The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 12
The plateau opened before them like a held breath finally released.
After three days of walls — rock faces and narrow paths and valleys that pressed in from both sides — the sudden breadth of it hit Niccolò physically, a loosening in his chest he hadn’t known was tight. The Tianshan dropped away behind them and ahead the land flattened into an enormous pale expanse under a sky that went on without apology in every direction.
The Keshig felt it too. Something in the column eased — not discipline, that never eased — but the particular tension of people who have been moving through dangerous ground and have just left it. Horses stretched into longer strides. Shoulders dropped. Someone near the back of the column said something that produced a short burst of laughter quickly contained.
Khutulun rode beside him for the first time since leaving the monastery.
Not at the head of the column where she belonged by habit and authority. Beside him, her stallion matching his horse’s pace, the plateau spreading around them and the Keshig tactfully redistributing themselves in a way that left a corridor of privacy neither Niccolò nor Khutulun acknowledged.
They rode in silence for a while. The good kind — the kind that had accumulated between them over eleven days of mountain road and didn’t require filling.
“Kaidu won’t follow past the plateau boundary,” she said eventually.
“How far is the boundary.”
“We crossed it an hour ago.” She looked straight ahead. “He knows better than to bring a dispute with the Paiza onto open ground. Too many witnesses out here. Traders, herdsmen, imperial messengers.” A pause. “Out here everything reaches my father eventually.”
“And what reaches your father about us,” he asked. “Eventually.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Everything,” she said. “Always. He has eyes on every road.” She glanced at him sideways. “He probably knows you’re here already. He certainly knows where I am.”
“Does he know about the monastery.”
A longer pause. “He will.”
Niccolò absorbed this. The plateau moved around them, vast and indifferent, and somewhere ahead of it Shangdu waited with Kublai Khan and his court and his uncles and the full weight of the Golden Lineage’s opinion about Venetian mapmakers.
“How much time do we have,” he asked.
“Before Shangdu? Eight days.”
“Before the conversation we’re going to have to have with your father.”
She looked at him. “That depends on how fast his messengers ride.”
“So potentially less than eight days.”
“Potentially considerably less,” she agreed.
He nodded slowly. He had known this was coming — had known it in the monastery and on the road and in every mile since the meadow — and had told her he had a map for it. He intended to honor that. He was simply aware, riding across the plateau with the Tianshan behind him and Shangdu ahead, that the territory between those two points was going to require everything he had.
“Tell me about him,” he said. “Not the Khan. Your father.”
She looked at him with a slight adjustment of expression — surprise, quickly housed. “Why.”
“Because you know terrain before you ride into it,” he said. “Tell me the terrain.”
She considered this for a moment with the gravity she brought to decisions regardless of scale. Then she began to talk.
Kublai, she told him, was not the Khan of Venetian imagination.
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