The coming of the Mongols had been announced on the airwaves, their menacing and the rattling of their sabers carried along on a haze of white noise. Give up your holdings, your lands, your city, they roared and we will spare your men of the sword and the gun, your women and children of humiliation and torture. Give up Moscow and no blood will be shed.

And the Muscovites had laughed at that, slapping their knees as the Mongol ultimatum went on: We are the Horde, the swords and the wheels and the knives in service to the Batu-Khan. Kneel and we will not burn your city to the ground. And in the squares and in the alleys, the bone-orchards tittered and jittered. Across the abandoned subway tracks, the writhing things cackled. You will be spared the bloodshed and ushered painlessly into the age of the Ikh Mongol Uls. And in the Kremlin, the fused mass that had been Khargin and his advisors howled madly, their limbs and bodies flailing as it dragged itself through the halls, leaving behind it a trail of blood and clear mucus, the Prophet riding on its back.

Deny us this right and Moscow will be gone from the face of the Earth the ultimatum concluded, the voice retreating back into the white-noise haze. And the speakers hissed and went silent, as the entirety of Moscow howled with joy. The statue of peter the great writhed, the bronze peeling to reveal a cascade of reds. The Monument to the conquerors of space burst outward, its mass a nightmarish thing of limbs and mouths. The skyscrapers shed their glass, revealing beneath them the white-red carnival of what had once been their tenants, singing with the voices of children.

Moscow laughed until the Prophet raised his hand, the city falling silent in a single second. The Prophet then thought, his decision weighed by a million brains, calculating every single possibility, counting for every possible weakness in the city that the Mongols could exploit. After a days’ worth of scheming, the Prophet did finally decide on his plan, ordered Moscow to subside, to swallow its alleyways and give birth do dead-ends, ordered the monuments to stand at the ready and compacted its bulk near the Red Square. Now, all it needed was to know the strength of its enemy.

And soon enough, the answers were provided for it, when the Mongol messenger came roaring up the M6 on their dirty bikes, waving their flags. They had come armed, one hand on their bike throttles, the other on the trigger. The Prophet theorized that not every city welcomed the Mongols. Perhaps some had been foolish enough to drive them away, or even kill these scouts. These were the actions of lesser creatures, lashing out at the weak, hoping that their bravado would warrant not retribution. But then again, they did not have the wonders of Moscow at their disposal. And so, the Prophet bade Khargin to leave his place at the center of the mass and welcome the bikers into the fold of the city. To ensure that the illusion would be complete, the Prophet bade some of its subjects to walk the streets and look out the windows, ordering them to display horror at the passing of these unimportant, tiny mites. The Prophet baited the Mongols and they came running. Perhaps, the Prophet thought, they think that Moscow is already theirs.

So the Mongols made their way to the Red Square (the streets of Moscow rearranged into a perfect straight line to allow them unimpeded progress), where Khargin himself, dressed in his most formal outfit, waited to greet them. Not once did they think to challenge the sight of a single man, ridiculous in his Sunday best for surrender, unescorted without the guns of his best men at his back. Perhaps this was not a new thing, to these Mongols; perhaps they had been raised to consider the surrender of cities as their given birthright, feeding off the terror of those terrified fools who would gape at the sound of revving engines and the half-forgotten whiff of petrol. And if that failed, the Mongols could trust the terrified refugees who had escaped the slaughter from their homes and had made their way to other settlements, where they would cry and beat their chests at the very mention of the Horde, breaking the spirits of its defenders before even the glint of the sun’s light on their mounts’ windshields was seen at the distance.

The Prophet bade the Khargin to welcome the scouts with open arms. It made him say:

“Moscow welcomes the Mongols.” It was an empty gesture, part of a charade that the Prophet had picked up from a memory in the Khargin’s subconscious. True to form, the scout climbed off his bike, holstered the rifle on his back and walked over to the man.

“Have you come to inform us that Moscow will kneel to the Horde, so we can inform the Khan that your city is to be spared? “

“What if I was to deny you rite of passage?”

“You know who we are. Perhaps there are men and women in this city who have survived the Horde. Ask them and you will know what is to come.”

The Khargin grinned. He had known of the primitive brutality of the Horde. Their means were gruesome, but limited in scope and imagination. But then again, they did not have the Prophet’s gifts at hand.

“Twenty thousand men will come to your city, burn the Kremlin and dye the streets red with blood. Your fall will be swift and there will be no mercy. The Khan will see to it that Moscow is destroyed by his hand, even more thoroughly than Subutai himself. There will be nothing left here, when the Horde has come through, but ash and bones, piled high enough to touch the heavens.” The scout continued, angered at the Khargin’s grin.

“And if we promise not to destroy you? If Moscow promises not to swallow the Khan and the twenty thousand men in all and chew up their bones? What will you offer us then?” the Khargin responded. The rifle was in the Mongol’s hand the next instant, shooting the man at point-blank range, reducing his brain and the back of his skull into fine, thin mist.

“Thank you. That will do nicely” The Khargin responded through its ruined mouth, as the Red Square writhed and the marble creaked and split. There was a moment of black and red, of inhuman hissing and Mongols screaming, before the crunching of jaws as big as buildings put an abrupt end to them. When they receded, restoring the Red Square back to its inconspicuous state, the Khargin was whole again, his mind infused with what little knowledge the scouts possessed. The Prophet ran through their knowledge, counted the Horde and savored the expectation of twenty thousand souls, making their way to his jaws, to fight and scream and fill his belly.

The Khargin licked its lips and Moscow did the same. There was going to be a feast, soon enough, to fill the city’s belly and make it grow, to give it arms and legs for it leave this cold place and move on to pastures new…

Russia, Now:

In the three weeks it took the Khan’s ten-myangan strong force to reach Moscow, two myangans had been dispatched to Kiev, bearing the biker-scout’s severed head as a banner. They had met Kiev’s army in the field, slaughtered them and then laid siege to the city itself, albeit a brief one. After severing the heads of the slain defenders, the Mongols had catapulted them over the walls for two days straight. After that, they catapulted the rest of the bodies. When the delegation of Kiev, forced to concede after the urgings of a panicked population, asked to parlay with the myangan-lords, their ambassadors were dragged by the hair and then quartered, their limbs tied to the back fenders of mounts until they came apart, then their bodies were also catapulted over the walls. By chance or by calculation, they careened over the city, met in mid-air and smashed (a ball of flesh blood and horrified expressions) through the windows of the then-curator of the National Art museum, now self-proclaimed King of Kiev and Ukraine. The mass crushed him against the wall and his spine shattered in the process, killing him outright.

After this, the Mongols detonated the explosives at the base of the walls of Kiev and poured inside, a screaming, bloody wave. It took them two weeks to kill every single thing in the city and another to finish off the stragglers, before setting fire to the entire thing and informing the Horde that Kiev was no longer to be found on the map. No slaves were taken and no loot was divvied up amongst the men. The treasures of the Ukraine (its Burlyuks, it’s Marchenkos, its Eskets burning, running together, homogenizing into formless grey powder) burned along with its people until the winds blew, tossing them into the Matviis’ka Gulf, making the waters run black for weeks.

The Khan’s force rarely stopped, during their trek. Their stops were short and the driving was done in shifts. With the exception of two days spent to allow the shaman-engineers to service the Tngri and print the parts for some of the mounts that had had trouble coping with the road, there had been no respite. The men could guess why: the Khan was aware that winter was barely four months away. Should they delay in taking Moscow for any reason, should the Mongols find themselves trapped outside its gates or inside its streets without adequate shelter, then the Russian winter would surely kill them off in barely a few weeks. The Horde might have been mighty, but it was no match for Old Man Winter.

Moscow needed to be taken as swiftly as possible. If the Horde was unable to do that, then they would have to burn it. The Khan had been clear on this matter: “We will achieve what Napoleon failed to do. And if I cannot have it, I shall deny the luxury of letting the Russians destroy their own city. I will turn Moscow into molten slag before I am denied its bounty.”

These words did not worry Baraat, even though they terrified the myangan-lords of the other forces. But while the occupation of Saryozek had taught him the importance of maintaining their hold, the idea of lingering anyplace without moving, of standing still and being forced to face Heng and Ying every day. Somewhere deep inside, he found this notion to be absolutely ludicrous: finding the strength to kill the god of Saryozek and to destroy the T-34 happened in an instant, but to face the woman and child of the man he had killed? To find the strength to somehow overcome his disgust for a woman he had thought radiant and impregnable to the grime and grit, of the disgusting attributes of the flesh seemed to him, impossible.

Heng did not seem to mind this; if anything, she seemed to thrive at it and so did the child (little Ying, who looked to Baraat more and more like her father every day). Baraat had heard of myangan-lords giving away their wives, when they would be bored with them and found a suitable replacement. But he would not have any other than Heng and Heng revolted him. So he grinned and he bore it and he suffered, even as he longed for the slaughter that was to come in Moscow.

Make the walls be brittle or made of wood. Make the people be faint of heart. Make the rivers easily accessible, so we can poison them. Baraat would pray to no-one in particular. Make the Khan send me somewhere else afterwards. Make every other city near-impregnable, make the roads long and untraversable, make the days as long as weeks. Make the world go on forever and make us fail again and again until I am dead and free.

On the twentieth day, as the myangans left the M6 and sped their way up the M4, the city of Moscow in sight, their banners raised high, the sun glinting off their windshields as they came up on the horizon, Baraat let out a sigh of relief: there were no walls in Moscow, only scattered defensive barriers. Looking through his binoculars, he saw the terrified Muscovites as they left their work halfway done and ran into the city, seeking perhaps refuge in the streets. It was poorly-defended, too large in size with perhaps too few defenders. Their forces would roll in, take the city, let the Khan have his way and then…

…then I will run. I will ask for the Khan to allow me a way out, into Europe. All the way South, to where there are only cutthroats and barbarians and a tangle of roads. Where I can run and fight and kill and be killed for the glory of the Horde he thought.

“Move across the M12, take the Tsoskaya. The 35th, 12th and 8th will move across Leniniskiy Prospekt. Once you have secured the roads, the 22nd will proceed with the cannon battery, to soften the Muscovites up. You will move when given the signal.” The voice of the Khan came from the radios and the forces scattered in the road, engines roaring like thunder. Baraat watched as the Muscovites ran before them, watching as some were run over under their mount’s wheels, other simply stopping and falling to their knees across the Prospekt to be run over or shot.

“Why aren’t they going for cover?” Baraat asked.

“Where will they go? There is no place for them to hide, not here” Heng said, looking forward, shielding Ying’s eyes from the slaughter. “The Mongols came, didn’t they? What could they do?”

“They could hide and fight. They could jump into the river, or run down into the subway tunnels. Something’s wrong.” Baraat muttered, signaling the 35th on his radio “Relay message to the 8th: suggest retreat and regrouping. Something is wrong.”

“There will be no retreat, myangan-lord” the calm, measured voice of the Khan came from the speakers.

“The Muscovites are not falling back. They appear to be leading us on! None of them are defending themselves, not in the slightest!”

“They were unprepared for us and now they are scattering. This will be a quick victory. Dissapointing, but quick.”

“No, don’t you understand, this is not a retreat! They had known we were coming for two months now! They are probably looking to trap us inside the city! We need to abandon the march! We need to-”

“You will be quiet, Baraat of the Buriyat. Or I will put out your eyes with my own two hands.”

And the radio went silent, as Baraat replaced the receiver into place, watching as he drove deeper into Moscow, across a Leniniskiy Prospekt that seemed to somehow get narrower every passing second, forcing the mounts to move from their five-long formation to four, to three, until finally he realized his RV and another mount barely had enough room to move across it, the Mudje mounts of the 8th moving along in a single file, deeper into the city that had burned in the Khan’s brain, blinding him to any signs of danger.

“I need you to signal a retreat.” Baraat told his designated driver.

“Mynagan-lord, we cannot turn back! We’re at the head of the formation, we have the 12th myangan behind us. The Khan…”

“The Khan is not in this RV at the moment! I’m your superior officer and I am ordering you, signal the retreat!”

“I cannot do that, myangan-lord…”

“I Understand” Baraat said, before smashing his fist against his driver’s nose, breaking it. It did not knock him out, but it gave him the time to flick the speakers on to PA, the fall back signal blasting from the speakers:

Toniight I’m gonna have myself a good tiiime,

I feel alliiivee and the world will turn it inside ouout yeah

“Buriyat, what the hell are you doing?” the Khan snarled from the speakers. Baraat’s designated driver, one hand on the wheel, the other on the mess that had become his nose, stared in horror, as Freddy Mercury sang on:

And floating around in ecstasy, so…

Don’t. Stop. Me. Now.

“It’s a bloody trap! They’re herding us in!” Baraat screamed at the receiver and now he could almost see it, the way the buildings leaned in, the grinning hungry faces looking out from the windows, the slight slithering motion of the pavement, he could see Moscow somehow moving, stretching its muscles for the kill.

“Detain the myangan-lord.” The Khan commanded.

Don’t. Stop. Me.

‘Cause I’m having a good time, having a good time!

Heng screamed, as the RV jerked violently, the designated driver reaching out to grasp Baraat by the neck, even as he turned up the volume of the speakers. His fingers grasped at Baraat’s hair, trying to slam his head down against the dashboard. Fighting back against him, the speaker-phone clutched in his hand, Baraat snarled and then smashed it against the driver’s face hard enough to crack the plastic, before crashing his head against the window, smashing through the glass. Baraat stared for a moment in horrors, as the Mongol’s neck was punctured by the slivers of jagged glass and grabbed on to the wheel, wresting it away from his grip.

“Turn back, turn back!” he screamed against the spilt guts of the speaker that was now deaf and dumb.

I’m a shooting starleaping through the sky,

Like a tiger, defying the laws of gravityyy

The dead man shuddered once, his feet jamming against the gas pedal, causing the RV to crash his fender across the Mudje ahead, just as the Re Square came into view, as Moscow around them began to shed its camouflage of cement and marble and wood, splinters raining down on the mounts, revealing beneath them the writhing, hungry nightmare of Moscow.

I'm a racing car passing by, like Lady Godiva!

I'm gonna go go go

There's no stopping meeee!

The Mongols spilled out into the Red Square and by then, Baraat knew, it was too late. The ground exploded upward, the Mudje flying up into the air, monstrous jaws shooting upward, crushing the mounts and the men inside between their jagged teeth. From the corner of his eye, he saw a tentacle reaching out, grasping his dead designated driver and ripping him effortlessly through the window. All around him, Moscow had become a living, breathing nightmare of glistening red and throbbing blue, of hungry whites and slithering pinks. Ying bawled and Heng screamed. Baraat struggled to get into the driver’s seat, the pooled blood on the faux leather soaking through his clothes.

I'm burnin' through the sky, yeah!

Two hundred degrees

That's why they call me Mister Fahrenheeieieit!

Turning the Rv to reverse, Baraat felt the shock of impact against metal, perhaps one of the mounts in his own myangan, caught in the retreat. The speakers blaring the retreat now, he saw as something vaguely human-shaped ejected itself from the ground beneath him and crashed its way through his wind shield, snarling at him, its face a great blind mouth with needle-like teeth. There was a moment of absolute horror, as Baraat struggled to maintain control on his wheel and searched for a weapon, realizing, too late, that he had none.

I'm trav'ling at the speed of liiiight!

I wanna make a supersonic man out of you!

The creature leaned in, its jaws heading for Baraat’s jugular, when the side of its face exploded outward. Baraat looked back and saw Heng, the smoking rifle in her hand, Ying bawling in her arms, screaming:

“Get us the hell out of here!”

Baraat didn’t need any further convincing. Turning the RV over the hellish, cancerous landscape, he crashed his way against the upturned mounts, the screaming men inside being torn apart by living nightmares, all hopes of conquest fled and gunned his way back across the Lenniniskiy Prospekt, so much narrower, so much longer than before, choked with mounts as far back as they eye could see and somewhere in the distance…

Don't stop me now! I'm having such a good time

I'm having a ball!

…the outline of teeth, a great vertical maw silhouetted against the sun, closing down.

“Fall Back! Fall back!”

Don't stop me now!

If you wanna have a good time just give me a caaal!

Too little, too late, as the mounts struggled to reverse, some of the more desperate drivers abandoning their places, trying to reach for safety on foot and overwhelmed by the same Muscovites they had killed on their way, their gaping wounds still bleeding ad they went for their throats, their eyes. They died in their dozens, leaving the lifeless husks of their mounts to block the way out for their brothers in combat.

“You cowards! You stupid, fucking cowards!” Baraat screamed, his tone bordering hysteria.

Don't. Stop. Me. Now. ('Cause I'm having a good time)

Don't. Stop. Me. Now. (Yes I'm havin' a good time)

I don't want to stop at all!

Baraat pushed his way against the mounts, the mass of metal crashing, smashing against each other, horns blaring, their actions uncoordinated, mindless, driven by sheer terror. Too little, too late for all of them. Baraat looked at Heng beside him, Ying now silent, sharing their terror.

“Get us out of here.” Heng muttered.

And then Moscow closed it jaws shut around the myangans and there was a symphony of screaming that went on for a very long time.