The Golden Tablet
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
They came through the col the next morning into Kaidu’s territory and the world changed.
Not dramatically. The mountains didn’t announce it. The sky didn’t darken. The path simply crossed a ridgeline and descended into a valley that looked like the valley behind them and was entirely different in the way that a room with someone dangerous in it looks like any other room.
Khutulun felt it before he saw anything worth feeling.
Her posture changed — subtly, the way a bowstring changes when a hand finds it in the dark, a quality of readiness that hadn’t been there before settling into her shoulders and her eyes and the way she held her horse. The Keshig felt it too, the column tightening without a word spoken, spacing adjusting, hands moving closer to weapons with the casual ease of people for whom this was simply the correct configuration for this landscape.
Niccolò put his instruments away and did not reach for them again.
They rode for two hours in a silence that was a different kind of silence than the steppe silence — inhabited, watchful, the silence of people listening to what the terrain was saying.
Then Khutulun raised her fist and the column stopped.
He came up beside her. She was looking at the valley wall to the north, at a place that looked like every other place on the valley wall to the north.
“What is it?” he asked quietly.
“Riders,” she replied. “Seven. On the ridge. They’ve been there since we came through the col.”
He looked. Saw nothing. “How do you—”
“The ravens,” she said. “Three of them tracking something along the ridge that isn’t moving fast enough to be prey.” She didn’t look at him. “Someone is watching us move.”
He looked at the ravens. Looked at the ridge. Felt the back of his neck say something his eyes couldn’t confirm.
“Kaidu’s men,” he said.
“Probably.” She was quiet for a moment, reading the ridge the way she read maps — for where you’d die. “They won’t move on a column this size in open ground. They’ll follow and wait for a better situation.”
“What’s a better situation?”
“A narrow pass. A river crossing. Somewhere the numbers don’t matter as much.” She finally looked at him. “Stay in the center of the column. If something happens you do not stop moving. You do not stop for anything.”
“And the maps?”
Her eyes went to his saddlebag where the master sheets were rolled. Something moved across her face — a calculation, rapid and complete.
“Give them to me,” she said.
He looked at her.
“If they take you they search you,” she said. “If they take me—” A pause. “They won’t take me.”
He reached into the saddlebag and pulled the master roll and held it out. She took it without ceremony and tucked it inside her coat against her body and looked at him with those direct dark eyes.
“Trust me,” she said. Not a command. Something more direct than a command.
“I already do,” he said.
Something crossed her face. Quick, unguarded, gone.
She turned to the column and they moved.
The ambush came at the river crossing two hours later.
Not the ambush Niccolò had been watching the valley walls for — the thundering cavalry charge of his imagination. The Mongolian kind, which was considerably worse: three riders materializing from behind a rock formation on the near bank as if the mountain had simply produced them, and four more appearing on the far bank simultaneously, and the column suddenly bracketed with nowhere to go that wasn’t water or stone.
The lead rider on the near bank called something across the water.
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