The ninth son of Tsagaandai-khan was feeling particularly thoughtful as he dismounted his horse and looked out over the sea of swaying golden grass that lay before him.
He listened to the wind as it played a thousand sighing whispers on the steppe and imagined that if he could just listen hard enough, he might receive advice from the spirits of the land. But no such advice came, it never did. The steppe remained the steppe: harsh, silent, and unforgiving even to its own children who were both blessed and cursed to wander her beautiful vastness. Save for the whispers of the grass in the wind and the occasional calls of distant birds, it was almost completely silent out in the Hungry Steppe.
“You spot anything?” came a voice next to Yesugei’s ear, startling him out of his reverie.
Chuckling, Yesugei’s half-brother crouched down next to him in the tall grass, bracing on his silver-decorated spear for support. To the stranger’s eye, the blood-bond between the two sons of Tsagaandai-khan seemed almost non-existent. Where Yesugei was of pure steppe nobility stock - black-haired, short, stocky, and round-faced - his brother Kaveh seemed to take all his features from his mother, a noblewoman from the Emirate of Huwaq who was taken by their father during his conquest of the eastern deserts. His tall and lithe half-brother’s red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes marked him as a passing curiosity to most, a delightful beauty to women, and a seeming alien to the steppe despite having lived and breathed it since he was born just a year after Yesugei.
“You think if I spotted anything I’d still be sitting here, scratching my ass?” grumbled Yesugei as he stood up and shoved Kaveh to the side, causing his half-brother to stumble across the ground.
“Shaa, you certainly looked so fucking wise sitting over there!” laughed Kaveh as he dusted off his green tunic and adjusted the knife tucked into his belt. “All you needed to do was stroke your beard and you’d be like Tsermaa-guai.”
As they walked back to their horses Kaveh twisted his face into an imitation of their guide, Tseren, and began stroking the messy wisps on his chin as if he were a wizened shaman. Yesugei allowed himself a wry smile as he mounted his horse, adjusted his felt cap and surveyed the lands that lay beyond the low valley he had been looking over. In the distance, he saw the spindly-thin silhouette of the aged Tseren quaffing from a wineskin, whilst even further away two of his father’s keshik bodyguards were galloping back to rejoin the rest of the search party.
“Look at us,” he muttered darkly to Kaveh, who was busy wiping the sweat from his brow. “Blood and blood-sworn of the Great Khan, and we can’t even find hide nor hair of three dozen riders in this damned waste.”
Yesugei seriously considered the task his father had granted him - to search for any sign of the ambassador that was due to have returned a week ago with tribute from the western Klyazmite city-states. The task that had set him spiralling around the Hungry Steppe like an errant, one-winged fly for nearly a week as he, Kaveh, and his father's men combed for any trace of where they might have disappeared. The ambassador, Dagun, was a staunch supporter of his father’s who rode under his banner in the days when the Qarakesek still fought tooth-and-nail to establish their dominance over the steppe - the possibility of him having simply cut loose with the treasures he gained from the quivering Klyazmite princes was out of the question according to Tsagaandai. If that was truly the case, then it left only a few realistic options as Yesugei saw.
One. The princes may have killed Dagun and his guards. It would be stupid, catastrophically stupid to the point of even being called suicidal, but it was possible. The Klyazmite princes of the west were easily brought to a bloody heel when the Great Khormchak Horde came upon their doorstep chasing after the Quanli, but peace had reigned for a good twenty years in their land since. Perhaps a coalition had formed under the Horde's nose and they killed Dagun to send a message - or just as easily, some arrogant princeling grew too comfortable on his throne and forgot he and his people only drew breath because the Horde permitted it at a heavy tax. If that were the case, it would only mean one thing: bloody, punitive war. The kind he had only heard whispered stories of from his father's singers - entire cities laid to ruin, their inhabitants slaughtered and dumped into the rivers which would run red and black with blood and decay - a war so devastating it would bring a deathly hush to the land for years to come, so thorough the slaughter that no living being remained to utter even a dirge to the Horde’s work.
Two. The more likely possibility, and the one that ate away at Yesugei’s mind each passing night: Dagun and his men were seized by Jirghadai-khan, whose lands they certainly would have crossed through to reach Klyazma and the western holds.
Yesugei’s uncle-by-oath was like a shadow: he only ever recalled seeing him once when he was five, before the rift that drove apart him and his father Tsagaandai. Since then, he had only heard stories - from his father’s bannermen as they rode during the day, and from singers around campfires at night. Stories of how the great Jirghadai and Tsagaandai swore their oath of brotherhood in the sacred southern forests, stories of their escapades as young bravado-filled men from the then-middling Quanli and Qarakesek tribes. And of course, the story of how both men conquered and united the many tribes of the steppe until the only ones left to conquer were each others’ confederations, each several hundred thousand souls strong. The one left standing at the end of the bloody saga was Yesugei’s father - but only after the Quanli were almost entirely out of the Hungry Steppe, and Jirghadai left so broken that he had resorted to marrying off his daughter and giving away his riches to the Klyazmite princes for their sworn shields.
The key was that all those were but stories to Yesugei - stories could be embellished, details exaggerated or forgotten - what mattered was the present: Jirghadai still remained. As a subject of his father’s, of course, but the old man and his Quanli tribesmen had managed to recover well under his father’s graces. Jirghadai held control of several conquered towns to the far west, and surely still inspired loyalty from the minor tribes that once saw fit to declare him Gur-Khan, the universal ruler of all Khormchaks. No matter how well Yesugei’s father treated him, the fire of ambition surely wouldn't be content to simply die down in a man such as Jirghadai. With the seized riches of the Klyazmite princes, he could buy himself a great deal of power - many of the smaller tribes whose greed guided them more than their wits could certainly be persuaded to turn on their aged Great Khan with gifts of gold and silver.
All the more reason to root this treachery out swiftly. Yesugei thought to himself. The longer they spun around aimlessly in the steppe, the more time their enemies had to prepare. And should Yesugei’s father - the Great Khan of the Khormchak Horde - find himself on the back foot in the face of treachery, then even their closest allies might find themselves giving thought to raising a new khan’s banner over the steppes.
No. Not whilst I’m still here. Yesugei felt his face twist into a deep scowl, felt his knuckles crack as he took the reins of his steed in a death grip. I am the blood of the White Khan. The Scourge of Three Gods. We will not fall.
He spurred his horse forwards, leaving a confused Kaveh in the middle of peeling an apple from his saddlebags. His face burned with newfound frustration as he approached the wizened Tseren, who hardly paid him any mind as he continued to gulp heartily from his wineskin. There was a time when Tseren was his father’s best tracker, but those days were long past. A life of soft silks, plentiful food, and easy drink turned the sharp-eyed Modkhai hunter and shaman of the sacred forests into a doddering fool who could hardly tell the sky from the earth. A doddering old fool who was driving them in endless circles across the steppe while his master’s empire could fracture at any moment.
Yesugei dismounted his horse in a single, smooth motion, and threw a sharp kick at the sickening wineskin. The leathery goat’s skin spiraled across the steppe, watering the dry summer grass with arkhi before landing with a puff of dust.
As the shaman cried out unintelligibly and made to stand, Yesugei pushed him to the ground and placed one hand on the hilt of his sword - a silver-decorated shamshir with a horse’s head pommel, set with black crystals for eyes.
“W-what’s the matter with you, boy?!” wheezed Tseren as Yesugei dug his heel into the disgraced shaman’s chest, his weathered hands brought up as if it could shield him from Yesugei’s rage.
“So, the beast can still speak?” Yesugei laughed cruelly. He felt his stomach turn violently at the sour smell that came off Tseren - a mix of sweat, vomit, and spoiled horse’s milk. “If you have time to drink, you have time to scout. And if you have time to scout, then you will scout, or I will peel you like a Shiger apple and make my own waterskin from your pathetic hide.”
Over the heavy pounding of his own blistering heart, Yesugei heard Kaveh calling to him. He relaxed his grip on the shamshir, and let Tseren stand. The shaman hardly put up a fight, and instead muttered drunkenly to himself as he dusted off his faded wool kaftan.
The sound of thundering hooves commanded Yesugei’s attention as his father’s keshik bodyguards drew near. Targatai, a lean archer wearing a leather vest over a red silk robe, was the first to speak.
“My lord, no sign of riders having come through the south. If they tried to cross the mountains there-” The archer pointed to the distant peaks of the south - a treacherous crossing, but one that avoided Quanli lands and patrols. “-they’d have had to cross the Darmen river. No small feat with three dozen riders.”
“And impossible to cross back, I reckon.” piped up the second of his father’s keshik guards - the rotund Khenbish, who wore the heavy plated armor of a lancer and sweat like a pig in the summer heat. In one hand he held the reins of his horse, in the other Khenbish bore the white horse-hair standard that marked their search party as under the protection of the Great Khan: to harm them would be to bring doom upon one’s bloodline, such was known all across the Hungry Steppe. “No way they'd be able to brave the journey back across the mountains with tribute. Even if they had a thousand slaves and camels carrying it all.”
“Meaning they probably passed through Quanli lands.” sighed Yesugei as he looked out west, in the direction of his uncle’s domain. He grabbed Tseren by the collar, and pointed towards the endless horizon of swaying grass. “You see there, Tseren? That’s your work for the day. Ride and scout the west - find me any traces of Dagun-noyan. And if I so much as see you think about dismounting before sundown, I’ll keep to my promise.”
With that, he let the sobered shaman go with a shove towards his waiting horse. He watched as Tseren clumsily clambered atop his saddle, then charged out towards the Quanli lands. He heard chuckles come from the keshiks as they watched Tseren’s form shrink into the distance.
Stolen story; please report.
“Look at him go!” laughed Targatai, shifting into a cross-legged seat on his saddle as he pulled out a piece of flatbread and tore out a chunk with his wolf-like teeth. “You’d almost think he remembered how to be a Khormchak.”
“He’s Modkhai - barely Khormchak to begin with if you ask me,” wheezed Khenbish as he removed his helmet and took a swig from Tseren’s abandoned wineskin. The Modkhai were the people of the northern forests that marked the boundary between the Hungry Steppe and the Sleeping Lands - a bitterly cold and frozen domain where not even the hardiest of Khormchaks dared to venture. Few Modkhai ventured from their native woodlands, but those that did often earned a grim reputation as sorcerers and cannibals, even as their tracking and survival skills made them unmatched and much sought-after hunters and scouts.
And yet instead of getting a modkhai who can speak with the wind, or turn into an eagle, we get a drunken fool, thought Yesugei.
The wineskin flew through the air again as Khenbish threw it to him, and Yesugei took a sniff of its contents. The smell of fermented milk only brought to mind the sour smell that rose off of Tseren, and Yesugei wrinkled his nose at the still-vivid memory before throwing the skin to Kaveh. His half-brother caught the skin deftly in one hand, and took a drink before biting into the juicy apple he held in his other hand. He heard the three men behind him talk amongst each other, heard hearty laughs come from them as someone cracked a joke.
But as Yesugei looked out towards the west, all that noise of merriment seemed to drown in the whispers of the swaying grass.
***
The sun had fully slipped behind the horizon by the time they struck camp beneath purple and black skies. Yesugei stretched his legs as he took a seat on a folding stool set out by Targatai and felt the exhaustion of the day crash over him. Just a few feet away he heard Khenbish give a wheezing cough as he and Targatai worked to raise their group’s yurt - lest they spend the night completely exposed to the steppe, which even in summer could bring frosts and a cold grave to the uninitiated. A light breeze rolled across his face, and Yesugei felt his eyelids grow heavy. He unbuckled his shamshir and made to set it on the ground by his stool before he heard the grass rustle behind him, causing him to start from his seat.
Kaveh, a shadow of his former smiley self, barely acknowledged Yesugei with a tired grunt as he set his saddlebags down next to his fur bedroll and collapsed into a tired heap. In the span of just eight hours they had covered as much ground as they had in the past four meandering days, and the harsh pace exacted its toll upon all of them. But though the muscles in his legs were sore and his tailbone ached from the saddle, Yesugei felt a burning sense of reward - a sense they were finally making progress, even if Dagun still remained at large. For too long he had allowed Tseren to leech off of their supplies and drink himself into oblivion - by tomorrow, if they kept the same pace, they’d be nearly halfway through the Quanli lands and on the outskirts of the first walled border town by afternoon. There, they would be able to wrestle some answers from the merchants on Dagun’s whereabouts and get to the bottom of this mess.
As Yesugei began to unbuckle his pack to reach for some dried meat, he heard a distant call: Tseren. He glanced off to the side, spotting the exhausted shaman galloping up towards him and Kaveh. His face was twisted with concern and fear as he approached, immediately setting Yesugei on edge.
“Come with me, you two. And bring your blades.”
Yesugei’s body ached loudly for rest as he and Kaveh saddled their horses, leaving behind the keshiks to continue setting the camp. As they followed behind Tseren at a light trot Yesugei heard Kaveh grumbling about how he preferred it when the Modkhai shaman was content to sit and drink from dawn to dusk. They followed Tseren up along a low ridge, where the shaman drew his tired horse to a halt and pointed towards a winding, snaking dirt path that passed for a road in the Hungry Steppe. By now the last rays of twilight had almost completely bled away from the sky, but as Yesugei squinted at the road, he saw something break the silhouette of the earth. Something lay on the road ahead, and not in just one place, but every hundred paces forwards.
It took Yesugei another second to realize what he was looking at.
“Pieces of bodies,” muttered Tseren. He dragged his finger across the landscape, from north to south. “There is part of a body over there as well. To the left are the hands. And there lies a head…”
Yesugei felt his stomach turn as he continued to examine the scene. A pile of gore beset with flies and maggots lay in the middle of the road, with pieces of other shining viscera scattered out in the grass - a flap of ripped muscle here, a shattered arm there. But the placement was too perfect - the grisly mess too orderly to have been the work of wild scavengers or predators.
“Do they want to frighten us?” rumbled Kaveh, now wide awake. His half-brother looked to and fro, scanning the horizon with his lance clutched tightly in his hands. “Is this the work of the Quanli?”
“I know not about fear,” said Tseren, his voice taking on a steel tone Yesugei had not heard in ages. The shaman gently nudged his horse forward, patting his steed’s neck as it grew nervous approaching the scent of blood. “But whoever did this has desecrated the road. Anyone who walks this path will be cursed, this is known.”
“We’re already damned.” hissed Yesugei as he and Kaveh followed Tseren. He reached down to his saddle and drew his composite bow from its leather holster, gently fitting an arrow into the bowstring. The light bow, made in the traditional Khormchak fashion of laminated horn and sinew, steeled Yesugei’s nerves. Unlike Kaveh who preferred to fight with lance and shield in honor of his Huwaq ancestors, Yesugei was a master of the bow first and foremost, as all Khormchak warriors were. Swordfighting was for duels and singers’ stories - but the humble bow was what won the Khormchaks all their wars.
Approaching the pile of torn flesh, Yesugei saw the glint of the last dying light play out across one of the piles of gore. A bracelet made of gold and resting upon a fine, womanly hand shone with the last light of day. Tseren dismounted from his horse to examine the bodies closer, but only to confirm the chilling realization the three men had already made as they closer examined the dead.
“Women and children,” whispered Kaveh. Yesugei heard his half-brother swallow his nausea before continuing. “Demons tear me…who could have done this? And why?”
“They didn’t just chop them up here. They brought these pieces here.” said Tseren, pointing to the scattered pallid pieces. “Look, the flesh is drained of blood!”
“It looks to be a dozen, no more than that,” said Yesugei as he cast another glance over the butchered, buzzing meat, trying to make out faces, any sign of identities. He could barely make out scraps of clothing in the pile, but all of it was stained the same shade of red-brown with the rest of the blood. “I see no tribe symbols - could they have been travelers? The families of merchants, maybe?”
A part of Yesugei felt infuriated at the slaughter, but another felt relief - relief this was not where and how Dagun and his group met their end. Recalling their mission still, Yesugei turned his horse away from the dead and trotted a slow circle around the gory mess. The bodies were all several days old, and though the deaths of so many innocents was unfortunate, it ultimately did not concern them. People perished out in the Hungry Steppe every day: from cold, from hunger, from thirst, and a myriad other causes. If they were to come upon the perpetrators on the road, Yesugei would gladly relish the opportunity to repay them in kind for their wanton murder. But many more lives, lives more dear to him, were at stake the longer they tarried out in foreign lands, the longer Dagun remained unaccounted for, and the longer the shadows obscured the truth.
As he gave a sigh and turned to call Tseren back to his horse, the creak of a hempen rope pulling taut tore through the silence of the steppe.
Tseren’s face twisted in agony as his hand scrambled at the looped rope thrown over his neck, pulled so tightly that blood began to well beneath the rough fibers. In an instant, Yesugei’s eyes traced the rope’s other end to a hand, and then a hunched figure that had risen from the grasses silent as a shadow. It wore a cloak covered in the yellow-brown grasses of the steppe, and over their face was a loose-hanging mask of tattered leather through which two bright golden eyes burned with murderous glee.
As Yesugei gave a cry and pulled back his bow he heard more faint rustlings in the grass and saw scattered movements from the corner of his eye. Then there was the muted twang of a bowstring that wasn’t his, and a lightning bolt of pain shot through his left arm. The arrow fired from another figure in the grass tore straight through Yesugei's silk robe, burrowing itself deep into the fleshy part of his arm.
Through gritted teeth and blurred vision, Yesugei loosed his own arrow in the direction of the figure choking Tseren. His shot whistled through the wind and with a wet, fleshy impact, found the throat of the cloaked assassin. But there was no time to nock a second arrow - Yesugei’s left hand that held the bowstring taut trembled uncontrollably as he tried to reach for a barbed arrow in his quiver, and the assassin that feathered him once was already taking aim with a second shot. He swiveled himself and his horse around, kicking up a small cloud of dust, and lay as low as possible on his saddle. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as he continued to fumble for a second arrow - bracing for the searing agony of another shot finding its mark.
“Qarakesek!” bellowed Kaveh, and the name of their tribe echoed through the steppe as he threw himself forward, lance in hand. Yesugei heard the iron thundering of hooves, followed by a wet shlick as Kav’s lance jerked forward and pulled itself free from the body of the archer. With a bloody gurgle the second assassin fell, his bow falling from gnarled hands onto the dirt.
Yesugei drove his horse forward, leftwards - and he and Kaveh circled the field in a wide circuit. In the falling darkness he saw more shadows come to life, more assassins appear from the grass with bows and shamshirs. The assassins did not expect their sudden attack to fail, and they paid for it dearly as they now confusedly turned to and fro, half-blinded by the billowing dust their foes’ steeds kicked up as they rode. A surge of energy replaced the agony of the arrow even as it dug through his arm, and Yesugei focused his aim as he drew back his bow.
Another twang, another lethal shot, and the grasses welcomed another cloaked figure into their embrace as the assassin feebly grasped at the barbed arrow in his gut. Kav’s bloody spear flowed like silver water as he parried a clumsy shamshir strike, and thrust his spear so hard the assassin’s body lifted from the ground and dragged along the dirt for ten paces before the speartip pulled itself free.
The breeze blew across Yesugei’s face with an electrifying, intoxicating rush as he loosed another arrow, this one tearing through the leg of a man that rushed to cleave Yesugei from his saddle. As the assassin screamed and grasped at the jutting feathered shaft, Yesugei didn’t bother to nock another arrow - he spurred his horse on, and powerful iron hooves crushed the man into the dirt.
And just as quickly as it had begun, the fight was over - almost. The last golden-eyed assassin gave a muffled grunt as he and Tseren wrestled and rolled across the grasses. Then a final, rasping breath sounded as Tseren’s carved bone knife found the assassin’s soft belly and ripped him from navel to breast like a slaughtered sheep.
The Hungry Steppe fell quiet as the assassin breathed his last, and Yesugei slowed his horse to a stop. Slipping clumsily from his saddle and landing painfully on one knee, he grasped at the arrow with a trembling hand. Tseren’s overwhelming sour odor washed over him as the shaman suddenly appeared by his side, and helped him to painfully coax the arrow out from a mess of blood and stained silk.
“Thank the spirits,” gasped Tseren as he examined the arrow and reached into his hide pouch, pulling out bandages and a small poultice. “The arrow doesn’t smell of poison - surprising with how dishonorably they fought. Take this, press it tight to the wound. I will tie it.”
Yesugei gingerly placed the leaf-wrapped poultice to his wound, but Tseren’s trained hand left no room for gentleness as the shaman placed his own thumb over the poultice and pushed it, hard, into the arrow-wound. As Tseren began to tie the poultice into place with bandages, Yesugei felt the exhaustion, the anger, the frustration, and the confusion of the last few days suddenly snap.
The ninth son of Tsagaandai-khan screamed into the sky beneath the cold, unfeeling stars.