Chapter 39
The forest camp died quietly. Orda Naiman's main force had been the largest military assembly the region had seen in a generation.
Ten thousand men, their siege engines, their supply lines, their confidence.
They had sat outside Borjigin walls for weeks and watched a city starve, and they had felt invincible.
Because they were.
They went to sleep invincible.
They dreamt of their victory.
They did not wake up.
Varok's riders hit the eastern perimeter at the hour before dawn, when the body's defences are lowest and the mind is slowest to separate dream from reality.
Five thousand Valthorne cavalry moved in near silence through the tree line, torches unlit, horses' hooves wrapped in cloth—a trick Varok had learned from a campaign so nasty very few of his men had lived to tell the tale.
The first line of sentries died before they could shout.
The second line died before they understood why the first had gone quiet.
By the time the camp understood it was under attack, Varok's riders were already inside the perimeter, and the screaming had begun in earnest.
"Push through the centre!" Varok's voice carried over the chaos, his massive frame visible above the melee, his sword catching torchlight as the camp's fires were kicked alive by panicked men. "Don't let them form ranks—don't let them think!"
His horse reared as three soldiers rushed him simultaneously. He cut down two before his mount's hooves dealt with the third, and he was riding again before the bodies settled.
The men were waking in pieces—some men were armed, some half-dressed, and some still stumbling from their bedrolls into slaughter. The siege engines loomed useless in the darkness, enormous and immovable, monuments to a strategy that had just become irrelevant.
Varok rode past them without a glance.
"Numbers!" he bellowed at his second.
"Still unclear!" The man rode hard to keep pace. “They're scattered—no central command responding—"
"Because there's no one to respond." Varok grinned through blood that wasn't his. "Keep pushing. Don't let them regroup."
For an hour, it seemed like the sort of victory that songs were written about.
Then the eastern tree line lit up with torches.
Hundreds of them. Moving in organised formation, cavalry, by the sound of the hooves, was coming fast from the direction of the Main Continent.
The camp survivors heard it first. Those still standing turned toward the approaching lights with something shifting in their expressions: relief. And there were more than Varok would have liked. Ten thousand was simply a number that took time to reduce regardless of surprise.
"Reinforcements!" The shout went up, and it was taken up by a dozen voices, then a hundred. "Reinforcements! They've sent reinforcements!"
Varok raised his fist and his riders pulled up, reforming into rough lines. He watched the torches approach and did the arithmetic quickly. The column was large. Large enough that if it was what the surviving soldiers believed it was, the battle’s balance would shift considerably.
He kept his sword drawn.
The army emerged from the tree line.
Varok's eyes narrowed.
The banners were wrong.
Not Orda Naiman's. A sigil he didn't immediately recognise, riding beside a Borjigin banner that had no business being in this forest at this hour.
And at the column's head, two figures rode side by side: one broad-shouldered, his braids catching the torchlight, and the other younger, his posture stern.
The Naiman survivors went quiet.
One of them—a sergeant, by his armour, with enough rank to know what he was seeing—said something in his own language. A question, by the tone.
The man with the braids answered in the same tongue, loud enough to carry.
Varok didn't speak that tongue—the steppes alone had nine, but he had enough campaign experience to read the effect of words on a crowd. He watched the sergeant's face go from hope to confusion and then, eventually, despair.
The sergeant translated for the men around him.
Varok looked at his second. "What did he say?"
His second, who had been traded between enough tribes to pick up fragments of most regional languages, had gone slightly pale. "He said their reinforcements won't be coming. They've been slaughtered."
Varok looked at the column, at the man with the braids. Blue eyes found Varok's across the camp's wreckage and he inclined his head in greeting.
Varok raised his sword in acknowledgement.
The first man from Naiman’s camp to drop his weapon did so without ceremony — he simply let it fall, raised his hands, and knelt in the mud.
The second followed. Then a third. Then it moved through them like a wave, the sound of steel on wet earth replacing the sound of fighting, until the forest camp had gone quiet again.
Varok sheathed his sword. "Secure them," he told his second. Then he rode toward the column's head.
"You're late," he said when he reached the man with the braids.
Borji looked at him. Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. "We had to make a stop."
"The reinforcements."
"They weren’t going to stop being a problem on their own."
Varok considered this. Looked at the young man riding beside him—the Ameachi prince, he assumed. "And him?"
"He goes where I go," Borji said. "For now."
Varok grunted. He had not survived thirty years of campaigning by asking unnecessary questions. "The Great Khan is in the city. We should move."
"Yes." Borji looked at the kneeling survivors; his expression was unreadable. "We should."
"Seriously? Just like that?”
“I couldn’t believe it either; she’s spending a night with the General.”
“Maybe I should join a warlord’s party; who knows what gifts I’ll receive?"
“He must be enjoying a night of bliss. She’s a vixen for a reason; her skill must be better than the women of the red-light district."
Two guards stood before the reinforced door that led to the lowest level of the cells—the level where they stored the dead—chattering about a woman they should’ve kept out of their mouths. It was dreadfully cold, and their breaths fogged in the air.
"What was that?" one whispered.
The other frowned. "What was what?"
"That sound. Like—" He stopped, listening. "Like something moving."
"Probably rats. Place is full of them."
"No, it's—"
The thumping came again. Coming from behind the door.
The guards exchanged glances. Then, slowly, the senior one pulled out his keys.
"Open it," he ordered.
The junior guard didn't move immediately. "It's the dead level," he said. "Nothing down there but the box and the cold."
"I know what's down there."
"Then you know nothing should be making that sound."
The senior guard's jaw tightened. "Open it. Unless you'd like to explain to the commander why we stood at our post and did nothing?"
The junior guard relented and stepped aside to let him unlock the door.
The door swung open.
The smell hit them. Damp stone and rot. The torchlight from the corridor barely reached the far wall. The junior guard lingered in the doorway.
"Go on then," the senior guard muttered, more to himself than anyone.
They stepped inside.
The cell beyond was small, damp, and lit only by a guttering torch. At its centre sat the wooden box—the coffin, the prize, and the body of the Great Khan delivered for Altansarnai's pleasure.
The lid was closed.
Neither of them spoke. The junior guard became aware of his own breathing, it was too loud in the silence. He told himself it was the cold making his hands unsteady, that the box had always sat at that slight angle, that the scratch marks on the floor beneath it were old.
"Open it," the senior guard instructed, sword drawn, heart pounding.
The junior guard hesitated, then reached for the lid.
He lifted it.
It was empty.
They looked up.
Ragnar dropped from the ceiling. He landed behind the junior guard, his arm already wrapping around the man's throat, and twisted.
The crack that followed was short and sweet.
The senior guard spun, raising his sword but to no avail.
Ragnar's hand caught his wrist and squeezed, and the blade clattered to the floor. His other hand found the guard's throat, lifted him from his feet, and held him there while he choked and kicked and died.
He dropped the body without looking at it.
He was naked, his scarred skin gleaming in the torchlight, his eyes blazing with a fury that had no bottom.
The door opened behind him. He turned to Nyraxa, who stepped through with a bundle of cloth and some metal in her arms. She took in the scene and smirked.
"She really did a number on you."
Ragnar's gaze snapped to her. All good-natured amusement had left him. Then he looked at his wrist, where her antidote-coated needle pricked him just before he drank her wine.
"Where is my wife?"
Chinedu ran as fast as his small legs could carry.
Corridors he had known his entire life—corridors that now felt foreign, drenched in shadows and the distant echoes of screams. The world had become a nightmare.
One moment he had been in his chambers, practising his letters, awaiting news of the Akwaugo’s death.
The next, servants were screaming, guards were running, and the sky itself had turned to blood.
He didn't understand what was happening. He only knew that chaos had erupted amongst the people, and the deafening roar outside the wall had been the indication to leave.
The archways blurred past him—the eastern wing, the garden courtyard, the hall of ancestors. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Some wore the armour of palace guards. Others were servants. Chinedu's stomach lurched, but he kept running. He couldn't stop. If he stopped, the nightmare would catch him.
He rounded a corner and froze.
His sisters.
Three of them—the younger ones, the ones who had played with him in the garden just yesterday—lay crumpled against the wall. Their eyes were open, staring at nothing. Their fine clothes were torn and bloody.