Time had lost its meaning for Nergui, as he struggled with baring the hand-crack’s wires, screwing them into the GPS’ charger socket, the combat knife’s sharp blade wholly unfitting to the task. His hands had become a bloody mess of tiny cuts that made his fingers slick, unable to hold onto the miniscule electronics, staining the miniature screws. He did his best to not stain the tiny motherboard and circuitry, but there were still a few rust-red spots across the copper when he was done.

Behind him, the crows were feasting heartily on the dead man, their beaks pecking at the flesh so deeply that they clacked and screechiched against bone, their tongues lapping at the pooled blood. Some of their more tenacious brothers, who were wiser to the ways of carrion anatomy, were hard at work ripping at the camo suit, reaching for the choisest bits out of their brethren’s sight.

The crow that had been sipping at the pool of Nergui’s blood had long since given up watching the weeping, cursing biped and had joined its brothers, pecking at the tips of the Kazkhstani sniper’s fingers, tasting the calloused flesh and finding it to its liking. Nergui kept at it, oblivious to the fact.

He had rewired the hand-crank into the GPS for the sixth time in a row, struggling to remember his brother’s advice, passed on to him as they both leaned over chop-shop benches and in the hidden rooms behind the electronics storage areas of factories. But try as he might, the words became muddled, nonsensical after a while. He had rewired the thing in every way imaginable, each attempt leading to a dead end. Now, Nergui was going for his final attempt, hard-wiring the crank to the GPS’ battery directly, bypassing any of the circuitry and hoping that he had not somehow mangled the thing in the process.

As Nergui reached out to take the hand-crank and began to turn it for the hundredth time, he ceased cursing, took a deep breath and started praying. His words were drowned out in the steadily growing whirr of the hand-crank, as he began to turn it faster.

They were a mismatch of words, taken from equal parts Christian ritual overheard during Mass from the church across the street where he lived, Buddhist mantra picked up at random from comic books he had stumbled upon when he was a kid and a lot of improvisation. And even as he prayed for the GPS to work, he also prayed that there was someone, anyone or anything that would hear. He thought of tiny, bearded men looking down at him from the branches and up at him from the underbrush. He thought of birds with the wingspan of night, shaking their heads, amused at the sight. He thought of ancestors, huddled around him, poking at the device with growing curiosity.

And all around him and about him, as if drawn by his struggle and his powerful, desperate faith, the gods of the forest and the night and the ground and the blood conferred in silence, reaching out their slender fingers to bless the device, which suddenly sparked to life, the tiny red light beside the power switch blinking ON. The screen lighted up and Nergui watched in silent amazement, as the display flickered, its brilliant whiteness almost blinding him, the brand logo his solitary point of focus.

The screen switched into a solid-grey view, the words CONNECTING TO SATELITTE in bold white. Nergui sucked air between his teeth and held his breath. In the unknowable, star-studded heights above, a lone satellite, directionless save for the sub-routines which kept it in orbit well into the apocalypse, pivoted to receive the signal from the device. There were a series of switching relays, of electrical signals translating arcane mathematics, of trigonometry translated into electrical impulses.

And then, the GPS device turned on, showing a complete map of the surrounding area, Nergui’s exact position marked with a burnt-orange arrow, pointing toward the A353 and the nearby town of Saryozek. Pausing his turning of the hand-crank, Nergui marked it and sent the location back to his myangan. They weren’t going to worry too much over a biker-scout but they would rush in at the prospect of sacking a city.

As the pointer was sent and received in the camp, many kilometers away, Nergui suddenly realized that he had found faith in the gods, in the middle of the clearing, among the cawing of the crows, knelt beside a dead man.

***

“What is best in life?” the slanted-eyed man on the screen said, his voice a slow hissing, in contrast to the roaring response by the white giant, sitting on the throne.

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women!” the man-god Conan roared and the myangan roared with him, from Gansukh Kiryat to the lucky few in the coward’s stockades, privileged to the sight. Fists were raised high or rapped on the sides of mounts and the hoods of RVs, the Mongols cheering at the sound of the abbreviated wisdom of Genghis, who was Temujin.

All but Baraat Buriyat, for whom the psilocybin had just now reached his brain, trapped in a very personal, very private Hell of shifting colors and booming, terrible sounds that reverberated in his skull. Beside him, Kushi Ursut beat his chest and howled with the others, his voice a grinding, groaning thing. Behind him, the viewing crowd were shifting, flowing together, coalescing into a mass of fur and eyes and teeth that babbled incoherently.

Below him, the ground was a soft thing, a shifting thing covered in ferns. He wasn’t sure, but he could feel hidden, wiry muscles moving under the soles of his boots, at a languid, geological speed. A glance above was even worse: the sky was a kaleidoscope of lights, turning, turning madly, twisting and rolling, advancing and retreating dotted with the silhouettes of winged lizards. Baraat held on to his seat uselessly as he felt space itself pull him upward, into the great starry nothing. He thought of the images in old textbooks that had been spared the bonfires in winter and imagined himself endlessly spinning around millennia-old rocks, suspended between suns, beheld as a god or a passing oddity by alien eyes who would peer at him through the thick foliage of turquoise jungles. Gasping, panting, Baraat mustered every bit of his courage and shot up from his seat, stumbling and pushing out of the crowd. Beneath him, the Earth rippled and heaved. Pores the size of human heads opened and clutched at his crutches. His injured leg was suddenly caught by a grasping hand with crooked claws. Baraat kicked at it with his feet, the agony of his broken leg forgotten. He rolled on the ground and fought until the thing retreated, hiding itself among the thick foliage that now surrounded him. Something leaned over him and hissed, black bile dripping from between its sharp teeth. Baraat crawled away from it, screaming.

He ran, Baraat of the Buriyat, as fast and as hard as he could. Beneath his clothes, things crawled and cackled, tiny legs caressing his skin, mouths like suction cups clamping in the inside of his armpits and in the soft places between his legs. He didn’t know how, but something had nested on the back of his head. He heard it as it chattered and beat its membranous wings, clicking its mandibles wickedly. Baraat stood silent, petrified, as he and the insect tensed. For long moments, he waited as the thing revved down, like a restless mount, before summoning the courage to reach out and grab it. No sooner had his hand reached the back of his head, than the unseen insect sank its barbed stinger into the back of Baraat’s neck all the way to the hilt.

He screamed and ran, almost blinded by the pain, flailing his arms around, beating at his head, his aching, burning body, at his ears filled with the sound of a million buzzing insects that he knew, he knew were swarming under his clothes. Baraat tore at them, throwing them on the ground and all around him, tearing at his sweatshirt and his underwear, staring at the criss-cross of ants with human faces that ran across every inch of his body. But no matter how hard he bit at them, no matter how desperately he rolled on the ground, the things persisted and clicked and bit at his skin.

Turning behind him, Baraat saw ancient warriors clashing, jumping out of the screen, spraying gore on the mass of flesh and fur that had become the crowd of spectators, its mass of tongues smacking at the sight of the red mess. Baraat screamed, begging for help, but only monsters came to his aid, reaching out hands that seemed like flesh-colored gloves.

It was then, in his time of utter desperation, as zuun-lord Baraat Buriyat was falling upward at the bottomless hole that was the sky, surrounded by nightmares, bit and clawed by a myriad fangs, that he found his salvation, sticking out from among the massed monsters:

A slender form that outshined the Moon herself, her face a marvel of aged ivory, her eyes radiating cruel wisdom, her smile a crooked, barbed thing that beckoned him. He crawled, then stumbled, then hobbled to her, reaching out like a zealot about to meet with his God, the perfect manifestation of all he could have wanted. He prayed to her, for her, for himself, his hands outstretched. Her smile wavered, her eyes suddenly became wafer-thin slits. Her countenance lost its brilliance, as her slender hands that had wrestled with continents slapped at him, harshly. Something pricked his flesh and drew blood. Something numb and cold ran up his arm all the way up to the shoulder.

When Baraat looked down, he saw that his right arm was gone, missing from the shoulder down. There was no cut or any sign of blood on the stump. There was no sign of his limb, nor was there any pain. There was only a feeling of loss, of numbness, of a part of his brain switching off. His goddess was retreating now, back into the crowd, her brilliance dimming, masking herself among the rabble but Baraat knew better. He could still see her, could still reach out for her. Insect-men grabbed at him, but he beat them back, slipping from their grasp. He was almost on her, begging her help, ready to plead for his arm back, when his good leg gave out from under him. Once again, it was gone, vanished without a trace. Baraat collapsed, rolling on the ground, as he dragged himself with his remaining arm, tossing his crutch aside. His goddess ran away and was suddenly beset by the mass, who fell on her with claws and lolling tongues, pressing down and tearing at her form. Baraat tried to stand up, to try to run to her side best as he could, but knew that his other leg had gone too.

As she was being carried into her unknowable, nightmarish destination, Baraat’s last remaining limb dropped from its socket and was sucked into the churning ground. He was too busy weeping for his goddess to care for his own plight. He collapsed and his mind was poxed with dreams.

***

Cranking and praying, walking and heeding the instructions of the GPS, Nergui made his clumsy way out of the forest, a few tens of kilometers away from the city of Saryojek, too busy looking for the A353 and his possible survival to ponder on the nature of the gods who had been drawn to him like moths to a flame and had aided him in his time of need.

He would not, of course, forget any of this, not for as long as he lived: there was an intoxicating quality in faith, in this feeling of communion with unknown powers. There was a mystery at work, which Nergui had not fully grasped and knew he never truly would. He settled, right then and there, for simply being pious and grateful. He would figure out the rest as he went along.

Nergui wondered what his sister would think of this: her bootlegger, black-market pusher brother suddenly discovering religion. It would seem to her perhaps like some sort of cop-out, the kind that her aunt would talk over with her mother in long-winded emails, debating the innocence of this month’s soap opera hottie and the hit-and-run charges that he'd been stuck with. Perhaps she would have even mocked Nergui, outright accusing him of resorting to the means of primitives and superstitious men instead of facing the world head-on.

And Nergui would have listened, fueled with the temperance of the pious. He would have heeded his sister, nodding when appropriate and wait until she was done. And when his sister would ask the question can you prove the existence of those gods? Nergui would only shrug and say no, not really. But they kept my eyes from being pecked from crows, so it's a start.

He wanted to imagine the look she would give him: that grown-up, get-serious expression she would get halfway through ranting about his choices in life, about how she made it into medical school just because she knew she wasn’t mom and dad’s favorite. How undeserving Nergui was of their love and their devotion and the bail money they had paid at the end of each of his endeavors. Then perhaps she would have straightened him out, made a proper man out of him. Maybe she’d even introduce him to one of her University friends that wasn't too hard on the eyes.

Or maybe Nergui would keep being the useless slob that the Mongols dragged out of the prison cell on the night they burned his hometown and armed and clothed and fed, in exchange for information on the layout of the interior of Jiunquan and passage inside. The same slob who foolishly thought he’d have time to slip into the city and get his family out before the massacre began in earnest.

Nergui sometimes pondered what life would be like, had he never been caught by the Mongols halfway through entering the city. He dreamed, sometimes, that he had gotten his family out in time and they had ran to the mountains and hid there, in a little cottage in the middle of nowhere. He liked to think he would have been a proper man then, a brother and a son his family would have been proud to have. And they would have stayed safe, until the Horde was well gone from there, leaving them to live out their lives in peace.

But of course he was caught, on his way to his house, which was among the first to be sacked and burned. Of course he watched his mother suffer the way she did and saw her face smashed against a Mongol mount’s windshield. He saw his sister jump into the fire as the barbarians closed in, thinking her cornered. He never found out what happened to his brother, but the fires that burned in the industrial sector for a fortnight gave him a pretty clear idea.

They didn’t kill him, of course but they wouldn’t have him either. So instead, they chose to make some use of this Chinese piece of trash, as they called him. So they branded his sides with the mark of the 95th myangan and stripped him of his name, erasing his past life. They ranked him among the Ogtbish (who were Not Truly There At All) and he was named Nergui the No Name and he was sent forward into the wasteland, to seek other towns and cities for the Horde to sack and burn and bleed.

And though no leash had bit into his neck, no chain tugged at it, Nergui had never once thought of escaping or abandoning his position. It was the only thing he now had left which gave him some small amount of joy: to know that others will suffer as he did, that would share his misery in this broken, ruined mess the world had become. When it was well and good and healthy, civilization had labeled him as little more than a mangy rat. Now, he was harbinger of death, a provider of misery.

Such thoughts went through Nergui’s head, leaning over the GPS device that he didn’t notice the men standing at the edge of the clearing, around the abandoned motorcycles and the dead biker-scouts, until it was too late for him to run. A moment after he had tossed his GPS aside and turned, a rifle’s butt smashed into his face, knocking three teeth out and sending him tumbling down into numb nothingness.

***

Heng had done her best to avoid Baraat Buriyat that night: she had moved through the throng of the crowd, she had sneaked from tent to tent and hid beside the coward’s stockade, well out of what she thought was his line of sight. She kept her hand around the syringe, held so hard her knuckles almost turned white, watching him even as he watched the movie on the screen, blind to the throng of men around her.

But when Baraat began screaming and tearing his clothes off, kicking madly at a fallen branch and finally came at her babbling incoherently, Heng had suddenly lost her cool. She looked at the sweating, screaming boy that came at her naked, his face flustered, his eyes madly staring out into her own, watched as he slipped past the men who tried to restrain him and finally screamed, as his fingers almost grabbed her. She had popped the syringe’s cap and pulled it out of her pocket in one fluid motion. When he reached out to her, she stuck the needle in his palm and sent the entire dosage of clear fluid down into his veins.

Heng ran, realizing what she had done. Her mind overtaken by panic and pure, unadulterated fear, she headed as far away from the collapsing boy as she could. The men, consfused at the sight of a zuun-lord writhing, flailing helplessly on the ground, didn’t have the clarity of mind to stop her. Heng ran right past the night guard and out into the A353, her legs pounding at the asphalt, running as fast as she could.

You’re not going to get away she thought. They’re going to sic their men on you, drag you back kicking and screaming. Stop running before you make this worse.

Heng, of course, didn’t listen. She kept running until she was well out of breath, the distant sound of mount motors revving up and speeding toward her.

Just get down on the asphalt, hands behind your head. Don't give them an excuse.

Heng thought for one moment of the prospect of gunning it for the forest, losing her pursuers amid the trees, where their mounts could not tread. She could walk from there until she reached some place, any place where the Mongols hadn’t been yet. There were still pockets of civilization that would shelter her: even now, at the end of all things, people still needed a doctor.

You know what will happen, if anyone other than Gansukh’s men get you. You know what happens to the Ogtbish who try to make a break for it. You saw what happened to that harem woman who broke the Mongol’s fingers. Remember how she looked, after the saber came down on her neck?

Heng ran out of the A353. There was still time: she could lose them in the forest. If anyone found her, she could hurt him, they knew she knew how. The hard part was making her way through the forest, finding North. But she would manage, like she always would. Heng always managed.

They are going to have you quartered for this, Heng. But not before the entire myangan’s had a go.

The mount pulled up in front of her and the wizened old Mongol with the black-toothed smile opened the passenger seat and grabbed her. Heng clawed at his eyes uselessly, as he got her into a hold and threw her in the back seat.

“He’s going to owe me big for this,” the black-toothed man said, as he shut the door. “You too,” he hissed at her, as he motioned for the driver to take them back to camp. Heng watched in horror as they drew closer, at the massing men who stared at her pale, terrified form through the mount’s windows.

They are going to kill you, Heng. Gansukh himself is going to flog the skin off your back and tie you to his mount’s bumper.

But Heng didn’t shed a tear, even as she was forced to kneel in front of Gansukh Kiryat, standing over the limp form of Baraat Buriyat. The myangan-lord said:

“I had never taken you for a fool, Heng. Not until now.”

Heng said nothing.

“You know what the punishment is, for the murder of a zuun-lord?”

Heng nodded.

“Let it be known, then, that I am not one to make a woman suffer,” Gansukh said, as his saber was handed to him. Heng bit her lip, as the dulled edge of the blade came to rest against her neck. She could already tell that there was not going to be any clean cut.

Gansukh raised his saber in the air, its blade glinting against the moonlight. Heng kneeled down into the dirt, trying to curl up into a ball. Strong, rough hands grabbed at her hair and stretched out her neck. She fought them, but her heart wasn’t into it. Again, the dull edge rested against her neck.

“Myangan-lord! You are needed in your quarters!” someone shouted from the crowd. Gansukh paused, mid-strike.

“In a minute,” Gansukh grumbled through clenched teeth.

“Our biker-scouts just marked a city on our GPS tracker! Saryozek, only a hundred kilometers from here! A city, myangan-lord, ripe for the sacking!”

Gansukh Kiryat grinned, sheathing the saber back in its scabbard. He motioned his men and Heng was let go.

“Prepare the zuuns! We move at dawn!”

“What of the Ogtbish, myangan-lord?” asked the black-toothed Mongol, looming above her. Gansukh looked down at the limp form of Baraat.

“Will he live?”

“The dosage was not lethal.” Heng admitted. “It was never my intention to kill him, myangan-lord. He should be up in a few hours.”

“Throw her in the coward’s stockade and mobilize your men, Kushi Ursut. Have your zuun-lord proper and debriefed as soon as he is awake.”

“Yes, myangan-lord.”

Heng wept as soon as she heard the lock turn in the coward's stockade. Finally, she was safe.

***

The side of Nergui’s face felt as if on fire. His tongue lapped, absent-mindedly, at the mess that had once been three good teeth. Occasionally, he would turn his head to spit blood and bits of grit but he’d always do it when he knew he wouldn’t get any on the boots of his captors.

The men that had taken him wore the grey-green suits of Arystan commandos, just like the Kazakhstani sniper. They walked in formation, even now, their guns in hand. They had tied up Nergui with lengths of wire around his wrists, placing a collar round his neck with a length of chain with which they yanked him across the uneven ground. The hard leather bit into his neck, making it hard to swallow, to breathe but Nergui wasn’t going to complain.

Of course they beat him. They kicked at his ribs and mashed his face in the mud. They screamed at him in clumsy Mongolian and in pidgin Chinese:

“Who sent? Where from? Mongols, how many?”

Nergui hadn’t spoken a word. The fact that his mouth was a big red mess helped, of course. As soon as the Arystani realized they weren’t about to get any information from him, they exchanged a few words in Kazakhstani and then bound and dragged him across hidden mountain-roads, well away from the place where the stripped, looted bodies of his fellow biker-scouts lay. They had strapped the canteens with the looted gas from the bikes to his back, as well.

“No dead weight,” the Kazakhstani said, before kicking Nergui in the back to get him going. He kept his mouth shut, of course: he had been lucky that the GPS’ battery had failed as soon as they found him: if these men had known he had just sicced an entire myangan on them, they would have put a bullet in his head and left him to the crows.

As things were, Nergui was simply happy to be alive.

They marched for a few more hours, the dawn staining the night-sky with a perfect shade of red-gold, when the Kazakhstani stopped. The man behind Nergui, a giant bastard with a face that seemed carved out of basalt, kicked at the back of his knees and sent him sprawling. The men made camp in near-silence, exchanging few words between them. When it was over, one of the men, a gaunt creature with sunken eyes, approached Nergui and grabbed his chin. He grunted something in Kazakhstani. When Nergui didn’t respond, the man stuck his thumbs in Nergui’s mouth and pried his jaws apart with a single motion. Nergui screamed, as he felt the muscles tug back against his bleeding gums. The Kazakhstani only nodded, held fast to Nergui’s head, tutted and then ripped at his wind-resistant suit with his hands. Examining the gaunt, muscled chest and arms of Nergui, criss-crossed with scars from his previous life and his current one, the Kazakhstani pushed his captive back and placed his hands on his legs, squeezing his thighs and ankles.

Nergui couldn’t help but feel unsettled by this examination. The gaunt man was silent until he was done, before finally turning to the giant bastard and saying:

“Qul.”

The giant bastard grumbled something in response and then the gaunt man said something else, grinning evilly. The two men with them laughed heartily at that. Cracking open a tin can of what Nergui knew was mushroom soup, they heated it over a Bunsen-burner and ate. Nergui’s stomach rumbled at the sight. The men didn’t even acknowledge him. He thought of the warm, gooey substance filling his stomach, soothing the hunger in his belly. But then he imagined trying to chew in his bloody mess for a mouth and realized he had suddenly lost his appetite.

The Kazakhstani pulled him up on his feet and dragged Nergui through the mountain roads, until they were well into morning. When Nergui slipped as he tried to climb up a steep slope with his hands tied behind his back, the giant bastard lifted him by his neck and waist and carried him. The gaunt man cackled as they crossed the ridge.

And then Nergui saw the fortress that was Saryozek and knew despair.