The Mongoliad: Book One

CHAPTER 12: CHASING SHADOWS

Of the tumen who guarded the Khagan while he was in Karakorum, a minghan (one thousand men) was designated Khevtuul (the Night Guard). They patrolled the palace and the grounds after nightfall, and Gansukh knew there was a distinct difference between nocturnal patrols and hunting during the day. As the Khevtuul began to respond to Master Chucai’s alarm, Gansukh turned his attention to the buildings surrounding the palace. The Night Guard would surround the central building, and men with bows would be ready to fill the dark sky with arrows. Some of them might even start to search the surrounding area when they failed to find the assassin on the roof, but by then it would be too late.

The tile had given away the assassin’s location. Whatever his mission had been, it was no longer foremost in his mind. He was thinking about escape. Much like a deer once it is spooked—it forgets everything in its headlong rush to flee.

The square around the palace was filling with leather-clad figures brandishing bows and torches. Courtiers and concubines panicked, lifting up the hems of their robes and scattering like geese, the tassels on their hats and hairpins swinging wildly. Gansukh silently cursed the men with torches—the flicking light was spoiling everyone’s night vision. Already it was almost impossible to see where the roof of the palace stopped and the sky began. Too many shadows now. Too many places for a man to hide.

The first moments of the chase were critical. Prey, once spooked, would bolt—either for a hiding place or to put the most distance between itself and its hunter. A hunter had only a few seconds to judge his quarry; he had to either anticipate its flight and get in front of it somehow, or if the prey was faster, he had to have more stamina. And know how to track.

The Imperial Guard wasn’t comprised of hunters. Those who did go hunting with the Khagan simply spread out in a great circle, driving all the game before them. They weren’t hunting one animal; their tactic was to round up every living thing possible—useful for the Khagan’s sport, but a tactic that couldn’t catch a solitary quarry.

Some of the Night Guard was pointing now, and Gansukh looked up. A pair of guards had found the assassin’s route onto the roof and was giving chase. One slipped on the slanted tiles and fell, screaming. He clattered off the roof in a cascade of broken tiles and landed heavily on the courtyard stones. They were stupid to follow the assassin that way, Gansukh noted, but they were easy to spot, and they gave him a valuable hint as to the direction the assassin had gone.

The second guard trotted with more care, and when he raised his bow, he stopped. Before he could shoot, something hit him in the face and his arrow went wild. He slipped, but managed to catch the cap tiles and hang on. His bow slid part-way down the roof.

The assassin had to go to ground somewhere, and Gansukh tried to recall the location of all the buildings surrounding the palace. To his recollection, they were all too far away. But jumping was the only way—the only quick way—off the roof. The assassin had made a mistake, obviously, and had been spotted. Fleeing to the roof had been a desperate gamble, one that might have been successful had he not been betrayed by a loose tile.

Gansukh reached the southeastern corner of the palace and came to a halt. The southern courtyard was even more open, and the only structure that could possibly be a spot for a man to jump to was the enormous statue—the silver tree crowned by the four serpentine spouts that each spewed a different liquid. But the tree was barren other than its spouts and offered no place to hide, and the open ground surrounding it was rapidly filling up with a mob of agitated Khevtuul.

Men shouted to the west, and a clump of Night Guards raced toward the far side of the palace, drawn by a cacophonous crash of more tiles. Gansukh started to follow and then stopped. Behind him lay the garden. Its walls weren’t very tall; he could, if he stood on his toes, reach the top of the wall, but the trees were much taller.

Something flickered across the sky, and a tall ash tree inside the wall of the garden swayed violently as if buffeted by the wind. The trees on either side barely moved.

Marveling at the assassin’s agility and daring—such a leap was clearly the sign of a desperate man—Gansukh reversed his course and raced for the garden. With a grunt, he hauled himself up and over the wall. He landed easily and pushed his way through the hedges toward the vibrating ash tree.

Stones rattled on the path beyond the cluster of trees, and Gansukh tried to remember the route the path took through the manicured maze of trees and bushes. As he remembered it, the track wound haphazardly through the long rectangular space of the garden—clearly not a tactical route. More often than not, he had been distracted when he had been in the garden during the day. Gansukh dashed beneath a willow, its long branches whipping his face and shoulders, and found himself at one end of the long central clearing.

Not far, in fact, from where the deer he had shot earlier that day had been standing.

Ahead—to the north, he thought as he oriented himself—he spotted movement. A figure in dark clothes, nearly invisible in the shadows of the garden, but betrayed by spears of moonlight. Gansukh sprinted after him, trying to close the gap.

There was a gate in the northern wall of the garden and a guardhouse as well. Perhaps the assassin was running blindly and didn’t know what lay ahead of him, but Gansukh couldn’t rely on that chance. The man had gotten all the way into the palace. Surely he knew enough of the buildings and the Khevtuul’s routines to plan both his assault and his escape. And if he didn’t…

At Kozelsk, their plan had gone awry almost immediately, and he had to improvise a solution. He could still remember that feeling, that panic that gave way to a singular focus. Choices became easier. Survival became all-important. Nothing else mattered.

The assassin veered right, disappearing from the path, and Gansukh waited until he was past a large clump of cedar trees before dodging right as well. The eastern wall. While taller than the wall between the garden and the main compound, the outer wall of the palace wasn’t intended to repel intruders so much as it was meant to separate the Khagan and his court from the sprawl of Karakorum. It wasn’t wide enough to post guards on, but it was higher than a man could jump—even from horseback.

Behind him, Gansukh heard voices shouting, and when he spared a glance over his shoulder, he saw some of the trees outlined with orange light. Torches. The Khevtuul had figured out the assassin’s ploy too, and were now charging into the garden. He thought he could make out the word “two,” and then an arrow rushed by, nearly clipping his head.

In the confusion, they had mistaken him for another intruder.

Lian had finished brushing her long hair when she heard the faint cry of alarm. Within moments the corridor outside her room was filled with the sound of running feet. She threw a long jacket over her light silk robe and went to investigate the commotion. As she left the narrow confines of her room, she was immediately swept up in the flood of similarly half-clad bodies. She tried to piece together a coherent story from the snatches of conversation she heard in the tumultuous rush toward the building’s exit. A fire in the storehouses, an attack by the Khagan’s enemies, an assassin sent by the Chinese to kill the Khagan as he sat for his evening meal, a dozen assassins, each trained in a different manner of swift and silent execution—there was no coherence in the stories, she realized; they were all equally true and false. Panic was the only constant.

Outside was no less chaotic, and the concubines and courtly ladies huddled together like clusters of clucking chickens while the Khevtuul swarmed like an outraged hive of bees. Their attention was directed toward the palace, and Lian drifted like a ghost through the confusion until she reached the edge of the wide avenue around the central building. Ahead, on the western side of the palace, a flurry of Khevtuul boiled around a pair of lumps on the ground, and as Lian wandered closer, she realized the bodies were wearing the same garb as the guards around them.

She let out the breath she had been holding as she realized she had been worried that one of the bodies might have been Gansukh. Chiding herself for her reaction—as well as acting like a simple country girl where the young warrior was concerned—she turned to return to her quarters, but she paused when she heard Master Chucai’s voice.

He was striding toward her, a black cloud that eclipsed the play of torchlight behind him. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

She clutched her jacket closed and dropped her gaze toward the ground. “There was a great deal of excitement amongst the ladies of the court,” she said. “Like them, I was concerned for my safety.”

Chucai growled in his chest, a noise not unlike distant thunder. “Go back to your room,” he snapped. “Gather up the—” He flapped a long sleeve at the cluster of women. “Take them with you. It isn’t safe. You should be inside.”

Lian bowed. “Yes, Master Chucai.” She brushed past him, hurrying to be out of his presence.

He caught her arm as she passed and brought her up short. His stare was indomitable, and she looked away, trying to hide from his gaze. “I’m sure young Gansukh is in no danger,” he said, and when she blushed at having her heart read so plainly, he released her.

She fled back to her room, neglecting to bring any of the other ladies with her. All she wanted was to hide from the fact that he might be right: that Gansukh was safe and that she cared at all.

There was no time to stop and explain. Gansukh slowed as he came to the outer wall of the palace, and he tried to quiet his breathing and listen for some sign of where the assassin had gone. The effort seemed futile, as the shouting and thrashing of the Khevtuul in the garden made it nearly impossible to hear any subtle sound, but he was rewarded with a scraping noise, followed by a grunt.

He had missed it at first, looking for the wrong thing. Not far ahead, wriggling against the wall like a black snake, was a knotted rope. He ran over and pulled it taut. There was some weight near the other end, and when he looked up, he could see the dark shape of the assassin as the man neared the top of the wall.

He chided himself for not bringing his sword and bow with him. But he hadn’t realized the meeting with Lian was meant to be a martial one. He had thought…

Gansukh pushed those thoughts aside as he started up the rope. However the assassin had anchored it to the top of the wall, Gansukh hoped his weight would be enough to make the man not tarry and release the rope. The fall wouldn’t kill him, but following the assassin up the rope was the only way he could hope to keep up. It would take too much time to race around through the north gate—longer if the guards continued to confuse him for another intruder.

The assassin didn’t stop, and by the time Gansukh reached the top of the wall, the dark-robed figure was gone.

Arrows bounced off the wall around him, and Gansukh didn’t wait for the archers to correct their aim. He leaped off the wall, landing and tumbling in a clumsy roll. He banged his left shoulder against the ground and ignored the flare of pain as he scrambled to his feet.

Which way? He was in a back alley behind one of the long buildings the Khagan used to store his possessions, and there were no doors or windows on this side. North or south? To the south lay the front gates of the palace and the large staging grounds at the head of the paved road that stretched through the main part of Karakorum. If the assassin were trying to disappear into the teeming chaos of the city, that would certainly be the route to take.

Gansukh hesitated. Going to ground didn’t seem like the right choice. In that case, the prey counted on the hunter losing interest. But for an assassin who had just killed the Khagan? The hunt would never stop, and the only hope the man had for survival was to run as far as he could—as fast as he could. Trying to escape through a city of tents would take too long.

To the west and north of the palace were a number of gates out of the city. Most of them were crowded during the day with shepherds and goat herders trying to sell their animals, but at night the markets should be empty.

A woman screamed somewhere beyond the storehouse, and Gansukh’s decision was made for him. He sprinted to his left, and when he reached the corner of the building, he spotted a small Chinese courtesan dressed in blue silk sprawled on her back in the middle of the street beyond. She was hurling curses at a swiftly moving figure.

“Stop! Intruder!” The northern guardhouse was behind him, and Gansukh ducked around the corner of the building as the guards on the elevated platform started shooting arrows.

It probably would have been wiser for him to wait for the Khevtuul to catch up, identify himself, and join with them in their pursuit of the assassin instead of being mistaken for the assassin’s accomplice. Gansukh stared at the receding figure of the assassin as he raced down the empty street toward the market gate. It would be wiser…

Muttering a half plea/half curse to the Blue Wolf, Gansukh sprinted after his quarry.