the ditches and redoubts constructed by Hwanseong’s men hardened as if they had been constructed from rocks; overnight the land around Makam became a flat plain on which cavalrymen could maneuver and fight, and artillery could be brought onto the field and made to aim and fire at will. Unlike the cities of Nanwian, Makam was not built to withstand artillery bombardment and modern techniques of siege. The giant had calculated the coming of the frost perfectly, and two columns were readied for the assault on the city. Their duty was to infiltrate through the breaches in the walls made by the artillery and force the gates of the city. 

Yet this was an impossible mission. The approach to the city that they took, which was across a long earthen causeway that hitherto was the only dry way into the city, was perfectly positioned in the firing arcs of two cannon towers. Artillery from both sides fired ceaselessly, and several holes appeared in the earthen walls of Makam, but every time the assault columns tried to rush over the causeway they were raked from both flanks by cannon and arquebus fire. Under the energetic command of Hwanseong, who promised triple wages for every man who advanced past the walls, the attackers eventually managed to reach the base of the walls under great duress, but even there their suffering did not end, for they drew fire from the watchtowers and battlements. From above they were harangued by arrows and javelins, and in the breaches the defenders slaughtered them in the dozens with swords and axes. By nightfall two hundred Nanwians had been killed, staining the causeway with their blood. No desperate courage was of avail yet, and Hwanseong had to retire his troops for the time being. 

But terrain and weather was still on Hwanseong’s side. No winter storm came to befuddle the infidels. After a lull of four days ten siege guns, nestled in a carefully-constructed redoubt beyond the reach of the defenders’ arquebuses, opened fire on the gate of the city and reduced it to a pile of rubble after several hours, under which many of Heeyeon’s men were buried alive. But even so the city defended itself savagely; every assault was met with bloody resistance at close quarters. Only the outer defences had been compromised. It seemed that if Hwanseong were to take the city, he would have to win every house, alley, and hole in the ground by coming to grips face-to-face with the defenders. 

However, Makam was not unassailable. Hwanseong’s failure stemmed only from lack of men. Were he to possess a great host such as those easily mustered by the Headmen of the north, he would have stormed the city and drowned its stubborn defenders in waves of human bodies. As it stood, the situation was unwinnable. He had not the men to surround the city and cut off its supply line on the Lun, thereby starving out the people inside, nor to force an assault and win the city brutely. Thus, after only a few weeks of battle, Hwanseong had to entrench his army for the long-term and write to the commissioners in Dangjin to send more men and material. With his contacts among the mercenary networks in Nanwian he engaged the services of Hirai Momo — an act that was to have dire and far-reaching consequences on the fate of Im Nayeon. 

On Heeyeon’s side casualties were severe too. She had lost many good fighters in the bloody assaults, and the outer bastions of the city had been destroyed, particularly those on the eastern side. Most worryingly, food supplies were getting low, for the stores had been burnt by naphtha bombs used by the Jiaozhi mercenaries in Hwanseong’s army. The supply runs from upriver were inadequate to feed an entire city, and there was no cattle to fall back on, for there was no fodder. The people were becoming exhausted from the ceaseless fighting, and more importantly they were surrounded by the unburied dead. This was no trivial matter, for the stench disgusted the garrison and wafted through the city to sicken the noncombatants. The dead of winter had passed, and spring was coming. Clouds of flies tormented the living, and flocks of carrion stopped on the ruins and brooded over the mounds of corpses. 

In the second month of the siege, Hwanseong was told by his spies — quite incorrectly — that Heeyeon intended to flee the city, he quickly assembled another assault column in preparation for a final attack. In this column was another mercenary who would play a key role in the fate of Nayeon, the Manchese adventurer Rafael Augusto O’Kelly de Palmeria. Covered by two batteries firing in enfilade, the column made its way over the causeway at the double-quick, and swiftly took the outer defences without opposition. They continued in this way, surrounded by ominous silence, until they reached the citadel of the city and swarmed into it. 

Then, just as they were raising the flag of the Sindeok on the battlements, the column was set upon by Heeyeon’s warriors who had laid hidden in the houses and hiding-holes. A desperate fight followed in which the attackers tried to cut their way out of the city, but their escape was clogged further by the mob, who rushed onto them with weapons. Women charged into the fray with drawn swords, while their children, brandishing daggers, crawled under the stamping feet and clashing blades to disembowel the Nanwians. Now six hundred Nanwians were huddled chaotically in the narrow, twisting streets, their lines of retreat blocked by the entire city population’s worth of blades. The Nanwians staggered and slipped in their own blood, while their officers were all killed by snipers who took