The Shah wakes to the calamitous beat of war drums pounding outside the city. When he reaches the outer walls in his throng of heavily armoured warriors, he can do nothing but bite the back of his hand when he sees what stands outside his city.
A vast horde of mounted warriors stretching between the edges of the horizon, at least forty thousand in number if not more. Their bronze battle standards glitter in the desert sun and their blue flags flutter in the breeze, unmarked by insignias or marcations of any kind. A clear blue made in reverence to the purity and might of the Sky God, and his son who stands clad in mortal flesh, the Great Khan, divine emperor of emperors.
The Shah is recalled to the day, a year prior, when three of the Khan’s emissaries appeared to him in his marbled hall, their silks and stolen jewels looking splendid enough, but not so fine as to hide their barbaric origins. They demanded of him an offering to the Khan, which should come in the form of three heavy chests laden with silver, and a hundred women that would be the Khan’s concubines.
The Shah gave the first emissary three silver coins, and commanded his men to castrate the other two emissaries with hot irons. ‘Here is your silver, and here are your women,’ said the Shah to the emissary, and sent them fleeing from his city, into the desert, without their horses, silks, or jewellery.
Now sand that lies dormant on the battlements begins to jitter in its place as a thunderous rumble begins. The trample of forty thousand armoured horses advancing at once is enough to drown out the boom of man-high war drums and the guttural hum of the throat-singers.
The worn golden wards that are affixed to the ancient sandstone walls to hold back enemy magic are broken apart by the colossal war machines that tower above the Khan’s horde. The immense chunks of rock they sling take less than a day to bring down enough of the wards for the Khan’s stone caster to blast apart the rest with a turn of his hand.
On the other side of the city, the defenders defect and throw themselves upon the mercy of the Khan’s soldiers. The mounted warriors charge through the newly opened gate and slaughter the surrendering men, before flooding into the city, reaving and pillaging all that falls before them.
The Shah has fallen back to his keep, his mind reeling. Half of his five thousand men are dead or captured by the end of the first day. The other half will soon give him and his family up in a futile attempt at ingratiating themselves with the conquerors.
His only hope is that his brother will send aid before the keep falls.
The next day, the Shah sees by the dawn light that the Khan’s men surround the keep on all sides, and they have gathered thousands of peasants and nobles from the ravaged city at the lip of the keep’s forty-foot deep ditch. The Shah watches in silent horror as the Khan’s army corrals the civilians towards the ditch, like wolves on the edge of a herd of sheep.
In droves, the civilians fall screaming into the ditch, pushed at the end of a spear-tip or the mass the crowd. The sickening crunch and overwhelming musk of blood fills the air as the Khan’s siege towers roll over the mass of squirming bodies that now fill the ditch, and the Shah sees the first of the ramps that clatter down onto the sandstone ramparts, and hears the bellowing cry of the Khan’s men charging onto the keep’s walls.
When they bring the Shah before the Khan’s General, he is not bound, but simply disarmed. Not that he, a mundane, could ever pose a threat to a wizard.
The General considers the Shah, and pulls from a purse the three silver coins that the Shah gave to the Khan’s emissary, one year ago.
‘I have come to return your coins, brother,’ says the General, as the coppery tang of magic fills the air, and the silver coins in the General’s hand shimmer as their form wavers, and they become a ball of glistening liquid in his hand.
The Shah screams as the General pours the molten silver through his fingers and into the Shah’s eyes.
Paddy Dobson
8th August 2022