The Mongoliad: Book One

working themselves into a howling, ravenous mob. They craved blood, demanded death, and worst of all, they wanted Zug!

Haakon felt like puking.

In the darkness of the eastern gate something moved—a shadow of black and red with broad, square shoulders and a large white mouth. Slowly, emerging into the bright sunlight with all the panache of a royal concubine making an entrance into a court somehow filled with rude bumpkins, the outlandish figure emerged into the open.

They were making that familiar noise—that buzzing sound as if a hundred bees were trapped inside his skull. His mouth was filled with the taste of metal and his jaw ached. He had vomited once already—a bilious stream of acidic arkhi that had spattered his suneate—and his stomach was so knotted he couldn’t puke again.

His suneate, strips of armor bound in parallel and tied to his legs, had been spattered many times over the last few years—mostly with blood. More recently, throwing up before the fight had become a common occurrence. It had become part of the ritual of preparation. Just before he put on the mask, his stomach would rebel. The one part of him that had any feeling left, only his stomach could still muster any outrage at what he had become. The rest was numb, too pickled by the arkhi to care.

He was dead. A ghost, held in this world by the iron of his cage, by the blood debt he had incurred. They summoned him, screaming and shouting the name he had given them—the name he had earned. Their cries—that insistent buzzing of honeybees—woke him from his stupor; he would animate the bag of flesh, would wrap it in the carapace of his shame, and would send it stumbling toward the light.

Only then would he be given the skull-maker.

The noise would stop when he collected a head. The skull-maker, so bright in the light, would go round and round until it wasn’t bright anymore. They would scream and shout for a while after he was done, but the pain in his head would start to lessen. They would let him go back into the darkness; they would let him crawl away, sloughing off his mask and his shell as he went. Until there was nothing left of the monster. Until there was only the dead man who would plunge into the bottomless pit offered by the arkhi. The ghost who would return to the void of senselessness.

He tottered, bumping into the wall of the tunnel. The skull-maker scraped along the ceiling, whining that it was cutting wood instead of bone. It was thirsty too.

He tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry. His tongue was a slab of rock, and he ground his teeth against it, trying to feel something. Anything.

Place the foot before lifting the other, he instructed the bag of flesh. Control the skull-maker. It has to wait.

His instructions, always delivered along with the skull-maker as if he were a child and couldn’t remember, were simple: don’t kill him too quickly. The audience wanted a show, as did the shadow in the pavilion. His duty was to entertain. It wasn’t to kill a man; it was to make them howl and laugh. It was to make them believe they controlled the monster. They could make it perform for them. Make it dance. Make it sing. Make it kill. He was their toy.

Soon, he whispered to the skull-maker as he stepped out of the tunnel.

Haakon’s opponent stalked slowly out of the gate’s shadow. Its armor was the gaudiest and most complex that Haakon had ever seen. Layers of plates overlapped, much like the lamellar of the Mongols, but constructed by the hand of a true artisan. Mongol armor was a patchwork assembly of jagged scrap in comparison to the perfectly shaped pieces of the demon’s equipage. A polished black helmet lay low over its brow, topped by a spreading crest that reminded Haakon of the wings that some of his ancestors sported on their helms. A mane of white hair thrust from beneath the helmet’s slanting cowl, and a cunningly wrought mask—mouth drawn back in a sneering roar, long tendrils of white horsehair spilling off the upper lip, eyes rimmed with spires of painted fire—obscured his opponent’s face.

It was the face of a demon.

Haakon had heard stories of Onghwe Khan’s grand champion, of course; gossip and local legends returned with every group of Shield-Brethren that ventured into the shantytown surrounding the arena for supplies. As soon as the Mongolian engineers had begun to construct the arena, the surrounding plain had begun to sprout makeshift markets of trinket-sellers, soothsayers, gilded-tongued minstrels, footpads, mercurial physicians, and sharp-eyed traders, all drawn by the promise of bloodsport and commerce, all filled with an endless supply of lies, legends, and horror stories about the sorts of monsters the dissolute Khan had at his disposal.

Haakon was familiar with similar stories from his own childhood—tales of the jotnar and their role at Ragnarok, for example—but he hadn’t given them much thought. Not until today.

It is the nature of fear, Feronantus’s voice reminded him, offering an alternate viewpoint to Taran’s precise lessons. Your own mind betrays you with bogles from your childhood. Images that would not disturb you at any other time become huge, magnified by energies you do not control. You are not open to the flow; every muscle in your body is tight, and there is no path. Every tiny spark is getting caught, and a fire is building around you.

Haakon gasped.

Breathe, you idiot. It’s just a man in a suit of armor. Taran’s instruction was like his sword work—simple and direct.

Breathe. Focus. Use your eyes.

The noise from the stands remained an unceasing, overwhelming flood. The buzzing voices seemed to snarl up inside his helmet. Echoes battered his ears. The sun beat down on him now as well, mercilessly heating his mail and armor. Already his corded browband was soaked, and salt sting slithered toward the corners of his eyes. His armpits itched, and the weight on his shoulders seemed impossible to bear.

Breathe. Let energy in; push it out again. You are not a rock.

The demon—nay, it must be a man—halted near the center of the arena. In its— his—right hand was a pole, half again as long as the demon was tall, tipped with a single-edged blade.

The noise lessened. Haakon thought he had gone deaf, that he had passed into that void of combat that came before death, where one’s self vanished into a broad ocean of awareness. Fate- sight, Feronantus called it, an excruciating sense of mortality tempered by unwavering sensitivity, a revolving awareness of field and enemy, surrounded by darkness.

But that wasn’t the case. He could still hear his labored breathing, could still feel his heart pumping blood fiercely through his body. He was still very much in his own skin; it was the rest of the world that had fallen silent.

The demon had not moved, but the audience had abruptly cut off their collective buzzing roar. From far away, Haakon heard a cry like a baby’s wail, and part of him wondered how a baby could still be alive after what he had seen before the walls of Legnica. More likely it was the cry of some bird.

But as if that cry were his signal, the demon moved—but not into a combat stance.

Instead he bowed, a short inclination of his upper body, and from there, with one graceful motion, he shifted his left foot back and lifted the pole. Couched across his body, the glaive now pointed straight at Haakon, sunlight reflecting from its bright blade.

The demon’s brief bow was so incongruous, so against the threat of his frightening raiment, that Haakon took a half step back. Of a certes, a man, disguised as a demon. Several realizations followed in a clumsy rush: first, his opponent came from a cultured place where people had manners; second, they hewed to their manners even before fighting, suggesting that ritual combat was an established practice.

Third, this was not a good sign.

He’s waiting, Haakon realized, wondering if his opponent thought him such a fool