The Khan Derby
What followed that sudden performance was silence. The chieftains’ declaration that they would offer the Emperor the seat of Khan had not been arranged in advance—it was a spontaneous act. Even a political monster would struggle to produce an immediate response to an incident of this scale.
I was standing off to the side as a spectator and still had no idea what to say; how much worse must it have been for the Duke of Victory, who had taken the whole thing head-on? Thankfully the chieftains had carefully, repeatedly framed it as a petition to the Emperor. Had they not made the subject crystal clear, it would have looked as if they were urging the Duke of Victory himself to become Khan—and the atmosphere would have demanded an immediate march back to the Imperial Capital.
Khan, huh.
In any case, I spun my thoughts quickly through the sudden crisis. The nomads’ petition that the Emperor become their Khan meant nothing more than an additional concurrent title for His Majesty. He already held several kingships. Would one more Khan really show?
…It would.
Unfortunately, it would show like hell. The Empire did not officially recognize the title of Khan, let alone Kagan. Whether the Emperor accepted that label or refused it would reshape the order of the entire continent.
Even without recognizing the Khanate, the Empire’s occupation of the North would suffer no hindrance. The influential men who herded sheep across the northern wastes had already received imperial titles; they were the Emperor’s vassals and members of the Empire. By any measure, the North would be imperial territory.
But if the title of Khan were acknowledged and the Emperor held it concurrently, the North would no longer be mere undeveloped land the Empire had conquered. It would look as though a nation called the North had joined the Empire of its own will. Word games, perhaps—but in politics, those subtle distinctions snowball.
Ownerless land becomes a domain with a rightful master.
And that would be a problem. If, by some turn of events, the Khan title slipped from the Emperor’s hands—or if the nomads started shouting about a “home-grown Khan of our own making” and tried to nationalize the office—the North we had only just secured would break away. Not as scattered tribes, either, but as a single North united under a Khan.
Of course, every disadvantage has its counterpart. Accepting the title of Khan would lock down imperial control of the North with iron certainty. It would no longer be a matter of simply making local strongmen into nobles; the Emperor would become the rightful ruler by the North’s own acclamation.
Complicated.
It was not a problem to be settled lightly. So long as the Empire remained solid, the Khanate would be the sturdiest possible control mechanism for the North. But if the Empire ever faltered, that same title could come flying back as a fatal dagger.
“That those who wandered without a rightful master should place their trust in His Majesty is only proper.”
The Duke of Victory, having finished his own calculations, spoke at last.
“This one shall report your loyalty and resolve to His Majesty.”
A perfectly natural answer—that he would convey the matter to the Emperor—drew no objection from the chieftains. A subject could not arbitrarily dispose of an honor meant for the throne.
And the next morning, the Emperor’s reply arrived.
From this day forward, the Emperor of the Kpelleofen Empire was King of Tiraf, Groten, Latia, Prunian, and Galan—and Khan of the North.
So it’s a Khan derby now.
Imported Khan versus domestic Khan. My chest swelled with grandeur all on its own.
Word that Eimanka XVI of the Kpelleofen Empire had become Corvus Khan of the North spread across the entire northern wilderness. The Empire itself barely lifted a finger in the process.
Of course not—the chieftains who had made the nomination were far more desperate than the Empire ever was. They had clustered in the garrison insisting they would not leave until they heard the Emperor’s answer, and the moment word came that he had accepted, they evolved into living loudspeakers.
Had the Emperor refused the nomination, murmurs might have circulated among the tribes: We understand you wanted the tribes safe, but wasn’t that a bit much? Having overcome that burden and become founding heroes of the Khan’s enthronement, they were understandably thrilled. The distance between a stooge and a hero of the realm is a single sheet of paper.
“We end this war before autumn is out, at the latest.”
With the Khan derby thus established, the Duke of Victory set his own cutoff. Several months still remained before autumn would pass, but given that the last war had dragged on for two years, the declaration was pure swagger.
No one contradicted him. The nomination of the Khan had unlocked most of the shackles the Empire had been wearing.
“Every tribe has sworn to take the field. They say they will cast down the false Khan and establish peace.”
From the moment they offered the Emperor the name of Khan, the surrendered tribes began to behave as if a limiter had been removed. Where once they had fretted over their own safety, they now declared their active cooperation in the campaign against Dorgon.
As a result, the forces the Empire could actually deploy swelled at a stroke. With the surrendered tribes on the battlefield, the troops that had been guarding and watching them could be redirected elsewhere, and the expanded cavalry strength kept Dorgon’s host from prowling the borders.
There was no longer any need to put on a forced show of invincibility, either. Until now, even minor adjustments of the front lines had been kept to a minimum for fear that any appearance of the Imperial Army faltering against Dorgon might send the surrendered tribes bolting again. Common sense said a force of a little over ten thousand could never truly endanger the Imperial Army—but the Empire and the nomads had already spent two years watching monsters that operated outside common sense.
I can finally breathe.
The days until now had been tearfully hard. In the last war the mindset had been simple—just kill the Kagan by any means necessary—and every tool had been thrown into the fight. This war was different. There was so much more to protect.
We had to project the Empire’s unbroken strength so the surrendered tribes would keep their faith. We had to peel off troops to guarantee their safety and keep them under watch. We had to scour the borders like madmen for the sake of the barely recovered imperial north. We had to avoid large-scale clashes as much as possible to minimize the aftershocks of mobilizing an expeditionary force…
The high command had sighed through the miracle of having to fight under every one of those conditions at once. Even in games, clearing the stage is easy; clearing it with every bonus objective is the real nightmare.
But now those restraints and shackles could be cast aside. All that remained was to crush Dorgon under overwhelming numbers.
We will never get a better board than this.
Dorgon’s host, once estimated at sixty to seventy thousand, had fallen to around fourteen thousand. Against that, the Empire fielded an expeditionary army of over two hundred thousand, with the surrendered tribes joining the ranks as well.
The Khan nomination had driven allied morale to its absolute peak. A commander’s virtue is to fight under the best possible conditions—and conditions better than these would never come again. Now was the moment.
This is going to end.
Strength gathered of its own accord in the hands clasped behind my back. I had not faced Dorgon since the Battle of Sarei, but soon enough I would. Soon enough, I could finish this.
“Then let’s be off. Today wasn’t the day—but next time, let’s fight properly.”
He had said as much himself. I did not believe he would run.
If he had been the sort to run at this stage, he would never have risen in the first place.
Maybe it was because I had failed to die when everyone else did—I kept hearing the strangest stories.
Khan, of all things.
A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. Plenty of men had styled themselves Khan or received the acclamation before, but I had never imagined the day would come when the nomads would nominate an imperial as their Khan.
Only a few years ago I would have called it impossible. But today, both legitimacy and practical interest had made an imperial Khan possible. Heaven itself had permitted it.
“They say the man who already has everything only wants more. Looks like the saying was right.”
Dashan could not manage any reaction to the half-joking remark.
He neither exploded in outrage that an imperial could never be called Khan, nor blamed his own inadequacy for how things had come to this. The shock of watching common sense collapse had apparently left him without words. A pity.
“If he’s Emperor and Khan both, what the hell are we supposed to call him? Kagan?”
“My Khan!”
Even Dashan, still reeling, could not help but flinch and shout at the word Kagan.
“A joke. The Emperor himself would hate being called that in the first place.”
Yes—Kagan was a nightmare of a word for both the Empire and its Emperor. He would hardly want to be addressed by it.
Unless he was some kind of extreme pervert, that is.
“And them?”
“They are adjusting the front lines on a massive scale. It seems we will clash on the plains before long.”
I nodded at that. If an Empire with nothing left to hold it back had quietly maintained a defensive posture, I would have found it more suspicious.
The days of touring the various fronts to pay my respects were over. It had been a fairly tiresome business—whether I ought to be glad it was ending, or steel my resolve because the end was approaching, I could not quite decide.
“We wait until the Empire moves. A glorious finale is waiting for us; no need to waste our strength beforehand.”
“Yes, my Khan.”
I stepped close to Dashan as he bowed his head in answer and clapped him on the shoulder. In the last war we had been fellow keshik; afterward, comrades in vagrancy. The bond ran deep. Now he was suffering as my loyal adjutant.
And now I was about to lay a burden on him that would be nearly impossible to bear. All I felt was apology—and gratitude.
“If you change your mind, tell me at any time.”
Dashan only bowed to the waist without a word. I huffed a quiet laugh watching him.
I knew his mind would never change. Even so, I had wanted to ask again.
Signs that the Empire was about to move had appeared, so I began my preparations in earnest.
Quite a few left.
The fighting had thinned our numbers, but more than ten thousand still gathered. That so many lunatics like myself remained was almost astonishing.
“When five humans gather, one of them is garbage.”
“What the hell kind of nonsense is that.”
Suddenly I remembered something Crassius Karl had said long ago. His mouth had been ruinous in every sense of the word, constantly spitting out bizarre remarks—yet that particular line had stuck in my memory with uncanny force.
Perhaps because some part of me had agreed with it. I was confirming its truth even now, wasn’t I?
Roughly one in five, yes.
Damn that bastard. What made it worse was that he never said anything that was actually wrong.
I brushed the spell-scroll nestled against my chest. I had made only a single copy—prepared in the spirit that if even this one failed, Heaven simply did not will it.
It will succeed.
I had no grounds for the belief, yet my confidence was strangely overflowing.
It was a magnificent device for crowning our finale. Something of this caliber was bound to work.