Heaven's Mandate - 4
In the years since the Great Subjugation War, the Empire's intelligence network across the far north had collapsed completely. Even with every effort poured into rebuilding it from the armistice to the present day, they had barely clawed back half of what they once had—and even that half had been stretched thin tracking the Heaven-Defier's bloodline rather than restored in full.
As a result, the Empire had no clear picture of the north's military strength or its internal affairs. And now the Heaven-Defier's bloodkin had proclaimed himself Khan. Tension was inevitable.
Fear of the unknown. The only experience they could lean on was the Heaven-Defier's own rampage, which had nearly driven the Empire's Mandate of Heaven to a death sentence. To respond with laxity now would be as good as declaring that the Empire and its Mandate were forfeit.
So this is what the reality looks like.
But once the veil of the unknown was torn away and the truth stood bare, the shock was of an entirely different kind.
Could the north as it stood even be called a single power? Traitors moved openly inside it, and no one lifted a hand to cut them down. Was that anything resembling normal?
A coalition, then?
No—something lower still. A coalition at least shared a common goal and fought for it. These people did not even share an objective.
The name of Khan should not be so light a thing.
His head throbbed. If some great tribal chieftain had simply raised a banner with a handful of like-minded followers, that would have been comprehensible. But the Heaven-Defier's bloodkin had named himself Khan. A mere powerbroker and a Khan stood on entirely different planes of authority.
For a man of enough skill to gather a following under that weight of authority to then fail at internal control was absurd. Anyone who could not even keep his own house in order and still called himself Khan would fall at the hands of the nomads themselves, long before the Empire needed to intervene. Other tribes would ask, by what right does the likes of you stand above us—and then they would break him.
History bore that out. Chieftains who proclaimed themselves Khan had appeared from time to time among the nomads. Their ends were all the same—death at nomad hands—and so no one had ever taken those claims seriously.
This situation cannot exist.
It was not his private stubbornness speaking. History itself said so. The futures open to a self-proclaimed Khan were two and only two: to stand above every tribe as a calamity, as the Heaven-Defier had—or to sink into the ranks of the steppe's wandering ghosts, as every pretender before him had. Absolute rule without absolute control, the kind this current Khan seemed to wield, simply did not happen.
But what was he to do about it? Incomprehensible and impossible as it was, it had happened. Denial of reality was useless. The only path left was to find a way to deal with it.
If the Khan's grip was loose, they would drive a wedge into that gap and expand the Empire's influence. And the more tribes that bowed their heads to the Empire, the more information they would gather about this bizarre state of affairs.
A high priest of a heretical faith, is it.
By that measure, the Barandiga tribe the Duke of Victory had reported on was a top-priority target for recruitment. Religion never stayed merely religion; it melted into daily life until it became the very foundation of the nomads' world.
The sole obstacle was that it was a heresy—
The Eternal Blue Sky.
Suddenly the World Tree's revival, which the Crown Prince had reported, rose in his mind.
He had examined the incident carefully at the time—a monumental event in which the World Tree, destroyed by the Apels Empire's atrocities, had been restored in the age of Crefelofen. And the cause, he recalled, had been the Audit Department Chief coming into contact with the power of a god other than Enen.
He had been flabbergasted at the time—how on earth did the Audit Department Chief get tangled up in the World Tree's revival?—but looking at it now, it was nothing short of the Great Emperor's own providence.
The god of the north revived the World Tree through an imperial subject.
That left no justification for simply crushing the faith as heresy. The World Tree was a vital presence for the Dawn Church as well.
The moment the decision settled, he activated the communication orb. Even now the war continued, and the Empire's soldiers were spilling blood in a foreign land. If there was any means of hastening the end of the fighting, a sovereign's duty was to act on it without delay.
"Your Majesty's humble servant begs to—"
"Summon Cardinal Lisiuko. I have urgent business with him."
He cut off the bowing Minister of Palace Affairs and issued the order at once.
Cardinal Lisiuko—head of the Ausen Archdiocese, the man who held the greatest authority among all Dawn Church officials within the Empire. He already knew something of the World Tree's revival. Persuading him would not take long.
Summoned by the Duke of Victory, I stepped into the command tent to find the multi-level—no, the northern map Count Kaitana had given us spread open across the table. A token of loyalty, marked with the territories of tribes whose intent to surrender was already clear.
"Auditor. Have you heard anything regarding the Barandiga tribe's domain?"
The Duke of Victory spoke without looking up from the map. I shook my head.
"Nothing of the sort, Your Grace. Over the past three years a great many tribes have relocated, and the Barandiga are said to be among them."
"Then we will need contact with tribes other than Kaitana's if we hope to find them."
"Yes, Your Grace. Unfortunately so."
Even Count Kaitana—this year's reigning champion of northern collaboration—did not have every tribe's location memorized. A tribe's territory could shift overnight, in the crudest sense of the word. Without ongoing contact, there was simply no way to track another tribe's range in real time.
On top of that, when Kagan went up in flames alongside every tribe with any real power, a mass migration crisis had erupted across the north. The lands those powerful tribes held had been the choicest real estate in the region—and suddenly they were vacant lots without owners. For the tribes that had sat back with their arms folded and watched the war, it must have looked like a gift from heaven.
The Barandiga tribe had not missed that gift from heaven, and Count Kaitana—who had never maintained much contact with them to begin with—had promptly lost track of where they were.
"That said, he did hear from other tribes that the Barandiga are currently moving toward the front."
At least Count Kaitana had secured that scrap of intelligence early in the war. It was how he had determined that the Barandiga remained neutral.
A priestly tribe whose faith had been trampled into the dirt ought to have come frothing at the mouth for revenge. If their advance was strangely slow instead, it meant the Barandiga had not yet steeled themselves for war. And yet they could not be called fully surrendered either—they had made no effort to appeal to the Empire.
"At least they are not hiding in the rear. That is fortunate."
The Duke of Victory, who had been frowning over some private calculation, looked up with visible relief. Fair enough. "Find a tribe hidden somewhere in the north" and "find a tribe that will eventually reach the front" were not remotely the same difficulty.
"His Majesty has declared that even a heretical faith, if it seeks to enter the Empire's embrace, shall be received as is proper."
"His Majesty's mercy is truly as vast as the sea."
The words of praise left my mouth on pure instinct. He was saying they would take in even the Barandiga—the very heart of the heretical faith.
Honestly, knowing the Emperor's character and his relentless focus on national interest, I had half-expected he would take them in regardless of the heresy. Still, for the Emperor of Crefelofen—beloved of Enen, bearer of the Mandate of Heaven—to shelter a heretical faith was a heavy burden. He had chosen to bear it anyway. As a subject, I was obliged to praise that resolve.
"When the Barandiga appear on the front, we will make contact. Take note of it, Auditor."
"Yes, Your Grace."
I bowed my head to the Duke of Victory.
Contact with the Barandiga would be far thornier than with the Kaitana. For one thing, they had no firm will to surrender. For another, as the last high priestly line left in the north, their piety would run deep. And toward me—the splendid villain who had ground their faith underfoot—they would hardly feel warm—
"Priests? There aren't any of those. They're all dead."
Ah. Well, that's a relief. So no one overflowing with piety, then.
...
Come again?
The wrongness hit me a beat late.
There were no priests?
The Eternal Blue Sky, who had chatted with me to dodge the fairies, had fallen silent the moment I entered the north. Even a god who refrained from meddling too heavily in human affairs would find it bitter to watch her former worshippers die up close. Besides, her true seat of power was the World Tree now.
And that same Eternal Blue Sky had broken her silence to speak for the first time in a long while—
"If even one priest had been left, I wouldn't have fallen this far. No temples, no priests—that's why I was stuck living in your body."
—with news that was nothing short of devastating.
Thinking back, I was fairly sure I had heard something similar the first time I met the Eternal Blue Sky. Damn it, why had I forgotten? Had meeting a god short-circuited my memory?
The priesthood, annihilated.
Anyway, the information had been updated, so I started turning it over again. If even the Barandiga priests—who had never followed Kagan—were dead, that meant the Empire had gone out of its way to kill priests uninvolved in the war, all for the sake of crushing the heretical faith.
Which sent the difficulty of any negotiation skyrocketing. How were they supposed to trust an Empire that had attacked them while they sat quietly—
"Ah, the last priest died of natural causes. Went peacefully of old age, right in front of his family."
……
Information updated again.
"His son inherited both the chieftain's seat and the priesthood… but something went wrong during the succession, and he never actually performed the priest's duties."
Maybe because the temple got smashed? she muttered, and I could not bring myself to open my mouth.
This is driving me insane.
Lately, every single time I ran the numbers, reality came back with a different answer.
Tribes deserting in broad daylight. Count Kaitana's dazzling career as a collaborator. And now a final high priest who lived out his days in comfort until the line simply… ended.
Damn it all.
Was the north genuinely cursed? I could not predict a single thing, not even the smallest detail.
We had mutton last night, so maybe horse today?
"Chieftain, we will reach the front in a matter of days. We could collide with the Empire."
And on top of that, drinking nothing but fermented mare's milk every single day had gotten beyond tedious. Imperial liquor was too precious to throw around casually.
"You need to take a position! As high priest, will you stand against the heretics, or will you follow the tide?"
Still—every so often, a man ought to be allowed something rare. Drink was for drinking, not for decoration—
"Father!"
"I am listening."
I answered Shati's shriek with all the enthusiasm of wet sand.
Watching my only daughter shake with rage made me feel a little bad, but the unfortunate truth was that Shati held a wildly inflated fantasy of what a high priest was supposed to be.
High priest, my ass.
What use was a high priest to a faith that had lost its temple, its sacred relics, its hope, and its future?
In the last war our tribe had stayed neutral on account of my father's advanced age, but that did not mean we had looked away. The Apostle of the Eternal Blue Sky, the Grand High Priest, and the first Khan to ever unify the nomads—when a being like that was driving the Empire back, how could anyone simply turn their face aside?
But the Apostle had gone to the god's side. The Grand High Priest no longer spread the faith upon this earth. And the Khan had fallen before the Empire's blades.
We were finished. Our belief, our faith—all of it had collapsed that day. So high priest or not, the title was empty noise. And yet in this mess, the others still looked at me with quiet expectation simply because I carried that name.
Do they think a high priest grows his head back after it is cut off?
I would count myself lucky if the Empire did not come hunting me for sport.
I could have renounced the title, of course—but the single strongest thread holding our tribe together was that very name. Which was why I had been stuck wearing this white elephant for years.
And it was enough to drive a man mad. As Shati said, following the tide meant being far too entangled in this worthless trinket—and following a faith already dead meant throwing my life away for nothing.
Life is a goddamn joke.
No matter how I looked at it, it made me furious. Our own people I could understand—they were a tribe bound together by a high priest's authority. But why the hell were the other tribes pinning their hopes on me? Had I ever offered so much as a single horse or a strip of land just because I was high priest?
If Kagan were still alive, not one of them would have dared open their mouths.
What a miserable life this was.