by Dan Davis
My companions pushed into the room after me while I stood staring at the three servants, wondering if I might not have them bound and gagged instead of dispatched. One of the old women dropped to her knees with her hands raised in supplication as our intentions dawned on her. The other screwed up her face in anger and took a deep breath.
She did not have time to utter a cry, for Khutulun pushed past me and cracked the woman’s head open with the hammer side of her axe, and then buried the blade into the skull of the other one. Through it all, the boy stood stock still, arms by his sides and his eyes screwed shut. Khutulun whipped her axe blade from the old woman’s skull and hacked into the lad’s face, dropping him like the women. Wiping her blade on her coat, she turned and sneered at me, her expression mocking my weakness. I had a foolish urge to protest that I would have killed them had she not intervened but Eva grabbed the sack from my hand and shoved me into motion.
Without further idiotic delay, I headed into the servants’ stairwell and ran up the timber stairs, the others right behind me. It was dark and narrow and the boards creaked underfoot and though we attempted to be quiet, we sounded like an invading army as we ascended.
A man’s voice growled something above and I ran up the last few steps, drawing my dagger.
It was a Mongol soldier, dressed for war. A kezik, a guard protecting his lords within the nearby hall. And though he was there to stop unauthorised entry and to fight intruders, he was not truly expecting to have to do so. Since the dawn of time, almost every guard who ever stood on duty has served an unremarkable watch where the greatest danger to him is being found dozing by his commanding officer. There are a few moments where his expectations conflict with reality and he must adjust to the fact that he will have to shake himself for sudden violence.
Those few moments were all I needed.
I leapt up the steps and slammed my dagger up under his chin and forced him clear from the landing area into the antechamber, bearing him down beneath me with my hand over his mouth. His dark eyes were wide in shock that he was being killed.
Orus jumped over me and brought down the second kezik with a terrific blow from his mace. The crash the man made as he hit the wall and bounced onto the floor was sure to bring more men from within the hall to investigate. The kezik’s dented helm rolled across the floor until Orus stamped on it.
The kezik beneath me stopped struggling and I savoured the smell of his blood and watched as his eyes faded and he breathed his last breath into my face. It reeked of sour wine and onions.
Khutulun and Eva continued on up the stairs to the gallery above, their feet making a terrible din.
The revelry within the hall continued unabated but I could not feel relief. At any moment, they could discover us. Thomas and Hassan, or Stephen, could already have been killed or—even worse—captured.
Our dead keziks had been guarding the rear door into the hall where Hulegu and the other lords celebrated the new year. A small, sturdy door of dark wood was all that separated me from my enemies. Orus stood before it, a mace in one hand and a bulging sack in the other.
“Bar the door,” I hissed at him.
He turned with a confused expression. “How?”
Certain that he was being foolish, I stepped beside him, cursing his stupidity.
Yet he was correct.
Our paid informants had sworn that the doors at either end of the hall could be barred and yet there was nothing to suggest that had ever been possible. Merely an ornate iron latch.
I took a deep breath and clapped Orus on the shoulder. “Do not let even a single man through,” I said and relieved him of his sack, for I would need the contents in short order.
Before I ascended the next stair to the gallery, I glanced back at the young Mongol warrior. He stood with a mace in his left hand, and his sword now drawn in his right. A single man to hold that small antechamber against a horde who would be desperate to escape.
He turned and looked at me over his shoulder. For once, he did not grin. Instead, he nodded once, slowly and in response, I bowed my head.
I took the final stairway in a few leaps to find Eva and Khutulun crouched at the top of the steps. Another servant lay dead, face down against the wall with blood pooling beneath him.
I had reached the gallery, which ran along one side of the building just beneath the edge of the vaulted ceiling, with a beautifully carved balustrade at waist height, that looked down onto the hall below. At the far end of the gallery I knew was a stairway leading to some other part of the palace beyond the hall but I had to trust that Hassan and Thomas would do what they could to block or distract any reinforcements from that end once the assault began. In its normal function, such a gallery could house musicians, at other times it was where lords could look down on those inside the hall without having to mix with them.
It would also, I hoped, provide the perfect platform for committing a massacre.
The voices down in the hall were loud and the stink of the men and their vile food filled my nose. Laughter and arguments suggested that they were all steaming drunk and I prayed that we had timed it correctly so that their inebriation would inhibit their strength and coordination. Judging from the sound alone, there could have been fifty or a hundred men below me. Perhaps more.
With any luck, we could launch our attack without them ever knowing what hit them.
“Quickly, now,” I whispered to Eva and Khutulun.
We yanked open the sacks and began to unpack the contents. Inside, we had ceramic pots twice the size of a man’s fist, each one wrapped in its own pouch of soft sheepskin of the highest quality. The soft coats protected the thinly-walled pots from breaking prematurely, and also prevented them from clanking together and giving us away. We shoved the pouches back into the leather bags and tossed them aside while lining up the pots on their flat bases. Each pot had a tube of waxed paper jutting from the top. The tube of waxed paper was filled with black powder that fizzed and burned like the devil when it was lit.
From inside my coat, I took the length of slowmatch I had lit before we made our final approach on the city. It was a short length of twisted hemp impregnated with some alchemical substance that allowed it to retain an ember within for many hours which could then swiftly be utilised to light a fuse. I had been repeatedly assured of their impeccable reliability.
Mine was cold.
I blew on it but it was completely out.
“Bloody useless Saracen bastard,” I said, meaning Hassan, who had procured the devices from the surviving Syrian Assassins. “How do yours fare?” I asked Eva and Khutulun.
But then there was a shout from the far end of the gallery.
A Mongol guard stood staring at us, open-mouthed and outraged at our presence. No doubt the dead servant next to me also helped to give the game away. Another kezik came up beside him and there were more armed men behind filling the space.
Ripping my sword from the scabbard, I ran at them. I knew I would be in full view of anyone in the hall who looked up but there was nothing else I could do.
I felt the plan crumbling into pieces. So close to success, it had instead fallen to failure.
All I could do was fight on, fight through. It was all I knew. It was my profession. My passion.
The first Mongol drew his sword but I slashed my own blade across his face and he went wheeling back into the men crowding behind him. By God, I thought, there are so many of them. Too many to kill before the alarm was raised, if it was not too late already.
I kicked the next man’s legs out from under him and stomped on him as I lunged at the men behind. The floored man rolled away and I half fell, raising my blade to defend against the dagger swung at my head. I kicked out with such fear and anger that the man was sent tumbling over the balustrade and down into the hall below with a crash.
The revelry stopped all at once, like the last candle being snuffed out.
I slashed at the remaining men, catching one and the rest jumped back from
the gallery onto the landing beyond.
Behind me, Eva and Khutulun squatted, hunched over the rows of pots.
A cry went up from the hall, jeering and angry at the fallen man and I peered over the balustrade, leaning on the pillar of an arch.
The great hall was packed with Mongols. At a glance, it was well over two hundred men, plus almost as many servants or slaves, most young girls. The revellers lined the hall on either side of the centre, most sitting on benches or on rugs and furs on the floor. It was laid out like a ger, only there was no women’s side. What women there were mixed in amongst the men, and I saw none being treated with anything close to respect. There were no honoured wives, no domestic side to proceedings. Just slave girls.
I searched quickly for the lords amongst them. The ones who William had turned into immortals. There were many men dressed in silk finery, surrounded by clusters of followers and which of them were my targets, I could not easily tell.
Then again, it hardly mattered.
Most of them were staring at the body of the man who had fallen onto a group carousing below the gallery. Almost as one, however, every face in the hall was turned upward in search of the point from which the unfortunate fellow had tumbled. Of course, they all saw me.
At the top end—the end we had entered, and the one with the door guarded by Orus—sat Hulegu, surrounded on all sides by his keshig bodyguards who were dressed for war.
The Ilkhan, the most powerful man on Earth, other than, perhaps, his brother Kublai.
His eyes met mine and grew wide.
Holding my arms out by my side, I leaned over the balustrade and raised my voice to a powerful roar that echoed in the now-quiet hall. “Hulegu Khan! I am Richard of Ashbury. Your crimes are legion. And now your death is at hand!”
I doubt anyone understood my words precisely but Hulegu certainly caught the crux of my declaration. He jumped to his feet and jabbed a finger up at me, scowling in pure hatred and barked out orders.
All about the hall, men bestirred themselves to attack.
Our key inside man, the slaver Enrico, had assured me that the only men with weapons would be Hulegu’s immortal keshig but it was not just those eight soldiers who leapt to their feet and rushed across the hall toward the gallery. It seemed as though fully half of the drunken savages in the hall staggered across the benches, trampling slaves and servants as they charged my position. The first of them jumped up to grasp enormous painted fabrics hung on the wall and clambered up hand over hand.
A sword stabbed toward me from the side and I jerked away from it, bringing my blade up to defend the vicious attacks from the Mongols beside me up on the gallery. I could not defend the balcony from the men swarming up the wall hangings, as well as the men already up on the same level as me. Forgetting the hall for a moment, I rushed into the Mongols clustered near me in order to cause disorder amongst them and so destroy them rapidly. Cutting as fast as I could, slashing across their hands, their faces and shouting some wordless cries of fury. I stabbed one through the throat and he ran, blood gushing through his fingers, into the men behind him. While they threw him down, I killed them, too. Blood gushed out on the timbers underfoot amongst the writhing bodies.
“Richard!” Eva shouted from behind me.
The first men from the hall were climbing over the balustrade and I ran back along the gallery to cut them down. It was loud with shouts and jeering from the drunken merrymakers down below who were confident that they were themselves under no threat, that they would witness a short hunt followed by the violent execution of a Frankish interloper. They had no idea that it was their own horrifying deaths that were coming.
All along the balustrade, Mongols were dragging themselves up and over the railing. I cut the first man on the back of his exposed neck and his head came clean off, the body falling away. I cut off the hand of another man and crashed my blade into the skull of the next. On I ran to the next and smote him, and the next. They were drunk and slow and I was an immortal knight, faster than anything they could have imagined. I kicked a very fat man in the face and then the whole teeming bunch of them fell as one, as if by God’s own hand.
The rope suspending the wall hangings had snapped and the row of fabrics all collapsed under the weight of dozens of climbing men, and they fell tumbling into a pile at the base of the wall. Many of the spectators cheered and laughed at their comrades.
Not all were unaware of their danger. A group of men hammered on the main hall door but it seemed they could not force it open from the inside.
Well done, Thomas. God save you.
But the rear door that Orus guarded, behind Hulegu’s dais, was being advanced on by a group of men determined to rush out, climb the stairs and attack me from that side. Worse still, the Mongol bodyguards, armed and armoured though most without helms, now stood in a line below me, looking up.
Seeing me once more looking down, Hulegu roared and his eight keshig jumped into action, throwing themselves against the bare wall and scrambling up against the stonework. One climbed the remnant of the wall hangings rope at the far corner.
I knew then that it was over. I could not fight eight immortal warriors, not all at once in a confined space. They would surround me and overwhelm me and I prayed that they would kill me outright so that I would be spared the sight of Hulegu’s face, smug in his victory. Nevertheless, I prepared to kill as many as I could before I fell and hoped to give Eva and Khutulun the time that they clearly needed.
A pot sailed through the air from the end of the gallery in a great arc trailing smoke and a fizzing, smoking fire.
It smashed on the wall just above the rear door and the evil liquid inside gushed out and down for a moment before it was ignited by the waxed paper fuse. The sound was like a demon being thrust out from Hell, and the explosive ball of flame engulfed the men beneath in a shroud of boiling flame. Their screams filled the hall from floor to the timber roof high above. Safe from assault, the door was guarded by a raging fire. Flames leapt and bounced close to Hulegu’s dais and he skipped away from it.
While the Mongols were frozen in horror or shrieking in fear at the sight of their fellows writhing in agony, another incendiary pot flew, angling right across the hall from end to end. This time it smashed beside the main door and tossed out fire like a beast searching for men to consume. The fire drove the men there back from their efforts to break out and as the people within saw that both exits were aflame, every man and woman, lord and slave, panicked. Screams of terror echoed from the rafters.
Two more fire pots flew and both doorways were further engulfed in explosive flame. Eva and Khutulun were throwing them as rapidly as they could get the fuses lit and so more and more followed quickly, smashing into the floor or into people or benches everywhere in the hall. Each fire pot belched out so much fire that every one of them immolated a half dozen people or more. The screaming crowd gathered in groups, clutching each other. What tempting targets they made. When these groups were hit, they all died.
The roaring of the fire grew, as did the screams and cries of agony and pure terror. Smoke billowed up in plumes and built steadily, quickly filling the hall with thicker and thicker smoke and the flames danced higher and licked the walls and the roof beams above.
All the while, the strongest and bravest Mongols clambered up the wall to the gallery, and I fought to keep them from overwhelming us. I cut and shoved and kicked like a demon. Some made it up over the balustrade momentarily and I killed them or threw them back into the ocean of fire below.
An armoured, immortal keshig leapt up and threw himself over onto the gallery close to Eva and Khutulun. He paused, looking between them and me, as I ran at him from the other end. He wisely chose me but had foolishly turned his back on Eva, who stood up behind him and swung her dagger into his neck and punched out his throat in a shower of blood and gristle. Without missing a beat, she snatched up a fire pot and tossed it down the wall into the other immortals climbing up.
But not
all of them. Another keshig lunged from where he clutched to the rail and I thrust my sword into his open mouth and pushed it hard into him, my blade getting caught in his teeth and skull.
I was getting tired, and sucking in lungfuls of filthy, hot smoke and the sweat and tears running into my eyes stung and partially blinded me. My strikes were growing sloppy as my arms grew tired and the fear of the flames grew rapidly toward panic. Simply put, I was getting carried away and I paid for my carelessness when the keshig I had run through the mouth flung himself away and ripped my sword from my hand.
Two others clambered over the balustrade onto the gallery either side of me and I ran to one in order to throw him down. Before I could grab him, he slashed my arm open near the shoulder. Grasping his sword arm, I drew my dagger but he clamped onto my wrist and held on so hard I could not shake him off. I let go of his arm and punched him square in the face hard enough to crush his nose and spread the split flesh halfway across his face but still he clasped me. The other immortal stomped toward us. His braids and long moustache were singed and his skin burned but still the mad bastard grinned as he reached us. All I could do was retreat and use the body of the man entwined with me as a shield.
Dread filled me when, behind the grinning savage, half a dozen men at once climbed over onto the gallery.
The Mongol I grappled with butted me hard in the face with his helm, breaking my nose as I had done his. As only a man who has experienced such a thing will know, the pain of a broken nose is quite exquisite and uniquely disorienting. My eyes filled with tears and I was blinded. In panic at my sudden vulnerably, I seized him by the head with both hands and sank my teeth into his face and ripped off his cheek, upper lip and a good portion of his crushed nose. His screams filled my mouth, as did his blood and I drank it down for a moment, then heaved the writhing, faceless bastard at the keshig behind, just to slow him down as I backed away and wiped blood from my eyes.