The Kingdom (2 page)

An intentional move, Dhakal realized immediately. A distraction.

The attackers would be coming from the forest side.

Dhakal drew the bow fully, took aim, and let fly the arrow. The point pierced the man’s leg in the crease between his upper thigh and hip. He screamed, clutched his leg, and toppled off his horse. Instinctively, Dhakal knew his aim was true. The arrow had punctured the leg artery; the man was out of the fight and would be dead within minutes.

Still crouching, Dhakal spun on his back heel while retrieving three more arrows from his quiver; two he planted in the ground before him, the third he nocked. There, thirty feet away, were three attackers, swords drawn, creeping through the underbrush toward him. Dhakal took aim on the trailing figure and fired. The man went down. In rapid succession he fired twice more, catching one man squarely in the chest, the next in the throat. A fourth warrior let out a war cry and charged from behind a copse of trees. He almost reached the edge of the stream before Dhakal’s arrow dropped him.

The forest fell silent.

Four? Dhakal thought. They had never sent fewer than a dozen before.

As if in answer to his puzzlement, the pounding of horses’ hooves sounded on the trail behind him. Dhakal spun, saw a line of horses galloping down the trail past their fallen comrade. Three horses . . . four . . . seven . . . Ten horses and still they came. The odds were overwhelming. Dhakal mounted his horse, nocked an arrow, and turned in his saddle in time to see the first horse galloping through the gap between the trees and into the clearing. Dhakal fired. The arrow plunged into the man’s right eye. The force drove him backward, over his saddle, where he bumped off the rump of his horse and into the next rider, whose horse reared, backpedaling, creating a choke point. Horses began slamming into one another. The charge stalled.

Dhakal kicked his heels into his horse’s flank. The animal leapt off the bank into the water. Dhakal brought its head around, heeled the horse, and charged downriver.

 

 

He realized this was no chance ambush. His pursuers had been covertly following him for some time and had managed to surround him.

Over the splashing of his horse’s hooves in the shallow water he could hear them now: riders crashing through the forest to his right and hooves on the gravel trail to his left.

Ahead, the stream curved to the right. The trees and undergrowth were thicker here, crowding the bank, all but blotting out the sun and leaving him in twilight. He heard a shout and glanced over his shoulder. Four riders were in pursuit. He looked right, saw dark horse shapes slipping in and out of the trees, paralleling his course. They were flushing him, he realized. But to where?

His answer came seconds later as the trees suddenly parted and he found himself in a meadow. The stream’s width quadrupled; the color of the water told him the depth had increased as well. On impulse, he veered his horse left, toward the sandy bank. Directly ahead, a line of five riders burst from the tree line, two of them bent low, pikes held horizontally before them, the other three riding upright, bows drawn. He laid his body across his horse’s neck and jerked the reins to the right, back into the water. On the opposite bank, another line of riders had emerged from the trees, these too armed with pikes and bows. And to complete the ambush, directly behind, galloping down the stream toward him, was yet another line of cavalry.

As if on cue, all three groups slowed to a trot, then stopped. Pikes still at the ready and arrows nocked, they watched him.

Why aren’t they following? he wondered.

And then he heard it, the deafening rush of water.

Waterfall.

I am caught. Trapped.

He reined back and let the horse walk until they reached a bend in the river. He stopped. Here the water was deeper and moving fast. Fifty yards ahead Dhakal could see the mist plume billowing over the surface, could see the water boiling over the rocks at the rim of the cataract.

He turned in his saddle.

His pursuers had not moved save a single rider. The man’s armor told Dhakal this was the leader of the group. The man stopped twenty feet away and raised his hands to his shoulders, signaling he was unarmed.

He shouted something. Dhakal did not understand the language, but the tone was clear: placation.
It is over,
the man was surely saying.
You have fought well, done your duty. Surrender, and you will be treated fairly.

It was a lie. He would be tortured and eventually killed. He would die fighting before he would let the Theurang fall into the hands of his accursed enemy.

 

Dhakal turned his horse until he was facing the pursuers. With exaggerated slowness, he drew the bow from his back and tossed it into the river. He did the same with his quiver, followed by his long sword and short sword. Finally the dagger in his belt.

The enemy leader gave Dhakal a nod of respect, then turned in his saddle and shouted something to his men. Slowly, one by one, the riders raised their pikes and sheathed their bows. The leader turned back to Dhakal and raised his hand, gesturing for him to come forward.

Dhakal gave him a smile and a shake of his head.

He jerked his reins hard to the right, whipping his horse around, then heeled it hard in the flanks. The horse reared, coiled its legs beneath it, and began thrashing toward the spray rising above the deep waterfall.

Giuseppe saw the dust cloud on the eastern horizon before his brother did. A mile wide and confined by the walls of a narrow valley, the swirling brown wall of dirt and sand was headed directly for them.

Eyes fixed on the spectacle, Giuseppe tapped his older brother on the shoulder. Francesco Lana de Terzi of Brescia, Lombardy, Italy, turned from his kneeling position where he’d been studying a sheaf of blueprints and looked in the direction Giuseppe was pointing.

The younger Lana de Terzi whispered nervously, “Is it a storm?”

“Of sorts,” Francesco replied. “But not the kind you mean.” Behind that dust cloud was not another wind-whipped sandstorm, the kind they’d grown so accustomed to over the last six months, but rather hundreds of pounding horses’ hooves. And atop the horses, hundreds of elite and deadly soldiers.

Francesco gave Giuseppe a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “Do not worry, brother, I have been expecting them—though, I admit, not this early.”

“It is him?” Giuseppe croaked. “He is coming? You did not tell me that.”

“I didn’t want to frighten you. Worry not. We still have time.”

Francesco raised a flattened hand to shield his eyes from the sun and studied the approaching cloud. Distances were deceptive here, he had learned. The vastness of the Qing Empire lay far behind the horizon. In the two years they’d spent in this country, Francesco and his brother had seen a wild variety of terrain—from jungles to forests to deserts—but of all of them, this place, this territory that seemed to have a dozen different pronunciations and spellings, was the most godforsaken.

Comprised mostly of hills, some rolling and some jagged, the land was a vast canvas painted in only two colors: brown and gray. Even the water of rivers that gushed through the valleys was a dull gray. It was as though God had cursed this place with a swipe of his mighty hand. On days when the clouds parted, the startlingly blue sky seemed only to accent the ashen landscape.

And then there was the wind, Francesco thought with a shudder. The seemingly endless wind that whistled through the rocks and drove eddies of dust along the ground that seemed so animated the locals often treated the phenomena like ghosts come to snatch away their souls. Six months ago, Francesco, a scientist by nature and training, had scoffed at such superstitions. Now he wasn’t so sure. He had heard too many strange sounds in the night.

Another few days, he consoled himself, and we will have the resources we need. But it wasn’t simply a matter of time, was it? He was making a bargain with the devil. The fact that he was doing it for the larger good was something he hoped God would remember when Judgment Day came.

He studied the approaching wall of dust a few seconds more before lowering his hand and turning to Giuseppe. “They are still twenty miles away,” he estimated. “We have another hour, at least. Come, let us finish.”

Francesco turned back around and shouted to one of the men, a squat, powerful figure in a roughly woven black tunic and trousers. Hao, Francesco’s primary liaison and translator, jogged over.

“Yes, sire!” he said in heavily accented but passable Italian.

Francesco sighed. Though he’d long ago given up trying to get Hao to call him by his first name, he had hoped that at least by now the man would have ceased with the formality.

“Tell the men to finish quickly. Our guest will be arriving soon.”

Hao cast an eye to the horizon and saw what Giuseppe had pointed out a few minutes earlier. His eyes widened. He nodded curtly, said, “It will be done, sire!” then turned around and began barking orders to the dozens of local men milling around the hilltop clearing. He scurried off to join in.

The clearing, which measured a hundred paces square, was in fact the roof of a gompa’s interior courtyard. On all sides of the clearing, its turreted walls and watchtowers followed the hill’s ridges down to the valley floor like spines on a lizard’s back.

While Francesco had been told a gompa was primarily a fortified center for education, the residents of this particular stronghold seemed to practice only one profession: soldiering. And for that, he was grateful. As evidenced by the frequent raids and skirmishes that took place on the plains below, it was clear he and his men were living on this realm’s frontier. It was no accident that they had been transported here to complete work on the machine—what their benefactor had dubbed the
Great Dragon
.

The clearing now echoed with the overlapping pounding of mallets on wood as Hao’s workers hurried to drive the final stakes into the rocky soil. All across the clearing, plumes of brown dust rose into the air, only to be caught by the wind and whipped into nothingness. After another ten minutes the mallets fell silent. Hao scrambled back to where Francesco and Giuseppe stood.

“We are done, sire.”

Francesco backed up a few steps and admired the structure. He was pleased. Designing it on paper was one thing; to see it come to life was something else altogether.

Standing forty feet tall, occupying three-quarters of the clearing, and constructed of snow-white silk, with curved exterior bamboo braces painted blood red, the tent seemed like a castle built of clouds.

“Well done,” Francesco told Hao. “Giuseppe?”

“Magnificent,” the younger Lana de Terzi murmured.

Francesco nodded, and said softly, “Now, let us hope what is inside is even more impressive.”

 

Though the gompa’s hawkeyed lookouts had certainly spotted the visitors approaching even before Giuseppe had, the alert horns did not sound until the retinue was but minutes away. This, as well as the riders’ direction of approach and early arrival, was a tactical decision, Francesco guessed. Most of the enemy’s outposts lay to the west. By coming in from the east, the party’s dust cloud would be obscured by the hill on which the gompa sat. This way, roving ambush parties would have no time to intercept the new arrivals. Knowing their benefactor as he did, Francesco suspected they had been covertly watching the gompa from a distance, waiting for the wind direction to change and enemy patrols to move on.

A cunning man, their patron, Francesco reminded himself. Cunning and dangerous.

 

 

Less than ten minutes later Francesco heard the crunching of leather and armored boots on the spiral gravel path below the clearing. Swirling dust rose above the rock-lined border of the clearing. Then, suddenly, silence. Though Francesco was expecting it, what came next startled him all the same.

With a single barked command from an unseen mouth, a cadre of two dozen Home Guard soldiers double-timed into the clearing, each syncopated footstep punctuated by a rhythmic grunt. Grim-faced, eyes fixed on the horizon, their pikes held horizontally before them, the guards spread out through the clearing and began herding the awestruck workers to its far side and out of sight behind the tent. Once done, they took up stations along the clearing’s perimeter, spaced at regular intervals, facing outward, pikes held diagonally across their bodies.

Again from the path below, another guttural command, followed by armored sandals crunching on gravel. A diamond-shaped formation of royal bodyguards in red-and-black bamboo armor marched into the clearing and headed directly toward where Francesco and Giuseppe stood. The phalanx stopped suddenly, and the soldiers foreside stepped to the left and right, opening a human gate, through which a single man strode.

Standing three hand widths taller than his tallest soldiers, the Kangxi Emperor, the Ruler of the Qing Dynasty, the Regent of the Mandate of Heaven, wore an expression that made the grimness of his soldiers’ faces seem positively exuberant.

The Kangxi Emperor took three long strides toward Francesco and came to a stop. Through squinted eyes, he studied the Italian’s face for several seconds before speaking. Francesco was about to call for Hao to translate, but the man was already there, standing at his elbow and whispering in his ear: “The Emperor says, ‘Are you surprised to see me?’”

“Surprised, yes, but pleased nonetheless, Your Majesty.”

The question was not a casual inquiry, Francesco knew. The Kangxi Emperor was paranoid in the extreme; had Francesco not seemed sufficiently surprised at the Emperor’s early arrival he would have fallen under immediate suspicion of being a spy.

“What is this structure I see before me?” the Kangxi Emperor asked.