The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10
The monastery appeared out of the mountain dark like something the rock had always contained and only recently decided to reveal.
Three hours of hard riding in failing light, the path narrowing as it climbed, the horses picking their footing by instinct more than visibility. Niccolò had stopped trying to read the terrain an hour back and had given himself over entirely to following Khutulun’s silhouette ahead of him in the dark — the set of her shoulders, the angle of her head, the way she read the path without appearing to look at it.
He had, he realized, stopped questioning her completely. Somewhere between the river crossing and the narrows and the meadow it had simply become the natural order of things — she knew this country and he didn’t and trusting her cost him nothing and had so far saved his life at least once.
He followed her and watched the dark and thought about the monastery.
The gates opened before they reached them. Someone had been watching the approach road, which meant she had sent word ahead, which meant she had planned for this contingency before it became a contingency. He filed that alongside everything else he had filed about her and felt the file straining at its original dimensions.
Inside the courtyard torchlight threw long shadows across a row of monks with the patient expressions of men accustomed to soldiers arriving at inconvenient hours and having made their theological peace with it. An elderly monk came forward — small, unhurried, with the particular quality of stillness that belongs to people who have spent decades in the same stone rooms doing the same stone things.
He and Khutulun spoke briefly in a dialect Niccolò didn’t have. She was different here — not softer exactly, but the authority she carried was held differently, the way you carry something valuable in someone else’s house. Respectful in the specific way of a person who understands that different rules apply in different spaces and honors that without being told.
The monk looked at Niccolò once with the frank curiosity of a man encountering something genuinely outside his established categories. Then he looked back at Khutulun and said something that made two of the younger monks exchange a glance.
Khutulun replied. Three words, even and unbothered.
The elderly monk looked at Niccolò again. Then he almost smiled — the monastery version, small and internal and belonging entirely to himself — and gestured toward the inner courtyard.
“What did he ask,” Niccolò said quietly as they dismounted.
“If you were my prisoner,” she replied, handing her stallion to a waiting monk without looking at him.
“And you said?”
She looked at him over the horse’s back. “Not exactly,” she said, and walked into the monastery.
He stood in the courtyard for a moment in the torchlight.
Not exactly.
He followed her in.
They were given two rooms on opposite sides of a stone courtyard the size of a generous breathing space.
The Keshig distributed themselves along the walls with the efficiency of people converting architecture into a defensive perimeter without being asked or making a production of it. Foscari located his bedroll with the focused dedication of a man for whom sleep had become a spiritual practice. Riva had acquired somewhere on the road a bruised cheekbone and a story he was telling to anyone whose language he could approximate.
Niccolò sat in his room with his lamp and his maps and worked.
He was good at working. He had been good at it since Venice, since his grandfather’s maps spread across the workshop table and the smell of ink and vellum had become the smell of everything that mattered. In fifteen years of mapmaking across three continents work had been the reliable thing — the thing that was there when nothing else was, the thing that made sense when the world didn’t.
Tonight the maps made sense and his mind was elsewhere entirely.
He transferred the day’s observations from memory to paper with hands that knew what they were doing without requiring his full attention and thought about the meadow and the hot spring and three days of riding in which something had been building with the slow inevitability of mountain weather — visible from a distance, undeniable up close, and now here.
He thought about two hours before light and the road to the plateau and Kaidu’s men on the ridge making their calculations.
He thought about her in the room on the other side of the courtyard.
He put his maps away.
He sat in the dark and listened to the monastery breathe — the deep settled silence of stone that had absorbed centuries of prayer and was not troubled by soldiers or Venetians or the particular difficulty of lying in the dark thinking about someone on the other side of a courtyard.
Outside, footsteps crossed the stone.
He was at the door frame before the knock landed.
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