Falling Sun
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A heavy pall hung over the entire group as they traveled, seeming to weigh as heavily on the feet of the peasants as their morale.
Yesugei led the way through dense woodlands, staying low and swift along the rutted hunting trails. The forests of Gatchisk, while less foreboding than the Devil Woods, were equally disorienting. Without the snaking paths, the endless maze of trees seemed to stretch without end, offering no landmarks to guide them. And the unnerving feeling of constantly being lost was not helped by the intense, suffocating humidity of the woods.
Of the nine new stragglers they had taken on, only Rudin - a boar-hunter with nearly forty summers under his belt - knew to keep them on the right path, leading them by linking fading game trails. Despite his age the man moved with surprisingly agility, and he kept a good pace with Yesugei as they scouted ahead. The others carried supplies and the wounded boyar, who muttered to himself in feverish dreaming.
The boyar’s wife - Nesha - alternated between worrying over her husband and chatting with Vasilisa. For the first time since their departure from the Devil Woods, Yesugei saw Vasilisa relax as she spoke to the middle-aged noblewoman. They spoke of the history of the land, of a dozen different boyars and governors whose names made Yesugei’s head spin, and of a young griffon - whatever that meant. Leaving them to their conversation, Yesugei pressed ahead with Rudin, keeping watch for any lurking dangers.
“We’re not far from Balai now,” said Rudin as they passed by a large gnarled tree with two trunks growing from its base. “This is the beginning of the Gray Boar’s path, so we’ll exit the woods south of the town.”
“This trail is quite far from the village,” Yesugei noted as he and Rudin carefully ascended a slick muddy slope. “Farther than I’d imagine any peasants from Yerkh would be permitted to hunt. Yet you know the trails even this far like the back of your hand.”
Rudin bristled at that comment, but didn’t reply until he was sure the others were beyond earshot. “Gods didn’t create the vast woods just so men could claim this bit and that bit for themselves.”
“Perhaps, but men also have this nasty habit of killing those who stray into their bits of land. Especially hunters hunting where they shouldn’t be. In my land, they call them poachers.”
“If that’s what you call a man who’d rather risk the noose over seeing his kin waste away into nothing, then be my guest. But no-one from Balai ever complained about no missing pigs here or there-”
Rudin suddenly crouched, motioning for Yesugei to do the same. Further down the trail, the earth split into a wide, shallow river. On the far bank was an old woodcutter’s hut surrounded by tree stumps and mossy logs. But the hunter’s attention was on the river, where two fat, pale swans floated serenely. They were oblivious to men’s wars, burned villages, or monsters—peaceful, unaffected, timeless.
Not for much longer.
Rudin licked his lips, raised his spear, and threw it through the high reeds. A loud honking screech sounded as the spear found its mark. A white blur rose up the river as the second swan took flight, but Rudin was already pulling the first bird’s feathery carcass onto land.
“There - now you’re in the business of poaching as well.” Rudin huffed as stuffed the swan into a cloth bag. “If they catch us now, we’ll both be hanged. But at least tonight we’ll have some roasted swan with your moldy bread and cheese.”
The woodcutter’s hut past the river was abandoned - long ago too, if the moss growing on the walls was any indication. However, its occupant had left the tool of his trade under his bed, and so they continued on with Rudin carrying his spear, and Yesugei a rust-covered double-bitted axe - still sharp enough to rend flesh or dent a helm, or at least leave a nasty infection barring all else.
Soon they began to pass by more signs of civilization - a wooden trail marker here, a runic standing stone there. Near sunset, they finally emerged from the woods to see the town itself: a cluster of wooden houses behind a palisade atop raised earth. The boyar’s stone towerhouse loomed in the west - right on the riverbank overseeing the pier, where the river Cherech shimmered in the fading daylight. Yet as the others slowly joined with Yesugei and Rudin, they noticed something odd about the town…
“I don’t see anyone…”
From where he stood atop a small rise at the edge of the woods, Yesugei could spy no movements of townsfolk along the streets, nor guards atop the walls. The houses’ chimneys sat cold, and worst of all - no boats lay at the pier.
“Maybe everyone’s hiding?” Gastya wondered aloud, readjusting his grip on the stretcher carrying the injured boyar.
“No signs of battle, and the gates are still closed,” Yesugei noted, squatting tiredly as he squinted at the silent town. “I don’t like this.”
Vasilisa guided her horse alongside him and Rudin. With Vratislav still asleep, she was the closest thing to a leader the other peasants recognized - even though their deference to her as Grand Princess visibly discomforted her. Her eyes carefully scanned the quiet town, and her face betrayed the same unease that Yesugei felt.
“I don’t like it either,” she admitted. “But it’s getting late, and we’ll freeze in the woods. We should still take a look. A careful look.”
Pressing her knees to Kaveh’s stallion, Vasilisa adjusted the strap of the wrapped Apostle’s cleaver slung across her back. The peasants had offered to carry her mysterious ‘treasure’ several times during their short journey, but she had always refused - for fear of frightening them if they saw the twisted flesh and bone of the weapon. But Yesugei also sensed a certain possessiveness over the blade, though it was too heavy to wield.
The prospect of a roof over their heads and a fire to keep warm outweighed the others’ apprehension about Balai, and their band emerged from the woods with Vasilisa at the head. When they got close, Valishin called out with a cry of kara-ooooooooo to hail anyone inside, but no answer came save the flutter of the town’s flag on the gatehouse. Soon they were right in front of the heavy gates, but not so much as a sentry poked their head from any of the battlements.
Doru stepped up to the gates, pickaxe in hand as he called, “Hey! Someone, open the gates! We have women and injured here!”
When no-one stirred from within the walls, the mason’s apprentice raised his pickaxe and slammed it against the iron-reinforced gates. When he did so, a blinding flash erupted from the gates, followed by a terrible heat that washed over the entire company like a wave of fire. When he opened his eyes Yesugei saw Doru lying on the ground - frightened, but alive. His pickaxe lay nearby, the wooden shaft scorched and sharpened head melted into a misshapen lump of cooling iron. Khavel rushed to Doru’s side, but the group’s focus turned to a fiery symbol now burned into the gates.
It was one Yesugei knew well - a fiery triangle atop a cross. The same symbol carved into Kaveh. Apostle magic.
They were here…or at least one of their kind was.
Vasilisa recognized the sorcery at work here as well, and shouted, “Everyone stand back! This is blood magic; it will sear you alive!”
“D-do you think the boyar put it up?” asked Valka.
“No, or he did, then boyar Crahask is no friend of ours,” replied Vasilisa as she dismounted from the horse. “We…we encountered something similar on the eastern road. It killed a good man.”
“How are we supposed to get inside, then?” asked Marmun. “The walls are too high to climb, and we don’t have any ropes.”
As Marmun spoke, Yesugei heard something strange—an eerie melody emanating from the burning symbol. The tune sounded strangely beautiful, like no other noise he had ever heard before - one part howling wind, and another part a thousand plucking noises like the strings of a harp. It felt wrong, yet beautiful in its complexity. Drawn to it, Yesugei moved toward the gates, ignoring Gastya’s attempts to stop him.
“What are you doing?” came the question from Gastya, but Yesugei shrugged off the farmer’s hand.
“Vasilisa…” he breathed as he drew closer to the gates, stretching out one hand until his fingers were nearly touching glyph. “Vasilisa…you can hear it too, can’t you?”
“Yesugei…” she murmured, awestruck.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Yesugei’s mind felt like it was melting inside his skull, overcome by a swirl of strange and powerful emotions that he did not quite understand. It was as if he was listening to someone else’s thoughts in a language both alien and intimately familiar.
Just as his fingers brushed the gates, Gastya and others tried to pull him back, with a cry of, “You madman! Get away!”
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But it was too late. His fingers brushed against the symbol, and then he was no longer in the Klyazmite plains. His world shifted into a dark, flickering forest of shadows. A bright light cut suddenly through the darkness, and he saw a tall, naked figure stride past him. From the writhing shadows he saw the towering gates of the town, gray and drab compared to the burning light of the spirit. The figure pressed its lips to the doors - whispering into the earth and the walls a terrible, beautiful song of forgotten lands, a haunting prayer for fire, earth, and the heavens.
Do they hear our prayers? Do they hear our cries?
“Yesugei!”
Vasilisa’s voice jolted him back into the world of the living, the suffering and the downtrodden. He opened his eyes to see the princess’ worried face above him. Groaning, he staggered to his feet, his body aching.
They were now inside the town’s walls—silent, orderly, and lifeless. Behind him, men worked to seal the gates, securing them with a heavy wooden bar. Boyar Vratislav, now strong enough to stand, limped up to Yesugei as he stretched his aching back.
“How did you open the gates?” The boyar demanded, his look serious. “Are you a blood-sorcerer, or just a lucky fool?”
“I just touched them, didn’t I?” The memory of even reaching out towards the doors seemed as though it had been ages past, but when he looked up at the sky the sun was still just barely over the horizon. It could not have been more than two hours.
“You did, and then you collapsed in the dirt as if you had died.” Vratislav huffed. “You had Lady Vasilisa worried sick and-”
“Boyar Vratislav,” interrupted Vasilisa with a gentle smile. “I think we should just thank the gods that whatever fickleness was behind that spell ended up sparing him. For now, we have bigger worries to deal with.”
“Yes…yes we do.” The boyar nodded, before beginning to bark out orders. “Gastya, Marmun, start searching the houses. See if you can find anyone - dead or alive. Doru, Khavel, get to the pier, and check if there are any smaller boats we can use, even a fishing boat will do. Rudin, you’re with us - I want to take a look at the towerhouse. Perhaps Crahask left a message to tell us what happened here.”
As the peasants reluctantly began to peel off in separate directions under Vratislav’s command Vasilisa tilted her head down and whispered in a quiet voice, “That song…what was it, exactly?”
“I…I don’t know. A prayer? A dirge? Maybe even a cry for help, to anyone who would listen…” His mind strayed back to the memory of the song, and Yesugei felt his chest grow heavy with a strange, sentimental sadness. “I saw a being. It whispered things into the walls and the town.”
“It drove the people out?”
“Perhaps. But the Ormanli needed butchery for their magic - I don’t see any corpses here. It’s like they all just…disappeared.”
Vratislav called to them, already beginning to make his way up the towerhouse alongside his wife and Rudin. Vasilisa acquiesced to his call. “We should go - an entire town doesn’t just disappear.”
The houses beneath the watch of the towerhouse cast long shadows onto their group as they crept up along the path towards the keep, with Rudin, Nesha, and Valka lingering behind the two of them. Yesugei saw Vasilisa’s unease grow with every house they passed by - the empty town seemed even more frightening than the burned ruins of Yerkh.
Why would hundreds of people disappear and leave behind all their possessions? In times of war, families took everything they could carry before fleeing in the face of an approaching army - here, days-old food still lingered at tables set for dinner, wagons packed with grain and cloth for the markets sat abandoned in the streets, and some hearths still clung onto fading embers. What scared them so much?
The towerhouse’s fortified gates were left wide open, groaning slightly with the wind as if beckoning them inside. In the boyar’s courtyard, Valka set herself to filling a cloth bag with cabbages and carrots from the manor’s garden while Vratislav rested with Nesha in the great hall among the griffon banners and empty seats of the boyar’s table. Rudin, Vasilisa, and Yesugei ascended the remaining floors one-by-one, each as predictably abandoned as the one before.
Unlike the clutter left behind in town, the armory of the boyar’s druzhina was nearly stripped bare. All that was left was a nasal helm - claimed by Rudin - and a recurve hunting bow with barbed arrows, claimed by Yesugei. Vasilisa, still clutching her cleaver, gratefully accepted a long dagger they found wedged behind an empty spear rack.
“At least you’ll have something to protect yourself,” remarked Yesugei. “Don’t all proper ladies carry small knives?”
“Have you met many proper ladies in your life, Yesugei?” bounced back Vasilisa as they climbed to the roof. “I’d love to hear about what other princesses you’ve entertained.”
“You’d be surprised - my father’s court entertained proper ladies from all across the world, east and west.” He recalled a delegation from Tanh Ninh came - an emperor's envoy who brought chests overflowing with silver for the noyans, gold for his father, and choice of one of the emperor’s daughters for a wife. He and Kaveh had tried teaching some of the girls riding, only to be promptly thrown out of the royal tent.
The memory used to fill him with a small sense of warmth - a reminder of when they were still both stupid boys, and the world had seemed so much larger, so much more. Now the world had grown small - and smiley Kaveh was dead. Every memory would be tainted with that knowledge, poisoned by the Apostles. He ascended the rest of the steps in silence.
The wind pricked a thousand small cold needles to his face as Rudin opened the hatch to the roof, blinding them all with the orange-red light of the falling sun. Below the battlements, he saw the entire forest and countryside awash in the orange-red glow of the sun’s light as though it were on fire - and then Yesugei saw that in some distant places, there was indeed fire, with thin plumes of smoke rising up from the woods and distant scattered holds.
“Demons tear me…” muttered Rudin, the maille curtain of his helm jingling as he adjusted it on his head to make out the view. “Looks like half the country is on fire. The Lord of Lightning ought to be pleased that war's finally come upon his people’s lands again.”
“You forget Perun is as much the lord of justice as he is of war,” pointed out Vasilisa as she rested against the crenels of the tower’s battlements. Her dark braid flowed with the howling wind as she cast her gaze upon the pillaged countryside. “There’s nothing just about this war.”
“Nothing just about any wars.” Rudin leaned his weight on the shaft of his spear as he talked. “What happened to Yerkh happened a thousand-thousand times over - even the noblest of boyars like lord Vratislav pillage and burn whenever they take to the field. ‘s just how war is. Lords and druzhinniks get all the glory, while everyone else suffers.”
The sun’s light glinted off of something hung around the flagpole of the towerhouse - a large wooden sentry’s horn banded with silver. Yesugei snatched the horn from the battlements as he thought aloud.
“You speak too bluntly to nobility to just have been a peasant,” he remarked as he examined the silver runic bands of the horn. “And you wield your spear like you’ve used it to kill more than wild pigs and swans. Who are you, Rudin?”
“No-one important.” His face was concealed behind a curtain of maille, but Yesugei could sense the sad smile on the poacher’s face as he spoke. “Might have been I was once the one dealing out the suffering at the beck and call of some lord or other…but I left those ghosts of mine behind me, at Ongainur Field.”
“You were there?”
The battle at Ongainur Field was a thing of wonder among the Qarakesek—the slaughter of Naizabai’s Klyazmite allies, and the battle that brought Klyazma under the heel of the Great Horde. Fifty thousand Klyazmites died to Khormchak arrows and lances, and three princes with fifty boyars were butchered after surrendering. Yesugei’s oldest brother Nariman, who had led the battle, made sure none of his siblings forgot that brilliant show of genius.
“Aye, I was. We chased you Khormchak bastards for what, five days? It’s been six years, but sometimes when I close my eyes I remember things like they happened yesterday. I remember how I sweat like a pig beneath my armor - how fucking hot it was when we finally caught up to your warband. And the dust…it was everywhere, in your eyes, in your mouth, in your water, in the crack of your ass whenever you got off your horse.
“The dust killed more men than anything else - it blinds you, it terrifies you. It makes confused men scatter and bump, screaming and hollering to find each other while the boyars are trying to form up lines. And then someone gets hit by an arrow, someone else takes the fallen man’s place, and some other brave idiots run out from the shieldwall trying to avenge their brother, only they get killed too. And the arrows just keep falling and falling…every volley you don’t know whether it’s going to keep coming or whether the Khormchaks decide to charge. You look around for your boyar, your banners, but all you can see is the man standing next to you - and then he lowers his shield to get a peek at the field, and gets an arrow in the eye for his trouble. You almost want the Khormchaks to charge, to see the bastards up close…”
Rudin’s wide eyes seemed to glow with the memory of that battle. Then the light faded, and turned to bitterness as he readjusted his helmet again. “I never got to kill any nomads in the end - we ran back across the Jigai and into the woods once we heard the Khormchaks had Prince Yaropolk, Vadim, and Badan’s heads on spikes, and that Yaropolk’s son Igor had run off with whatever remained of his men. Three princes, fifty-thousand men…and the only ones who survived were the ones with the damn sense to run.
“And afterwards there was your nomads’ peace. No-one needed craven fighting men without a lord. A career as a bandit would be short and ugly, and my old armor fetched a good price - enough to buy me a small plot and a home on the frontier. Now even that’s gone…and I’m too old to start all over again.”
When Rudin finished speaking, it was like all the energy had evaporated from his body. He sat down on the roof, and for the first time his age seemed so apparent - as though the bottled-up memories were holding back the tide of time.
Vasilisa was at a loss for words, as was Yesugei. He suddenly felt very uncomfortable standing on the roof, as though he were in Rudin’s world as an intruder. Vasilisa’s own discomfort at the mention of her father’s retreat was etched plainly on her face, and the two of them exchanged a glance as Vasilisa hurriedly excused herself.
“Leave the horn with me,” said Rudin as Yesugei made to descend the towerhouse. “I think I’ll stay here - keep watch at least for a while.”
Yesugei obliged and followed quickly after Vasilisa - leaving the old poacher to watch the sun fall beneath the horizon of his scorched homeland.