Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 90: The Wolf’s Mark

The felt gave way without sound.

Suuqai pulled it aside with two fingers at the bottom edge and let it fold back against his forearm. The gap opened. The smell reached him, bodies and smoke and dried fish, the density of air breathed and breathed again in a closed space. Under it, cold coming up from the earth.

He waited.

The breathing inside hadn’t changed. Deep, unguarded, the rhythm of men far enough down that small sounds passed over them.

He stepped through.

The two steppe riders came in behind him. One set the felt back against the outer wall, slow enough that the camp’s firelight stayed out. The interior was dark. Thin orange lines came through gaps in the reed-bundle walls from the coals outside, enough to see shadows but not faces.

Six men by Suuqai’s count. Five along the walls and across the ground, wrapped in coats and hides. And at the far end, slightly apart from the others, a sixth man on his back against the bundled reeds.

Faruk.

Suuqai crouched and kept still until his eyes had taken what they could. Packed earth near the entrance from years of foot traffic. Hides further in, a change in texture at arm’s reach. He needed that before moving.

He pointed left. The nearer man went left. He pointed right. The second went right. They separated along each wall without a sound between them.

The man on the left was sleeping with his face toward the wall, coat pulled to his ears. The steppe rider crouched beside him and took his time. He placed one hand on the ground beside the man’s head, found his position in the dark, then placed his left hand over the man’s face and pressed the head back against the hide. The knife went across the throat in one stroke.

The body came alive at once. The legs drove against the earth, the hands came up from nowhere. He pressed his forearm across the chest and rode out the motion with his weight. The sounds were wet contained within the room’s width. Across the space, a man shifted in his sleep, rolled onto his back, breathed deeply, and stilled.

The dying lasted longer than the killing.

When the motion under him had finished, he lowered the body’s hands and stood.

On the right side, it had taken longer. The man was on his back, which put the throat exposed but the weight distribution wrong for a clean pin.

The steppe rider moved the head to one side first with two fingers at the jaw, reading for a lighter sleep in the response. He found nothing. The knife went in and the dying ran the same as the first, the body working through its full resistance, holding it down until it stopped.

Two down. Four remaining.

Suuqai went to the third man himself, crossing the ground in a crouch, placing his feet between the hides. He reached the man and held above him for a moment. He placed his left hand under the man’s jaw and moved the head back in a slow arc.

The man’s breathing broke rhythm.

His body registered the touch before the mind could form anything from it.

Suuqai cut. The body locked with the full tension of a man whose nerves had received what they couldn’t process. Then the fight came, the legs driving, the hands reaching for whatever had found him in the dark.

Suuqai pressed him down with his knee across the chest and held his left hand over the mouth. The blood from the cut came up warm across his right hand and down the inside of his wrist.

The man’s hands found Suuqai’s coat and gripped, the grip of fingers still working when they had no reason to. Suuqai maintained the pressure and waited.

The hands released. The legs went still.

Then the right building made a sound.

It came through the felt walls as compressed violence, impact and something falling and two bodies working in a very tight space, a single syllable cut short before it formed. Then the noise of a man being taken down hard. Then nothing. Four seconds total.

In the left building, one of the sleeping men propped himself on one arm, head turning toward the wall. His eyes were open and not yet reading the room. The nearer steppe rider reached him in two steps and put him back down. Brief struggling, and then he stepped back.

The last man was against the far wall’s right side, halfway down. He was waking up. He had been since the noise from the right and he hadn’t moved. His hand rested on something under the hide at his hip.

Suuqai looked at him. The man looked at Suuqai.

The impasse didn’t take long. A steppe rider came to him before he could resist and it was done, and that made five.

Suuqai looked at the far end.

Faruk was sitting up.

Both hands flat on the ground at his sides, his back against the bundled reeds. He was watching the room, arriving at the count the room was forcing on him. The blood was in the air, copper and close, a smell that had no place here. He said something in his own language. The word of a man expecting no answer.

One of the men pressed him back against the wall and held his arms.

Suuqai crouched in front of him.

He reached into his coat and took out the small flat piece of bone he’d carried for this purpose. On one face sat the carved track of a wolf’s right forefoot, the large central pad and four toe pads and the claw marks above them.

His blade made a shallow cut across Faruk’s forehead. He pressed the carved face of the bone into the blood and turned it over slowly, twisting over the wound.

He looked at Faruk.

"Batu Khan," he said.

Two words. He said them so that Faruk could carry the name with him to the afterlife. So he knew what had come into the reeds.

Faruk’s eyes moved to the bone and then back to Suuqai’s face. A last glimpse of defiance on his gaze

Suuqai pressed the wolf’s track to Faruk’s forehead. The print came clear in the low orange light, the central pad, the four toes, the claws. He kept it for a count of three and lifted it.

Then he killed him. It was the same as the others.

He stood, wiped the bone on the inside of Faruk’s coat, and put it away. He went to the felt panel and stepped through.

Outside, the camp breathed. Banked fires across the ground. The sleeping shapes of lean-tos. At the eastern edge, the two norse at the horse picket line, one with a hand resting on the nearest animal’s neck. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Suuqai looked at the supply stacks.

The man there was watching him.

Suuqai raised his open hand, held it one second, and closed it into a fist.

He touched the fire materials to the base of the nearest stack.

Dry reed caught fast, the flame going up the full height in one breath, then sideways into the next stack, then into the lean-to behind it. The camp’s light went from banked-coal dark to something too bright and too orange, shadows running at wrong angles.

The horses broke before the first man woke. They screamed at the blaze and the picket stakes pulled from the soft delta earth without resistance. The whole line went east into the reeds in a crashing mass, the noise of them going through the stems carrying back and then the eastern edge was empty.

Men woke shouting.

The fire jumped between structures with nothing to stop it, each one feeding the next. Some men moved toward it and some moved away and none of them yet looked at the two larger structures.

Suuqai pushed north through the reed stand, no longer careful about sound. The steppe riders from the left building followed, then those from the right. The two norse from the picket line crossed the camp’s northern edge and the reeds took them.

The guide was at the near bank where he’d been left. He heard them coming and moved to the crossing point before they broke through.

They went into the water and crossed.

Back through the right-arm channel at pace, back to the dry island where the two guards were mounted. The dead prisoners were where they had been left.

They would be found when the survivors found this channel. Everything about the night was meant to be found, the wolf’s mark on Faruk’s forehead, the sentries down with clean cuts, the horses gone, the stores burning.

Any force with enough men could kill sleeping men. The message was the precision of it, the mark placed, the blaze timed, the exit clean. A decision made, and demonstrably one that would be made again, by whoever had that seal and sent it where it needed to go.

Whoever else that risked raiding the tumen would hear about it. That was in fact the larger part of it.

Suuqai turned his horse north and rode toward the road.