Chapter Forty-four

YESUGEI HAD NEVER been a simple man. When he led the exiled god-king through the grasslands to the foot of Chimbai-Khan’s dais, he had known that his world had changed forever by his actions. He had not desired fame or to mold that change to suit himself, nor did he claim a shaman’s gift to read the future in the bottom of a cup. But even a man who relied solely on his intellect could see that Fate had moved in young King Llesho’s eyes.

Since then, he’d seen wonders enough to last a lifetime. As a man who fought beside dragons, Yesugei considered himself free of supernatural fears. But if he had known the road on which he’d set the Qubal people would lead to this, he would have slit the god-king’s throat and left the Cloud Country in the hands of the Uulgar forever.

On any other battleground he would have expected the cries of the injured to join the squeals of the horses and the shouts of the fighting men. Here, no wounded lay among the dead, which was a mercy. From inside his coat he drew out a scented scarf to wrap around his face, though it helped little against the putrefaction rising from this field. The corpses lay black and swollen as if dead for many days, and among them crawled an army of vipers, slithering here from the open mouth of a dead man whose eyes stared in horror at the stormy sky and, there, burrowing beneath the leather half-armor of another so disfigured by the venoms that had killed him that he scarcely resembled a man at all.

Yesugei pulled his gaze away with an effort. Somewhere at the center of this abomination Qutula waited with his Durluken and with his lady who commanded the serpents. He had to be stopped. His demons had to be cast back into the underworld that spawned them. How a mortal man might be expected to accomplish that he didn’t know, but they had to try. Bracing himself against the horrors Qutula would throw at him, he pointed his sword. Banners dipped, and the defensive circle around Qutula tightened.

Then the earth shifted.

His horse screamed in alarm and fell heavily on its side. Yesugei jumped free before he was crushed by the weight of his mount, but his own legs would scarcely hold him. Solid ground became a tossing sea while men’s senses raged against nature overset. An eathquake. He’d heard of them from travelers. The hungry dead beat against the gates between the realms of the living and the underworld, they said. Demons reached through the shattered earth to swallow cities whole.

They had enough of demons in front of them. Better the underworld should open up and take these snakes back where they belonged and leave living men in peace. He waited for another tremor, but none came. His horse struggled to its legs, unhurt but shivering and rolling the whites of its eyes as it stood its shaky ground.

A khan could show no less courage than a dumb beast, or a general attend any less to his training. So exhorting himself, Yesugei leaped into his saddle and raised his sword again.

“Ayee-yah!” he cried.

The signal passed down the line of his captains, who watched him to shore up their own flagging courage. The order flowed from the captains to the thousands who took their lead from the officers charging at the head of their troops.

The horde surged forward. They would sweep this landscape of despair and drive out the human monster who had raised a demon army against his father the dead khan. And then Yesugei would take care of Prince Daritai. But a foreign conqueror seemed like a very small thing as his horse plunged toward the supernatural forces seething death in front of them.

“Rise up,damn you! Rise up!” Qutula called to his army of serpents. His men, those who had survived both the serpents and General Jochi’s attacks, fell back in terror. Chief among his Durluken, Mangkut circled his horse, panic stretching his lips in a grimace as he looked for a way out of Yesugei’s trap.

“Do you think the good general will allow any Durluken to live if he wins?” Qutula snapped at him. Duwa’s execution had taught him not to invite open rebellion. Where a man would not go at command, however, he could be pushed indirectly, with threats. If Mangkut cast a glance at his general’s sword before he turned his horse into the invading horde, he might be forgiven.

“Go, you curs!” the Durluken raised his sword to answer Yesugei’s challenge. “No man can stand against us! The spirits will clear the way to the very ger-tent palace of our own true khan!”

Qutula, who would be khan when the battle ended, acknowledged their devotion as his Durluken called his name for their battle cry. They were too few to stand alone against the many thousands Yesugei-Khan led over the killing field, but his lady would be pleased to see human warriors fighting beside her serpents. It was worth expending a few more lives for the pleaure of viewing the general’s bloated corpse, he thought, and led his own thousand into the fray.

Swaying in his saddle from exhaustion, Jochi led his warriors at an angle that brought him to Yesugei’s horde on the very edge of the writhing sea of vipers. Each general reached over his horse to clasp the arm of the other in greeting.

“I didn’t think you would come in time.”

“We’re here,” Yesugei answered his greeting. “To what use against such a foe, I cannot say.”

Demon-serpents snapped and hissed on every side of them, great fangs longer than his finger striking out again and again. Jochi raised his sword and slashed at a demon’s head while his men cried out in terror and loathing before they died. Horses reared up screaming in pain, throwing their riders as mortal vipers struck at their fetlocks and then at the exposed faces of their riders.

Like all Mergen’s officers in the recent magical wars in the Cloud Country, Jochi had paid the shaman Bolghai for blessings and protections placed on his sword. So far, he hadn’t killed any of the Lady Chaiujin’s demons with it—he thought only Chahar had managed that—but they tried to avoid his blade at least, as if it caused them pain. Few among the thousands tithed to the khanate would have such weapons, however.

“Cut a path!” General Jochi shouted above the din.

Yesugei, whose sword also enjoyed the shaman’s blessings, nodded that he understood.

Then, with their captains to either side, the generals turned on their demon foe, slashing to right and to left and in front of them, clearing a path down which the horde would follow with one goal. They would find Qutula and force him to send the serpents back where they came from, or he would die. Die anyway, Jochi thought, and distracted himself from the ache in his sword arm by imagining the varied and painful ways they would kill the murderous traitor.

Somewhere out in that landscape from hell, a mind was ordering the serpents. The generals soon found themselves separated from each other, and then from their captains, surrounded by venomous attacks on every side. Jochi hacked and slashed, his teeth gritted in a terrible grin of concentration. The serpent to the right and to the left of him felt the bite of his sword and fell back.

Another raised dripping fangs in front of him. He struck again, but distracted by the new attack, he didn’t notice the serpent-demon rising up head-tall behind him until he felt an acid pain slice the back of his neck. Twin knives, it felt like, each longer than his finger sunk in to the hilt, severing his spine. The viper shook him like a rattle while it loosed its venom. When it dropped him, he fell to the ground in agony, and uttered one great, raw-throated scream as his living flesh began to bubble and swell. The fangs had severed his spine, paralyzing him. Soon, thankfully, he felt nothing at all, though a glance told him that the wounds erupting on his blackening flesh still festered and bled. He closed his eyes, then, waiting for death, and prayed. But death, it seemed, would take its time today.

It was time. The demon who went by the stolen name of Lady Chaiujin cursed the human who had quickened her egg and his war that had embroiled her people in his devices. She cursed the human shape, grotesquely distended by the growing egg, which trapped her. And she cursed her offspring, which wanted out now.

She had lost her horse somewhere on that vast field of black-and-purple death. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t ride; her body screamed at her to squat in the mud and release her egg. She told her body to shut up. Standing rain-soaked in his battlefield, with her coats caught up in her arms and the rain pouring down from the horns of her headdress to drip like beads from its silver chains, she cursed Qutula for living and her father the demon-king for dying. She cursed Chimbai-Khan for good measure, though she had murdered him herself and felt neither grief nor remorse for it.

Her warm dry nest of stolen silks lay far on the other side of this abandoned killing field. The battle had passed on to fresh ground, leaving her behind with the dead. She took a step, another, pulled each foot out of the blood-and-rain-drenched, sucking mud and put it down again. The simple process of getting to the place where she could let down her egg took more strength than she had to give. The serpents who curled among the corpses at her feet gave neither help nor comfort. It wasn’t in their nature or hers.

“Father!” she screamed as the urge to rid herself of the egg overpowered her.

It hurt, it hurt. She wasn’t going to make it back to the warm, dry place she had prepared so carefully. Like all her plans, this one, too, had gone so wrong. She should have been khaness by now, wrapped in silks to comfort her pain, and in command. Or home, but her father was dead, the gates of the underworld closed to her now.

“Aaahhh! Aaahhh!” She couldn’t wait, couldn’t stop it, and the serpents picked their heads up and tasted the air when she screamed. They were hungry and knew their own, and its young. But this egg would be too big a mouthful for any of them.

“Leave me alone!”

She was their queen in the mortal realm, and so they pretended disinterest, slitherering away leaving wave tracks in the mud. She bent, tucking up the skirts of her coats so she could squat in the rutted earth. Heavy with rain, the rich cloth sagged and drooped, escaping her hands to drag in the mud. She struggled with it, gave her knees permission to fold under her.

Ah, there. The mud was soft, after all—almost comforting. The egg pushed harder. The human body she’d been forced to wear like a badly fitted coat these weeks clenched in rejection of its passenger. She hadn’t expect this, the size of the egg, or the pain as it fought its way through, making an enemy of the creature who had given it life.

Then it was out, gone, not a part of her anymore: a leathery sac half buried in the mud. No one would find it here. No one would think to look. There were so many dead, after all, purple and black and noisome, their guts swollen and their eyes eaten out by the serpents.

Once she had had plots to rule the grasslands, and an egg by which to claim them. But the egg wasn’t a part of her anymore. And quickly she forgot. Cool and sleek and green again, the Lady Chaiujin no more, she left her own waving pattern in the mud. Away, away, away.