Nergui’s tasks were simple, as decreed by Nurzan after that first night of absolute terror that he spent chained to the wheelchair-thing. It introduced itself as Temir in the middle of a wracking coughing fit, it voice a slurry of words mixed with phlegm, crashing into his ears as they rolled halfway down his severed tongue.

You are to feed it, when it asks for food. You will share the same meal he had decreed as he passed the tin plate, filled to the brim with a thick vegetable stew. There was only a wooden spoon or them to share, which Nergui would bring to Temir’s lips and slowly lower it, stopping when the crippled man would start to choke on it. When he was done, the spoon would be covered in blood and spittle, so Nergui drank the stew straight from the plate, oblivious to the scalding heat on his tongue.

You are to clean it, when it soils itself Nurzan had commanded. Temir had moaned as Nergui undid his straps and did his best to scrub at the layers of filth gathered on the wheelchair’s seat over who knows how many years. There was no look on gratitude on Temir’s face when he was done. Both men were too overcome with mutual shame to exchange glances.

If it speaks, ignore it the lord of Saryozek had said and Nergui had done as much. Temir did not seem to care for this, either. Occasionally, he would ask for food or to be cleaned or burst into fits of hideous, cackling laughter or bursts of sorrow, his diminished body wracked by sobs.

Nergui had remained fearless, expressionless during all this. His exhaustion and terror in this place, his humiliation by Nurzan, the occasional interrogations by the Arystani, these things had kept his mind occupied, leaving little time for him to ponder his condition. He had been beaten, bloodied and dragged into enemy territory and yet he found himself feeling nothing, driven by the animal need to simply survive. So Nergui kept quiet, kept his head low and did his best to stay alive.

There were little gods in Saryozek too, Nergui noticed, as he was wheeling Temir through the fortress for his walk. They looked down on him from the pulleys that held the ropes which lowered the crippled Kazakhstani. They slithered and crept between the foots of the soldiers’ beds and peeked from behind the shoulders of the Arystani. They popped their heads out from the exhaust pipes of the hand-cranked electrical generators and lapped at the pools of blood and sweat in the corners. Some of them were perched on Temir’s shoulders, whispering conspiratorially in his ear, or cleaning out the maggots and the scabs from his wounds with care.

Nergui could not divine their purpose or understand how he saw those little gods. The ones in the forest had been there to aid him but had remained hidden. And while he had not seen them, he had known they were fewer in number but more complete, wholesome. These gods were starved things with wanting eyes and long teeth, with lolling tongues that tasted the sweet reverberations of scattered and scant prayer. Nergui feared those gods, because they were near-feral, starving things. He could not count on them.

They were everywhere, this gaunt, suffering pantheon, except in the shadow of Nurzan. They would hiss and scatter when he would cross a threshold, avoiding his presence the way gazelles flee at the rustle of fir when a lioness stalks them. Nergui could see why: there was genuine malice there, there was madness unhinged but there was also cold calculation. He had known these things, because when Nergui was cuffed to Temir’s wheelchair and assigned to walk him, Nurzan came to him and said:

“Come with me, Chinese man. And I will show you how I like to play God.”

Nergui had followed outside, to the fortress parapet, to look at the bustling Saryozek below. He looked down at the damned which massed in its streets and asked Nergui:

“Which of these poor bastards do you wish released from his torment?”

“None,” Nergui had said and Nurzan had grasped him by the back of the neck and pressed his head against the parapet.

“Choose,” he had snarled.

Nergui blinked, pushing back tears as he looked down at the masses, until he spotted a lone blind man missing his right hand, a simple clay cup in his hand. Nergui couldn’t hear him over the murmur of the crowd, but he knew that he begged for a bite to eat, a handful of rice, anything to ease the fire in his belly.

“That one,” he told Nurzan and pointed at him. The lord of Saryozek grinned and was handed a rifle from one of his men. Bringing the scope to eye-level, he pulled the trigger. Nergui saw the old man’s begging cup explode into a million fragments. The old man screamed, as he noticed that the bullet had taken two of his fingers with it. There was a short moment of panic in the crowd, who then proceeded to their business, seemingly oblivious to the hoarse, guttural crying of the old beggar.

“I am not a boogieman, Chinese man,” Nurzan said, releasing the spent casing. “I am not here to release people from their suffering. I am here to increase it; tenfold, a thousandfold. My only regret is that I cannot envelop the entire world in these walls.”

“Please kill him,” Nergui said, not paying attention to Nurzan’s words, as he looked at the bleeding, thrashing beggar. “Put a bullet in his head.”

“What for? The Mongols are coming and he'll make for a good example. Better to let him bleed out. If he makes it, he will starve. There is not a soul in Saryozek who would feed a man that can’t carry his own weight.”

Around the old man, the little gods massed, their fangs gleaming, their tongs reaching out to lap at his spilled blood, their tiny feet and hands grabbing onto his back and swarming all over him.

“I will do it. I will kill him,” Nergui said. Nurzan laughed.

“And how will you go about it? I will not give you a gun or a knife.”

“I don’t need one,” Nergui snarled and led Temir out into the streets, the damned and the soldiers parting as he came through, toward the corner where the old beggar rolled on the dust and wept. Stopping the wheelchair beside the man, he kneeled down. His right hand was fastened on the back on the wheelchair, leaving him with little room to move. He swept the little gods aside. They parted like motes of dust.

“Please help me” the old beggar said, reaching the bloodied mess that was his hand out to touch Nergui. “Please, for the love of God, help me.”

Nergui’s fingers were crushing the beggar’s windpipe the next moment. He thrashed for a while but went almost instantly limp, as he felt his windpipe being crushed. Thank you, thank you, he mouthed.

Temir’s hand reached out and grasped Nergui with his remaining fingers. His grip was surprisingly strong. The sensation of his hand made the biker-scout sick. He turned to look and the wheelchair thing opened its eyes wide and mouthed something with the red wound it had for a mouth. Nergui felt sick at the sight of it. His hand, which was mightily clenching the old man’s windpipe, suddenly let go and ceased. Temir kept mouthing words that Nergui made out with some difficulty. He said:

Kill him and you achieve nothing. Let him live and you will topple Nurzan.

Nergui spat and looked at the old man, who was staring in horror as his would-be killer ceased his attempt. He grabbed his arm, tugged at his clothes and cried:

“No, no! Don’t leave me here, don’t leave me alive!”

But Nergui had turned, heading back to the fortress. Atop the parapet, Nurzan saw the scene and grit his teeth. The old man was weeping now, his pathetic pleading echoing across all of Saryozek “Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me like this! Please kill me, please!”

Nurzan reached for the rifle, cocked it and shot once again, his bullet tearing through the old man’s chest and ripping through his lungs and heart. It was a good death, a clean death and it was a rare sight in Nurzan’s Saryozek.

*** edo

The myangan stopped thirty kilometers off Saryozek, where the asphalt had been cracked and split, overcome by an infestation of ferns and grass. Ahead, lay the ruins of what had been old Saryozek, a city of millions. Somewhere among the hulks of the hollowed-out buildings, beneath the shadow of a mountain, great pillars of smoke betrayed the presence of their quarry.

The biker-scouts returned with a complete report: Saryozek was walled, set upo against a mountain, circled by a deep moat. Three in five men manning the walls had firearms, according to the shots taken against them. There seemed to be no large-caliber weapons or machine-gun placements worth speaking of. And while the exact number of the city’s defenders remained unknown to the officers of the myangan, one thing was for certain:

“We are going to have to weather a siege.” Gansukh Kiryat said to the gathered zuun-lords, as they pored over the GPS image of Saryozek in his RV. The uproar of his officers’ response (with the exception of Baraat) was fierce indeed.

“In the middle of Fall?” the rat-faced zuun-lord exclaimed.

“We will be stuck here, in the middle of winter!”

“I say turn back and leave! Head to Aral!”

“Why can’t the 100th myangan do it? They will be crossing Kazkhstan out of China! I have heard they are equipped with artillery, fresh from Kangbashi!”

On and on they went, the officers, shaking their fists and gritting their teeth in uproar, until their arguments and voices became indistinct, incoherent rabble. Because at the end of the table, his legs stretched out and his crutches discarded, sat zuun-lord Baraat Buriyat, unheeding and grinning. He transfixed the boy with his stare until his subordinates noticed the object of his focus and in turn ceased. There was silence for a while, before Ganuskh finally said, scowling:

“And what say you, young wolf?”

“I say we take the city until the winter’s done. If we reach Volgograd and tell the Batu-Khan we found a city worth taking that we didn’t sack, I cannot begin to imagine his sorrow and frustration.” Baraat replied.

“And how will we take a walled city, set up against the mountain, without any artillery to speak of?” cried the eldest zuun-lord among them. “Will we charge it with our mounts and hope we win?”

“No. We will smoke it out. We will force it defenders to flee their positions and fall right into our lap.” Baraat responded, matter-of-factly. “We will burn the mountain the city is built on and wait for them to come to us.”

Gansukh laughed at this, a harsh bark escaping his lips.

“So we should destroy the city in order to take it? What will the Batu-Khan think of this, I wonder?”

“He will think what you tell him of it: that you laid siege to a city and that its defenders gave themselves to you; that you took it without the unnecessary shedding of your myangan’s blood and that it was done without nary a shot being fired.” Baraat said. The zuun-lords were silent at the sound of the boy’s indignation. They turned to their myangan-lord, now gritting his teeth in fury.

“Saryozek has no means to maintain a siege longer than 3 months. We can risk the first days of winter. By that time, its inhabitants will have surrendered. You are dismissed.”

“Myangan-lord, we cannot risk even a week here! If they decide to attempt to force us back when the snows begin, then they could-“Baraat began to explain but was stopped by Gansukh’s forbidding motion.

“Go to your zuun. Tell them to prepare for a siege. War is a practice for patient, thinking men, not a playground for fools.”

Baraat returned to his quarters, seething with fury. Kushi was there, waiting for him, his expression controlled but understanding.

“It told you, they would not go for it. It was too much to even think you could even sway one of them to your cause. Perhaps it’s best to-”

“Get me Ganbold the engineer. And arrange for an audience with Heng for me. If we are going to be wasting our time baying at the walls of Saryozek, I might as well do something useful while I’m at it.”

***

Nergui’s punishment was postponed as the guards cried the coming of the Mongols in the distance. They came through a rolling wall of dust, their mounts ringing Saryozek across the base of the mountain, its tents set up amid a flurry of activity. Behind the walls, its defenders gritted their teeth and held onto their guns until their knuckles turned bone-white.

Before the walls, the Mongols hooted and banged the hoods of their cars or rattled the skulls on their fenders, their war-cry a deafening ululation. Knives were raised to greet the sun and shots were fired in the air, as the braves of each zuun moved close to the moat to be near shooting distance, laughing at the sounds of bullets smacking against their hoods or the spiderweb cracks that spontaneously appeared on their windshields.

The Mongols set up camp outside Saryozek. Within, Nurzan cackled maniacally at the sight. His reaction scared them more than the massed Mongols outside.

“We are under siege, Nurzan. I don’t find any reason for us to celebrate.” Kirill noted.

“Our enemies are massed right outside our locked and bolted door, unable to scale our walls. We are safe, well-fed and armed and it will be winter soon. Our bellies will barely feel the sting of hunger before those poor bastards flock to us, begging for death or enslavement. I say we are on top of the situation.” Nurzan said, grinning.

“But what if they don’t? What if they just decide to attack us? We’re not impregnable” Miras said “there are ways into the city that they’ll find out, if they look for long enough. The escape tunnels alone…”

“Are rigged and guarded. They will be blind in there, ours to kill as we please. This is a done deal. We have already won.”

“I say we kill the Chinese man. The Mongol scout, just to be sure.” Kirill said. “He could prove to be a liability.”

“The Chinese man stays. I want him to see his hope of rescue being obliterated before his very eyes. I want him starved, as the Mongols starve and I want him broken. When they come to my gates, he will be there to greet them and bring them to me.”

“With all due respect Nurzan” Kirill said “we cannot afford to have one of them in our headquarters, so close to either of us. The slightest chance of him contacting the Mongols, providing them with information on our defenses could prove catastrophic. We need to put him in the stockade, at the very least.”

“He is mine” Nurzan spat. “Mine to toy with, mine to torture, mine to control like Temir is, like Saryozek is, like you are! Now go, prepare those dregs we call an army and get them ready. I have work to do.”

***

The coward’s stockade consisted of two rows of narrow steel cages, six to each side of the prison-RV. Each cage was a two-meter tall and half-a-meter wide rectangle, with a makeshift bottom, most commonly made out of wooden planks, covered in layers of cotton or rough fabric.

Heng’s cage’s floor was carpeted with layers upon layers of Old Chinese newspapers, which tore and stained the soles of her feet as she sweated, struggling to remain upright.

The coward’s stockade cages’ measurements were such that allowed each person inside them to remain perfectly upright (leaving enough room for them to stand at full height), but their width did not allow their occupants to sit down comfortably or even kneel, let alone sleep. This, of course, only applied in the cases where the prison-RVs were, in fact, stationary and hung from the thick steel cuffs that supported them at the end of the girders that protruded from the sides of the RV, letting them dangle almost a meter away from any of the doors or windows. One could learn to cope, Heng thought, as soon as her panic subsided, provided they kept their knees against their shoulders and propped themselves against their cages. This wouldn’t stop the constant, maddening jiggling of the cages, but it would reduce it to a gentle, rocking motion. This would usually only last as long as the jailor-on-duty would allow it, however. Heng had seen the laughing men, who whipped at the exposed flesh of the prisoners with birch branches, straiking at the soles of their feet or their backs. The best, most dexterous among them could even aim the branch in such a fashion that it whipped the sleeping prisoners on the ear, so thet they would wake up in tremendous pain and disoriented, jangling both their own cages and everyone else’s that hung from the RV.

Other, less capable tormentors, would suffice with a hard, swift kick at the cages, which would scare the prisoners and cause them to howl and hold onto their cages for dear life, but provided far less sport.

When the prison-RV was in motion, however, was when the true torment begun. With nothing to hold the cages but the prisoners’ constant struggle to stay upright with their feet planted on each side of the floor, the cages swerved and bob every which way as they prison-RVs passed over potholes or took closed, hard turns. This would often cause the prisoners to slam against each side of the bars, usually head-first, causing them to tumble and roll around the tiny space, even as they struggled to get back upright.

Because being seated in the coward’s stockade, Heng realized, was by far the worst torture. The world around her whirled by and despite her best efforts, she found the tossing and turning of the cage itself to bring with it a terrible onset of vertigo. In a matter of minutes, the long stretch of rocky ground and asphalt and the sky beyond had turned, in her eyes, into a dizzying kaleidoscope of color. By the time the prison-RV reached a speed of 50 kilometers an hour, Heng was near-blind with nausea. Five minutes later, she had been sick on the newspaper floor. The sensation of the soaked paper on her bare feet wasn’t in itself as horrible as the shame it brought with it.

She did not tumble, even once. Instead, she held on for dear life so hard her knuckles were bone-white. She clenched her teeth until her gums felt numb. She closed her eyes and fought against her terror in the whirling darkness behind her eyelids.

By the time the myangan reached Saryozek and she was hurled against the bars of her cage, her forehead clanging on metal, Heng was sore, numb, hurt, but above all, she was alive. And right then, that was more than she had possibly hoped for.

***

On the second week of the siege, the shaman-engineer Ganbold said to Baraat Buriyat without once looking up from behind his apprentice’s shoulder, elbow-deep inside the gleaming, puffing guts of the wheeled god.:

“I am afraid I cannot allow you to drain the Tngri, zuun-lord. Not without getting clearance from myangan-lord Kiryat, that is.”

“It will only be this once, Ganbold. You needn’t fuss over this. Besides, the myangan-lord doesn’t need to know.” Baraat said. The look Ganbold gave him as he faced him head-on, his features distorted by his goggles almost mad the zuun-lord take a step back.

“A half-ton’s worth of fuel is not something ‘you needn’t fuss over’. Being flayed with rusty knives is something you only get to do ‘this once’. And while the myangan-lord ‘needn’t know’, I cannot even imagine how I should explain the fact the we will be unable to make our entire zuun mobile, when the myangan once again starts out on the road! Perhaps you will vouch for me, zuun-lord? Hm?” Ganbold said mockingly.

“If you let me do this, Ganbold, you will not have to explain anything to the myangan-lord and we will not have to move our zuun any further than it takes to park it inside Saryozek.” Baraat said.

“The answer is still no, zuun-lord.”

“Not even if I tell you what I need the fuel for?”

“I do not see what you could possibly use all this fuel for, zuun-lord. Beside as a means to negotiate the Kazakhs into giving up the city.” Ganbold said, turning only to slap his apprentice across the back of his head, as a wrench slipped inside the Tngri’s guts with a clang. “Unless…” he continued and then froze. “No, you couldn’t…”

“Perhaps I will.” Baraat responded.

“It is madness, pure madness.”

“And a waste, too.”

“A waste of unimaginable proportions!”

“Also, a blunder.”

“A blunder without equal!”

“One could even call it downright idiotic.”

“But it might just work…” Ganbold said, scratching at his beard. “Give me a day, at the most. I will have your fuel ready.”

“I will also need a few other things…” Baraat said, handing Ganbold a very short list, jotted down at the back of what had once been a student’s notebook.

“I’ll get the printers running. Might have some trouble with getting the wiring, though.”

“Let me worry about that.” Baraat said and slapped the madly grinning shaman-engineer on the back, who smiled a death’s-head smile. Now this, Ganbold thought, this brings me back…