The smell of roasted lamb filled the night air, mingling with smoke from the fires and the sweet scent of fermented mare's milk that the men passed around in leather flasks. Oghur sat near one of the larger fires, his knife working methodically as he carved strips of meat from the bone. The fat dripped into the flames below, hissing and spitting as it met the heat.
Around him, the clan celebrated in the way his people always did after a successful raid. The warriors told exaggerated stories of their exploits, each tale growing bolder with every retelling and every drink. The women sang old songs in their tongue, melodies that had been passed down through generations, their voices rising and falling with the rhythm of the steppe wind. Children ran between the tents in the darkness, shrieking with laughter as they played games of chase and combat, mimicking the warriors they'd watched return victorious.
It had been a good raid. Three Imperial supply wagons intercepted on the trade route that ran along the borderlands, far from any garrison that could respond quickly. Weapons, grain, bolts of silk, and enough silver to keep the clan comfortable through the coming winter. The Chinese merchants had hired guards, of course, but they were poorly trained conscripts who broke and ran after the first volley of arrows. No casualties on the Tujue side. Clean, efficient, profitable
.
'A good haul.'
Oghur was thirteen years old. He had killed his first man two years ago during a border skirmish with another nomad clan over grazing rights and water access. Tonight, he had killed his second. An Imperial soldier, young and inexperienced, maybe seventeen at most. The boy had been terrified, his hands shaking so badly he could barely hold his sword. When Oghur had come at him, the soldier had panicked and swung too wide, putting all his strength into a horizontal cut that left his entire torso exposed.
Oghur had stepped inside the guard like his father had taught him, moving with the efficiency of someone who understood that wasted motion meant death, and opened the soldier's throat with a single slash of his
blade. The man had fallen backward into the dirt, hands clutching at the wound as blood poured between his fingers. He had made choking sounds, eyes wide and disbelieving, as if he couldn't quite comprehend that his life was ending in this dusty nowhere place, so far from whatever home he had left behind.
'He was too slow.'
That was what Oghur had thought at the time, watching the light fade from the soldier's eyes. Not fear. Not guilt. Not even satisfaction. Just a simple tactical observation, the kind his father had drilled into him since he was old enough to hold a practice sword. The soldier had been too slow, had made a fundamental mistake in his technique, and so the soldier had died.
It was that simple.
War wasn't personal. It was just a matter of who made fewer mistakes.
He bit into the lamb, tearing the meat from the bone with his teeth. It was still warm from the fire, the outside charred and crispy while the inside remained tender and pink. The meat was tougher than he would have liked, probably from an older animal, but it was flavorful and rich with fat. His people didn't waste anything. Every part of the sheep would be used—the meat for eating, the hide for leather, the bones for tools, even the intestines for carrying water.
His father sat across the fire from him, deep in conversation with the other senior warriors and craftsmen. Batu, the clan's master smith and Oghur's father, was a man who seemed carved from the same iron he worked. His hair had gone gray years ago, and his hands were covered in burn scars and calluses from decades of working the forge. His face was like weathered leather, lined with age and sun and the harsh winds of the steppe. When he spoke, people listened, because Batu's words were always measured and deliberate. He never wasted breath on things that didn't matter.
"The Chinese are getting nervous," one of the warriors said, a man named Ganzorig who had lost two fingers on his left hand in a fight years ago. He gestured with his maimed hand as he spoke, the stumps moving unconsciously. "The patrols along the border have doubled in the last month. The merchant caravans are hiring more guards, better trained ones. The garrison commanders are offering bounties for Tujue heads."
"Let them be nervous," Batu replied, his voice calm and steady as he took a long drink from a wineskin before passing it to the man beside him. "We have raided these lands for generations, long before the current dynasty, long before their grandfathers' grandfathers built their first mud walls. The Chinese come and go, their empires rise and fall, their emperors grow fat and paranoid in their palaces. But we remain. The steppe endures, and so do we."
There were murmurs of agreement around the fire, warriors nodding and raising their cups in acknowledgment of the truth in those words. The Tujue had been here longer than anyone could remember, had survived droughts and wars and famines that would have destroyed softer peoples. They were not conquerors building monuments to their own glory. They were survivors, and that was harder, more valuable.
"The Emperor will send more soldiers eventually," another voice chimed in, belonging to an older warrior whose name Oghur didn't know. The man had a scar running from his forehead down across his blind left eye, the mark of a blade that should have killed him. "They always do when they lose face. The bureaucrats in the capital will write angry letters, the generals will promise swift retribution, and another army will march north thinking they can finally put an end to the 'barbarian problem' once and for all."
"Then we will kill more soldiers," Batu said simply, as if discussing the weather or the quality of this year's forage. "The Empire is vast, but the steppe is vaster. They can send ten armies, and we will bleed them all dry in this emptiness. This is our land. They do not understand it, cannot survive in it without their supply lines and their fortresses. We can."
There was laughter at that, the kind of dark, knowing laughter that came from men who had seen the truth of it proven again and again over the years. The Chinese armies would come with their banners and their drums and their cultivators who thought spiritual power made them invincible, and they would march into the steppe with confidence. And then the steppe would teach them, as it had taught so many before, that all the cultivation in the world meant nothing when you were dying of thirst or freezing in a winter storm or couldn't find the enemy that melted away into the grasslands like ghosts.
Oghur listened to it all but said nothing. He rarely spoke unless directly asked a question that required an answer. His mother had told him once, when he was younger and had asked why he was different from the other children who never seemed to stop chattering, that he had been born under a silent moon. She said the spirits had looked at him in his first moments of life and decided that he was meant to watch and listen rather than fill the air with meaningless noise.
He didn't know if he believed in spirits or fates or any of the old stories the elders told around fires like this one. But he knew that silence was useful in ways that talking rarely was. People revealed things when you stayed quiet. They filled the empty space with words, often more words than they intended, and if you paid attention you could learn what they really thought, what they really feared, what they were really planning.
Silence was a weapon, just like the knife at his belt.
The celebration continued late into the night. The men drank and boasted. The women sang songs that grew sadder as the night wore on, old ballads about warriors who never returned and lovers separated by death and distance. The children eventually tired themselves out and were carried to their tents by their mothers. The fires burned lower, reduced to glowing coals that pulsed with residual heat.
Oghur watched it all with the same detached observation he brought to everything. He noted which warriors drank too much and would wake with clouded heads. He watched the way his father's eyes kept drifting toward the northern horizon even as he laughed at someone's joke. He saw the tension in the shoulders of the scouts who had come back from their patrols earlier in the day, the way they sat slightly apart from the main celebration and spoke in low voices to each other.
'Something is wrong.'
He didn't know what, exactly. Just a feeling that prickled at the back of his neck like the first warning of a coming storm. The kind of instinct that had kept his ancestors alive for countless generations in a land that killed the careless and the stupid without mercy.
But everyone else seemed content to celebrate, so Oghur said nothing. He simply ate his meat and watched the fire and waited.
Later, after the fires had died down to ash and most of the clan had retreated to their tents to sleep off the food and drink, Oghur lay in the darkness beside his younger brother. Temur was already deeply asleep, his breathing slow and even, his small body curled against Oghur's side for warmth. He was ten years old, still soft in the way that children were before life had a chance to harden them into something sharper and colder.
'He has not killed anyone yet.'
Oghur stared up at the ceiling of the tent, barely visible in the darkness. Outside, the steppe was quiet in the way it only was in the deepest part of night. The wind had died down to almost nothing, just the faintest whisper through the grass. Somewhere in the distance, one of the horses snorted and shifted, the sound carrying clearly in the stillness.
It was peaceful. The kind of peace that should have made sleep come easily.
'Too peaceful.'
Oghur did not know why that thought came to him, sharp and clear as a blade. There was no logical reason for it. The raid had been successful. The clan was safe. The Chinese were likely still reeling from their losses, gathering reports, arguing about response strategies in their fortresses and garrison headquarters. There should be days, maybe weeks, before any retaliation came.
But the feeling would not leave him. It sat in his chest like a stone, heavy and cold and certain.
He closed his eyes anyway, because there was nothing to be done about feelings and instincts in the middle of the night. If something was coming, it would come whether he slept or not. Better to be rested.
Sleep came slowly, reluctantly, and even then it was thin and unsatisfying, full of half-formed dreams that he forgot the moment he woke.
Three days passed in relative normalcy. The clan continued to celebrate their successful raid in the evenings, though with less intensity as the meat was consumed and the wine ran low. During the days, life returned to its usual rhythms. The warriors trained and maintained their weapons and equipment. The women worked the looms and prepared food and tended to the herds. The children played and learned and absorbed the skills they would need to survive.
The scouts continued their patrols along the borderlands, ranging out in ever-widening circles to watch for any Imperial response. Each evening they returned with the same report—no unusual troop movements, no sign of mobilization from the nearby garrisons, nothing to suggest that retribution was coming.
"They are licking their wounds," one of the clan elders said during a gathering on the third evening, his weathered face creased with satisfaction. "Probably waiting for reinforcements from the interior before they dare to venture out again. Cowards, the lot of them. They only show courage when they have overwhelming numbers."
Batu nodded slowly but said nothing. Oghur watched his father's face and saw the lines of tension there, the way his jaw was set slightly tighter than usual. His father did not share the elder's confidence, though he was too diplomatic to say so in front of the others.
The forges burned hot day and night. Batu and his apprentices worked ceaselessly, their hammers ringing out in steady rhythm as they repaired damaged weapons and crafted new ones from the steel they had taken from the Chinese supply wagons. Good steel was precious on the steppe, worth more than silver or silk or any of the other luxuries the Chinese prized. A well-forged blade could mean the difference between life and death, between victory and defeat.
Oghur helped when he could, though he was not yet skilled enough to work the forge independently. His father had been teaching him the craft slowly, patiently, in the hours between raids and training. He had learned how to recognize the color of heated metal, how to judge when it was ready to be worked. He had learned the rhythm of the hammer, the way to fold the steel to create strength and flexibility. He had learned that a blade was not just a tool but an extension of the warrior who wielded it.
"A weapon is an extension of yourself," his father had told him during one of their lessons, holding up a newly forged sword to examine it in the firelight. "If it is weak, then you are weak. If it is brittle, then you will break when you are needed most. If it is sharp and true and well-balanced, then you become more than you were before. Never forget that. Never accept a weapon that is anything less than perfect, because your life will depend on it."
Oghur had nodded, absorbing the lesson as he absorbed everything his father taught him. He did not need convincing. He had seen what happened to warriors who carried inferior weapons, blades that shattered or bent or lost their edge at critical moments. They died, usually badly, and their deaths accomplished nothing.
On the fourth morning, Oghur woke before dawn with the certain knowledge that something had changed.
The air felt wrong. Not cold, not hot, just fundamentally wrong in a way that made his skin prickle with awareness. He lay still for a moment, trying to identify what had triggered this feeling, this instant certainty that something was different.
Then he realized what it was.
'No birds.'
At this hour, just before the sun rose, the steppe should have been alive with the sounds of birds. Larks beginning their morning songs, sparrows chattering as they searched for seeds, crows calling to each other as they took flight. The grasslands were full of them, had always been full of them for as long as Oghur could remember.
But now there was nothing. Just silence, vast and complete and deeply unnatural.
Oghur sat up slowly, careful not to wake Temur who was still sleeping peacefully beside him, oblivious to the wrongness that filled the air. He reached for his knife, the blade he had taken from the soldier he killed three days ago, and tucked it into his belt. Then he stood and stepped outside the tent.
The sky was gray with pre-dawn light, that strange time of day when the world existed in a liminal space between darkness and illumination. A few other warriors were already awake, standing near the edge of the encampment and staring toward the northern horizon. Their postures were tense, alert, the stance of men who sensed danger even if they could not yet see it.
Oghur walked over to them, his footsteps silent on the packed earth. One of the warriors, a man named Khasar who had been raiding since before Oghur was born, glanced at him briefly before returning his gaze to the horizon.
"What is it?" Oghur asked quietly, his voice barely more than a whisper in the stillness.
Khasar did not look at him when he answered, just raised one scarred hand and pointed toward the north. "Dust."
Oghur followed the direction of his finger and saw it immediately—a faint brown haze rising into the gray sky in the distance, barely visible but unmistakable once you knew to look for it. It was too far away to make out any details, but the implication was clear.
'Movement. A lot of movement.'
"Horses?" Oghur asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Horses," Khasar confirmed, his voice flat and emotionless. "Many horses. More than I have ever seen in one place."
"How many?" Oghur pressed, needing to know, needing to understand the scale of what they were facing.
Khasar was silent for a long moment, his eyes never leaving that distant smudge of dust on the horizon. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, almost defeated.
"Too many."