by Mark Ellis
Aside from coma, she wasn’t sure if she suffered from any of those conditions, except for the amnesia. She still retained a fairly good, if somewhat hazy idea of who she was, and of the vicious bastard who had rendered her senseless.
Bautu paid no attention to her now. Stripped of his armour, his broad chest lifted and fell as he drank in great lungfuls of the chill air. The firelight gleamed dully from his thick, greased braids, and despite the cold, a sheen of sweat glistened on the shaved patch at the top of his head. Etched onto the right side of his broad, low forehead, she saw a small marking she couldn’t identify. It didn’t look like a scar or a tattoo or even a caste mark, yet it somehow resembled all three.
Bautu’s gloved right fist held the coiled whip, and with his left he sipped from a bowl of koumiss, fermented mare’s milk. Even at a distance of six yards, she could smell his unwashed-animal odour. Brigid kept her head bowed, the fall of her thick red-gold hair concealing most of her face. Through her slitted eye, she gazed through the screen of her hair, out beyond Bautu and the bonfire.
The camp of the warrior horde spread across the shallow valley for at least a quarter of a mile. The humped yurts, domelike tents of stretched yak hide, were scattered in no particular order from one end of the valley to the next. The area between the clumps of yurts was cluttered with two-wheeled carts, ox yokes, hobbled ponies and mutton racks. Here and there glowed cook fires.
Farther out, oxen, horses and sheep grazed on the scrubby grass growing through the crust of old snow. Beyond the animals lay the Black City of Kharo-Khoto.
Most of the people clustered around the bonfire were men. They were, by and large, warriors, and dressed accordingly. Husky of build, with short legs bowed from years of clutching the barrels of their ponies, they wore yak-skin hauberks and conical, fur-lined caps. Though a few shouldered single-shot muzzle loaders, the standard weapon seemed to be a horn-and-wood bow. Every swarthy face showed a sparse moustache or beard.
When she and the two-man Cerberus team arrived to investigate a rumour of a warlord, Brigid, Adrian and Davis hadn’t expected to find anyone, much less a horde of warriors, at that location. On foot and under-armed, they were easily captured by Bautu and a mounted scouting party. Brigid understood a smattering of Khalkha, but almost nothing of their particular dialect, which sounded like a corrupted blend of Chinese, Turkic and colloquial Russian. Therefore, she had been unable to provide satisfactory answers to Bautu’s shouted questions.
Once in the shallow valley, Davis and Adrian had been strung up and scourged. Brigid assumed that after Bautu caught his second wind and had his fill of koumiss, she would be next to taste the lash.
As soon as the thought registered, Bautu glanced toward her. She didn’t move, body slack and sagging, her head lolling. He wiped the sweat from his face and took a step forward. Then he froze, head and eyes lifting, gazing past her. Brigid remained motionless. A moment later, she heard the labouring wheeze of an engine. As the sound grew louder, so did the squeak and creak of an overstressed suspension. Headlights washed over Bautu. He narrowed his eyes and shifted his position as a flatbed truck rattled and jounced over the uneven ground and braked to a stop near the bonfire. Wooden crates, at least a dozen of them, were stacked on the wag’s bed, kept in place by hemp netting. Painted on several of the crates in Russian Cyrillic script was a simple legend: 12.
Only one man climbed out of the cab. He was at least a head taller than Bautu. The high fleece cap perched at a jaunty angle made him seem taller still. A silver disk, pinned to the front of the cap, glinted with red highlights.
Pulling his calf-length, tan trench coat tighter around him, the man gave the hanging figures a disinterested glance and approached Bautu. In a faint, unintelligible murmur, he spoke to the warrior. Brigid couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand a word. His manner and tone, however, were very calm.
Bautu’s response was the exact opposite. With a savage sweep of his left arm, he gestured to the bodies of the hanging men, and an indecipherable rush of noise burst from his snarling mouth.
He continued the tirade, roaring out each incomprehensible word. The tall man listened to the blizzard of harsh consonants and outraged gutturals politely, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. He nodded frequently, as if in sympathy.
When Bautu paused to catch his breath, the man turned away, eyeing first Adrian and then Davis. Hands still in his pockets, he stepped to a hide-wrapped bundle on the ground, very near the fire. He toed a flap aside and gazed expressionlessly at the items piled within it—a compass, three H&K VP-70 handblasters, wrist chrons, a small rad counter, plastic containers of water and concentrated food and the trans-comm unit. The little black rectangle of moulded plastic and pressed metal held his attention for a very long time.
Lifting his head, the tall man gazed toward Brigid. Four long strides brought him right in front of her. She closed her eye and breathed shallowly. She heard the man chuckle. A gloved hand cupped her chin, raising her head with a surprisingly gentle touch, and he parted her tangle of hair. She did not move, did not react.
“Meno morosch mene golovu.” His voice was a rustling, conspiratorial whisper. In Russian he said, “Don’t fuck with me.”
Brigid took a breath, got her feet under her and stood up. Once she was relieved of the strain of supporting her weight, the fierce pain in her wrists and shoulders began to seep away. The man made a tsk noise when he saw she could open only one eye and he took a handkerchief from a coat pocket. Wetting it with his tongue, he carefully dabbed at the caked blood on her face, then prised up her right eyelid with a thumb and forefinger.
“Spaseebah,” she said.
The man grinned and replied in English, “Quite welcome you are.”
Brigid did not reply.
“Your accent gives you away,” he said, still speaking in a low tone. “You’re not Russian. Where are you from?”
“From far away.”
“England.” The man snapped his fingers. “No, not England, America. I have never met an American before.”
“Then we’re even. I’ve never met a Russian. I certainly didn’t expect to meet one in Mongolia.”
The man smiled. Brigid realized he was older than he looked at first glance. His dark eyes were surrounded by crinkled laugh lines, and the weather-beaten skin on either side of his sharp nose deeply creased.
Crossing the index and middle fingers of his right hand, he declared, “The histories of Mongolia and Mother Russia have been intertwined for over a thousand years, since the days of Temujin, Timur and Babur the Tiger. Sometimes we are enemies, sometimes we are so fond of each other, it would give the shade of Stalin the colic.”
“Which is it now?” Brigid asked. She glanced toward the fire. Bautu fingered his
lash, glowering at her from beneath a furrowed brow.
“Fairly obvious, is it not? You’re the one hung up for flaying, not me.”
“Who are you?”
The man put a hand to his chest and bowed. “Sverdlovosk is my name. And you are…?”
She considered giving him a false name, but decided not to bother. Her own name, or a nom de guerre wouldn’t make any difference out here. Besides, the pain in her head limited her powers of invention. “Baptiste.”
“An American in Mongolia. Your comrades were American, too, I presume. Sent by one of the baronies to spy on the Tushe Gun.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.”
An edge slipped into Sverdlovosk’s smooth voice. “Hardly. I doubt there’s been an American this close to the Black Gobi in over two centuries. I’ve heard that the intelligence-gathering networks of the united baronies were extending into other countries. You and your comrades are proof of that.”
Bautu emitted a bellow, shaking the coiled whip at them. Sverdlovosk shouted back, ending his retort with two sharp clicking sounds.
Retur
ning his attention to Brigid, he said, “A poor excuse for a language, I must admit. Probably it was a form of a local trading dialect, centuries ago.”
“Probably,” she agreed. “After Nukeday, when communications were cut off with other countries, these people slipped back into barbarism and an earlier language, forgetting its roots.”
Sverdlovosk eyed her admiringly, flicking his glance up and down her form.
“Impressive, Baptiste. You’re obviously educated and obviously very pretty under all that grit and gore on your face. What is not so obvious is how you got here from the Americas.”
“Does it matter?”
“Very much. It is the question which consumes Bautu, and he is desperate for an answer before the Tushe Gun arrives.”
“I know what those words mean, at least,” she said. “It’s a title…’the Avenging Genghis.’”
A sudden commotion of shouts and yelps erupted from the far end of the valley. Sverdlovosk looked that way, sighed and said, “He is ahead of schedule. If he arrived when he was supposed to have, I might have been able to browbeat Bautu into placing you in my custody. It is too late for that now, I fear.”
Trumpets made of rams’ horns bleated a discordant fanfare. An ululating wail burst from over a hundred tongues. Firelight glinted from polished sword blades as they were waved in the air. Muskets fired into the night sky, and the valley echoed with a staccato pop-popping. Plumes of powder smoke floated overhead like streamers of grey chiffon.
The chant began slowly at first: “Tushe Gun! Tushe Gun!”
The words were shouted in an ever-increasing rhythm until they sounded like a voice tape sped up and on continuous loop: “Tusheguntushegun—”
A harsh blast on a horn silenced the howling throng. The abrupt silence was broken by the clopping of unshod hooves and the squeak of saddle leather. Two mounted men approached the bonfire through a path flanked on either side by warriors and their women standing at respectful attention.
Flames played along the burnished iron scales of armour, winked from the polished helmets. Though the two men rode abreast, Brigid didn’t need Sverdlovosk to point out which figure was the Tushe Gun.
He was a head taller than his saddle mate, though the fanged bear skull mounted on top of his fur-trimmed helmet probably added more than a few inches to his height. A moulded breastplate of leather encased his torso and was reinforced by an interlocking pattern of metal scales. The long sword at his side, its scabbard set with gems, swung in rhythm to his dappled horse’s prancing gait.
His face was strangely shaped and shadowed, and it wasn’t until he reined his mount to a halt that Brigid realized he wore a mask, covering the right side of his face. It was crafted of a thin layer of exquisitely carved jade—at least it looked like jade because of its creamy green hue. The mask held no particular expression, but from behind the curving eyelets glinted an imperious, hawk like gaze. Light glinted briefly from a ring on his right hand. It was a massive ornament, made of thick hammered silver, designed like a dragon in four loops. The horned head held a baleful, demonic expression. The firelight made tiny iridescent sparks dance within the eyes of yellow gemstones.
Sverdlovosk dropped to one knee and stuck out his tongue in the traditional Mongolian greeting and act of submission. The intent, expressionless scrutiny of the masked face was focused not on the Russian but on Brigid. She tried to return the gaze with the same unblinking intensity.
The Tushe Gun spoke one word, a whisper she didn’t understand. Sverdlovosk instantly sprang to his feet and whirled on her. “Grovel before the Avenging Genghis,” he snapped, and pounded a fist into the pit of her stomach.
Continued in the next CALLSIGN CERBERUS saga: DRAGON’S KISS!
Former Magistrates Kane and Grant along with outrunner Domi and Brigid Baptiste, keeper of the archives, are sworn to uncover the secrets of the world’s fate.
Clues hint that a terrifying piece of the ancient puzzle is buried in the heart of Asia, where the ghost of the Great Khan wields an awesome power to rule or destroy.
MARK ELLIS is a versatile novelist and comics creator His numerous credentials include critically acclaimed properties such as Doc Savage, The Wild, Wild West, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, Star Rangers, Ninja Elite, Nosferatu: Plague of Terror, The Justice Machine, King Solomon’s Mines, Death Hawk and others. He is the co-author of The Everything Guide to Writing Graphic Novels.
Under his James Axler pen-name, Mark created the best-selling Outlanders series for Harlequin Enterprises’ Gold Eagle imprint. Published consecutively for over 18 years in various editions, Outlanders is the most successful mass market paperback original series of the last 30 years.
His other novels include Cryptozoica, Parallax Prime: Of Dire Chimeras, Knightwatch: Invictus X, The Spur series and entries in The Executioner and Deathlands series.
He has been featured in Starlog, Comics Scene and Fangoria magazines. He has also been interviewed by Robert Siegel for NPR’s All Things Considered.
Mark lives with his wife, best-selling author and photographer Melissa Martin Ellis in rural Ireland.
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