Heng had screamed herself beyond hoarse in the five minutes of Moscow's onslaught. Ying had kept crying, finally passing out from terror and exhaustion. Baraat fought against the tide of red for every single second, even after the tendrils of flesh had reached into the RV. He had fought them, sabre in hand, hacking at the flesh, before the tip had been stuck in a prying tongue and dragged into the sea of matter.
And then, it stopped, just as abruptly as it had begun. Moscow retreated back into the ground, dissolving into puddles of meat that collapsed with a thunderous roar, in waves, leaving behind them flattened mount-husks, shattered glass, spent shell casings. Heng stood silent, exchanging long looks with Baraat, before finally mustering the strength to mutter:
“Is it over? Is it done?”
Baraat had motioned her to stay quiet, as he crawled through the shattered windshield (the doors of the RV crushed against the seats, jammed for good. The mean exited their own mounts as well, in various states of shock. The Horde wailed and gnashed its teeth, fell to its knees or kicked and stabbed and shot at the lifeless carcass of the Moscow-beast. Baraat scanned around him for a sign of the Khan, a sign of the Mudje, crushed into a single knot of scrap metal. He searched for banners still held high, tried to listen in for any broadcast of victory or surrender, but all he found was horror.
A river of half-form faces flowed on the street. It splashed around Baraat's boots as he landed. He looked around for something he could hang on to, some anchor of sanity that he could grasp and found none, but the terror in hang's face, the pale, drained color of Ying as she slowly woke. They will have to do, Baraat mused.
“Oy!” he shouted at the men beside him, who were kicking at bits of meat, pounding them into a red mess around them, hacking at them impotently with knives. “Where the hell is your commanding officer?”
“I am” said one of the men, hands and face dripping with gore. “Kilitz Marsut, 18th myangan!” the man's eyes were wide, the color drained from his face. His mind must have been a tattered thing, held together by the promise of violence, perhaps revenge. Baraat knew exactly how he felt.
“Any other officer left alive? Any of your zuun-lords, your arbat-lords? Hell, anyone with a set of speakers on their mounts?”
“There is one, I believe...where is the Khan?”
All over, from the looks of it, Baraat thought. Instead, he said: “Find them. Signal the retreat. We need to leave this place immediately.”
“But what about the 12th and th 15th? They're on the other side of Moscow? How will they even hear us? We can't just leave them behind!”
Baraat looked out, across the liquefying mountains of meat that dribbled down into the Moskva, that putrefied at an accelerated rate. If anyone on the other side of the river had survived this, they would know that this was more than adequate enough to signal a retreat. If not, then they would be mired here, when the mass clogged the streets and they were best by flies or choked as their own mounts flooded.
“There's barely anything in the way, between our position and theirs. If we set the speakers at full blast, they'll hear us. We can regroup then, count our losses and then get the hell out of Russia.”
“We can't abandon the Khan's plan! We need to organize a counter-attack, we need to strike back, we need to...”
“We need to get the hell out.” Baraat snarled. “Leave this place, go down the M12 and leave this place for good! And if the Khan turns up and he wants to court-martial anyone for abandoning their posts, then he can take it up with me. Now get to it, Marsut!”
Marsut complied, his mad-eyed men in tow. They found a mount that had been halfway crushed, its PA system still intact. The engine was working, but only barely. Using the jumper cables from Baraat's RV, they turned the PA system at full volume, letting Freddy Mercury howl his anthem at the heavens:
Don't. Stop.Me.Now.
Don't. Stop. Me. Now.
They transmitted this through the radios as well, for good measure, in every known frequency and Moscow resounded with the treble of their mounts. The Mongols needed no further coercion. Pushing their mounts upright, setting up their tattered banners, wiping the blood from their longcoats, they moved through the rotting paths on the husk of the dead Moscow-beast, leaving behind them, running down the M12 until their brains gave out and they all howled madly at the moon.
No order to set up camp was given, or a clear signal for a morning report. Baraat simply looked at Heng, silent and pale. He climbed on the roof of his vehicle and told his men:
“First, we count the living! We know how many we are, we count those we lost! Second, an arbat will be sent to St Petersburg, another to Volgograd! They will not believe our words over the radio, or trust any reports. They need to see us, to see what happened, so they will know that Moscow has beaten the Horde. Hey must know that it is dead, but it is not to be touched. After this has been done, we will look for a superior officer! Now get to it!'
And they counted the living, but the dead as well. They counted the missing too, who climbed into mounts and gunned it Northeast, howling madly. They did not dare give those poor bastards chase. In a way, those were the lucky ones, slipping away into madness when the rest remained naked and exposed, forced to soldier on through these fields of unreason. There were nearly four thousand dead. The 8th myangan, the Khan's own which had been the vanguard of the charge had only a zuun's worth of survivors. The Khan's mount was missing.
A procession was held for the dead: a bonfire was set up, fueled by spare mount-parts that had been choked with Moscow-flesh. No songs were sung. The shaman-engineers had no prayer in them, to encompass the scale of this madness they had witnessed. After this, they searched for a myangan-lord to speak the words they were all thinking. It was almost an hour before Baraat mustered the courage to speak them:
“It took Moscow an hour to kill three myangan's worth of Mongols, before it choked and died. Perhaps it choked on our hardy flesh or we killed it, somehow. I cannot know, because I was too busy screaming my head off and soiling myself, like most of us were. The khan is dead and we are broken. His successor will perhaps give us orders, if we return to Volgograd now and fall to our knees and hope they will believe us.
“But they will not. Even after they see dead Moscow, even after they listen to the witnesses. They will call us turncoats, deserters, liars. When the historians write of this day, they will make no mention of this horror. Because this will be the day that we were witness to the greatest defeat the Horde has ever faced. Russia broke us, brothers. It is time we moved on.
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“if we leave, now, move down across the old interstates, we could cross into Europe. If we move across the E30 and don't stop, then we will be in Poland just before the winter comes. If we are lucky, we could occupy one of the cities, wait it out and move south. We can fight for the Horde there, keep our holdings, hope that maybe, if we fight long and hard enough, they will choose to forget our desertion. But we will never be able to go back home. If we run away, they will either find us and kill us as deserters or we will freeze on the road. The choice is yours. But if you follow me, you will not find peace, because there will be not a soul in this world that will believe we deserve it.”
When Baraat was done, there was a maelstrom of arguments, of heated debates. He returned in his RV, where Heng waited, prepared for the road.
“Where are you going?” Baraat asked.
“Back. To Volgograd, to St. petersburg, to jiunquan, to any place where they will have me. I won't stay on the road another day. I won't risk myself, or Ying, for this. For you.”
“I understand.” Baraat said. He did his best not show his relief. “I hope you will understand, if I don't try to reach you.'
“I hope to never see you again, Baraat of the Buriyat. At least not until I close my eyes and wake up in Hell.”
'I will leave you to it, then.” he said. Halfway through leaving the RV, one foot out in the open air, heng asked him:
“You killed, Gansukh, didn't you?”
“Yes. I stabbed him in the back, shot him and then threw him into the Volga.”
“For this? Was it worth it? So you could live out the rest of your life on the road?”
Baraat did not answer. He only left the vehicle, walked a ways from the road and smoked cigarette after cigarette, until the sun peeked out over the horizon.
***
Many years later, he died.
It happened on the road, the way he knew it would have always been, with five thousand men at his back, with his banner raised high. It was that of a young wolf, perched across the length of a saber's edge.
He had left Russia that morning, with three thousand men following him across the M1, to Poland. The rest had grouped around the other myangan-lords, heading back to Volgograd, to give Tuzniq news of the disaster. On their way, they were ambushed by Chechnyan stragglers and Uzebkhistani refugees, running away from the Horde. The clash was short and very bloody. The Mongols were not prepared to meet any resistance and the refugees had the advantage of numbers and desperation at their side. They cut them down even as they ran, wresting the weapons and their mounts away from them. The day would have ended in disaster, had Heng not taken a dead man's AK-47 and firing into the crowd, ordering the men to signal a regroup.
The Mongols followed the Ogtbish with the tattered, bloodied banner, her child strapped to her back and killed and hunted down every last one of their assailants, bringing their heads back to Tuzniq as trophies. For her bravery, Tuzniq-Khan took her as his bride, accepting her in her tent. He never touched her and Heng welcomed this. But the news of a woman leading a myangan spread like wildfire through the Empire and soon enough, stories of women abandoning the tents of their husbands to take up arms sprang all over. It was said that the very next year, a pregnant woman by the name of Niryani was the one who snuck in disguise and sabotaged the gates of Bhadrak, ensuring a bloodless victory for the Horde.
The other myangan-lords, who had returned from Moscow empty-handed with news of the Khan's death, were tried for desertion and high treason. These men were strapped to th fenders of the vanguard of the Japanese campaign, crushed and shot at like common criminals. The news, of course, reached even Baraat, who had not stopped since that night and had taken Bialystok in a single bloody charge. There was no celebration for him, or his men. They occupied the city and moved south. They reached Slovenia and were nearly crushed in Kosice, where its defenders had turned the bowels of the city into a network of tunnels and struck at them from the shadows. They burned it to the ground and killed the stragglers, who left their positions once they were choked by the smoke.
In Hungary, they were hailed as saviors, come to free them from the Romanian warlords, who had the gods of Cluj-napoca at their side. The Romanian lords were madmen, their bodies mutated and changed by the touch of the monsters. These, the Mongols destroyed with extreme prejudice, burning their cities, destroying their living temples and tearing apart their shrines, even as they howled with the voices of children.
Across the Balkans, they met little, but fierce resistance. The Greeks burned Salonica before the Mongols would have it. The Bosnians fought like men possessed. The serbs did not yield, even after the Mongols had strapped their women and children to the roofs of their mounts. In three years' time, the Mongols had conquered and lost Romania three times over. The Bosnians gave them an inch of land for every hundred men they lost. The Romanians melted into the night, leaving behind them ten dead for each one of the Mongols they had struck down. Europe would huddle around the Mongols in wintertime, savoring the warmth from their fuel provided by their Tngri and turn against them come summer.
Only a single message was delivered to Volgograd, relayed by radio transmission:
“Europe will never belong to the Mongols.”
And it was true, to an extent. The Italians flocked to Baraat and gave up their cities in exchange for biodiesel, falling in line behind them. But the Germans and the French would slaughter them and burn their holdings, in return. The old continent was a hell of open roads, of clotted blood and gunsmoke.
It was ten summers later, that the news came on every frequency: the Horde had reached America, moving up from the Bering straight with makeshift boats, ferrying the mounts over the small stretch of the Atlantic, down Canada, the ruins of the United States and the places beyond. In China, there were uprisings that were quickly quelled. Japan suffered and burned, but never yielded. Twenty years later, the shipyards of India produced boats that sailed from bengal to the Philipinnes and from there, to Australia. Africa came willingly, the kings of the Kongo and the Saharan warlords eagerly accepting the aid of the Mongols against their enemies.
It took the Horde forty years, before the world purred with the sound of their engines, before the lights went on across the surface of the world. Baraat never knew of this. He was in Zagreb at the time, fifty-six winters old and so very tired. The fires that had enveloped the city had kept him warm. His men (so few of them true Mongols now) were hard at work sacking what was worth through the blaze, raging through the first snows of winter. The assassin had approached him slowly, almost unheard. There was the almost-silent cocking of a gun at the back of his head.
“Make it quick.” he said as he turned, hands at his waist. His assassin was a girl, barely sixteen years of age. She pulled the trigger without a moment's hesitation.
Above the world, in a place-without-distance:
The Bone-God had seen all, at the moment of its birth, as the Bone-Wing and the Moscow-beast had clashed. It had been born in a single instant of violence, its birth a thing of savage beauty. The thunder-lizards stood silent for a long while, as the new intelligence spoke to them: it promised them respite, it spoke of pastures new, where they could dwell in peace in a world built to their demands. It knew of places far out into the Night, where the thunder-lizards could live out eternity, until the final Winter came once again, where they would fight and hunt and consume for all eternity.
And the thunder lizards accepted, leaving the Earth for good, crossing the light-years at the speed of things unbound by the laws that govern mind and matter. They reached the worlds that existed beyond countless suns, where the hidden billions lived out their lonely existences, thinking themselves well and truly alone. And the Bone-God shed parts of itself on abandoned planets, coating them with thunder-lizards, while broadcasting to those aching, yearning souls:
You are here. This is now. You are not alone.
And they would follow in their millions, the Bone-God spreading among them like a disease with a hundred thousand names, until the entirety of the universe spoke its mantra, until there was not a single inhabited world in the Universe that would not worship the Bone-God, lord of the Starways, who healed the totality of Creation of its loneliness.
And when the last of the thunder-lizards had been spent, countless millenia later, then the Bone-God returned to the shifting pastures of thought and melded into nothingness, its children singing its mantra, their song spread out across the interstellar void:
We are here, this is now. We are not alone.
Earth, a thousand years later:
The boy was born on the night of the signal, a thousand and sixteen years since the thunder-lizards finally took their revenge. The lights went out in the outskirts of Ksvogol nuur, the signal overwhelming the artificial day.
We are here, it sang. You are not alone.