The Winds of Tepr

The wind howls. A constant, grinding force from the east, it flattens the steppe grass and scours the earth, carrying with it the taste of things better left buried. The air is a grey-green soup, thick with plumes of smoke that crawl, low and malevolent, torn into tattered banners by the gale. It tastes of copper and rancid fat, a metallic tang that coats the tongue and clings to the back of the throat. High above, vultures circle in wide, patient gyres, their shadows stitching a dark pattern onto the smeared earth.

Gani stands at the heart of the transformation. Before her, zig-zag berms rise like the spines of buried dragons. Wagon lunettes, their wheels buried and beds filled with stones, form jagged teeth. Two chevroned lines of ditches scar the earth, and before them, rows of pits yawn, their mouths hidden under fragile lattices of brush and turf. It is a landscape of calculated malice, each trench and mound a declaration of war written in the soil.

"Deeper there," her voice cuts through the wind. A group of youths, their faces smeared with mud and sweat, redouble their efforts, digging into the stubborn earth. "The camel is a tall beast. Its panic is deep. Make it fall, and it will not rise easily." She moves along the line, her eyes missing nothing—a poorly camouflaged pit lid, a berm with too gentle a slope. Her presence is a cold fire, forging their fear into purpose.

Tseren rides along the emerging lines, his form slightly hunched in the saddle. He confers with his screen commanders, his voice a low rumble against the wind's higher pitch. "No muskets in the screens. Horse-archers and lasso riders only. Your task is to be a flickering flame, a temptation. You harry, you sting, you lure. You make them blind with rage and chase you right into the earth's jaws." He points toward the disguised pits. "Then, you peel away. The lancers wait in the lee of the second berm."

He glances toward Gani, a figure of stark resolve against the churning sky. A sudden, thicker wave of the corpse-smoke drifts across them, and Tseren winces, his stomach turning at the sweet, putrid odor. It is the smell of violated graves, of pyres that should have been sacred. Gani, feeling his gaze, turns her head. She does not flinch from the smell. She meets his eyes, and in her look there is no apology, no shared revulsion, only a fierce, terrible certainty.

"The wind is our ally today," she says, her words carried to him on the very breeze that carries the stench. "It remembers who we are."

Elsewhere, Lanau stands before the forty Banners-at-home, the heart of Naci's new hope. They are young, their faces a mixture of bravado and terror, clutching their long-barreled muskets like foreign talismans.

"Again!" Lanau's voice is a drill-master's whip. "Dry-fire! Measure your powder! Do not waste a grain, your life is in that horn! Prime the pan! Now, raise! Feel the weight! Find your target! Hold!"

The movements are clumsy, uncertain. A boy fumbles his powder measure, scattering black grains onto the dirt. Lanau is there in an instant, with a grip on his wrist that makes him gasp. "That is your blood spilling on the ground, boy. Pick it up. With your fingers. Taste the cost." Mortified, the boy scrabbles in the dirt.

She assigns them into files, a powder-runner for every two men and women, a misfire pair to swap weapons when a lock sparks but fails to fire.

A scout arrives, his horse lathered, his face cloth tied tight against the smoke. He reports to Tseren, his words tumbling out. "The Yohazatz vanguard… after only six days of smoke, their camel riders are feeling it. Coughing, eyes running. They are trying to find lanes, skirting the densest banks of smoke. They are probing. Looking for a way in."

Tseren nods, his jaw tight. He looks from the scout, to the diligently drilling Banners, to the earthworks, and finally to his wife.

...

The world, for the Yohazatz vanguard, has become a tasting-plate of hell. The great, shaggy war-camels, usually imperturbable as mountains, now bellow and toss their heads, ropes of foul-smelling foam dripping from their lips. Their eyes weep constant, sticky tears, blinking against the particulate filth that rides the wind. The riders have tied cloths soaked in sour mare's milk over their noses and mouths, a desperate remedy that does little more than exchange one stench for another, creating a pungent, cloying barrier against the copper-rancid taste of the Tepr corpse-smoke.

Captain Borchu, a veteran whose face is a roadmap of old scars, spits a glob of phlegm that is tinged with soot. He gestures with his whip towards the creeping banks of smoke. "This is not a wind, it is a poison! My beasts are half-blinded. We should pull back, wait for a turn. Let this devil's breath blow itself out on the empty plains. To charge into this is to fight blindfolded."

A younger scout, his eyes wide with a superstitious terror, nods fervently. "The scouts speak truth, Lord Nemeh. This is Tepr witchcraft. Their shamans have bargained with fever-demons to curse the very air. No natural fire burns this way, or smells of… of that." He cannot bring himself to name the source of the stench, as if giving it voice would grant it more power.

They are clustered around Nemeh, a figure of unsettling calm in the midst of the brewing panic. He sits astride his own magnificent camel, Jaran, a beast known for its preternatural stillness. Unlike his men, he wears no scented cloth. He breathes the tainted air deeply, as if sampling a fine wine, his eyes fixed on the distorted landscape ahead—the zig-zag berms and suspiciously smooth ground that speaks of hidden traps.

"The Tepr have no demons but their own cowardice," Nemeh replies, his voice a low, resonant hum that cuts through the animals' distress calls. There is a fanatic heat in his eyes, a light that seems untroubled by the streaming eyes of his mount or the coughing of his men. "They hide behind smoke and holes in the ground. They think we are children, frightened by shadows."

He turns his gaze upon Borchu, and the older captain feels a chill that has nothing to do with the wind. "Pain is a sieve, Borchu. Fear is a sieve. It separates the strong from the weak, the faithful from the doubter. The weak will clog, their hearts and lungs filling with dread. We," he says, his hand sweeping to encompass the entire war-host, "will pass through."

"But the pits, Lord—" another captain begins.

"We will find the pits with their lives," Nemeh interrupts, his tone still conversational. "A staggered wedge. The front ranks will test the ground. They will find the traps for those who follow." There is no malice in the statement. The lives of the vanguard are a currency to be spent on cartography.

He then turns to his drummers, young boys whose faces are pale beneath their grime. "You will keep the cadence. No matter what you see, no matter what you hear—the scream of a beast, the cry of a man—you will keep the cadence. When the world panics, rhythm is the anchor. The drum is the heartbeat of the host. Do not let it falter."

The order is given. There are no more arguments. The captains wheel their camels, shouting commands, forcing the anxious animals into a formation that resembles a giant, multi-layered arrowhead pointed at the heart of the Tepr defenses. The drummers begin their beat, a deep, resonant thump-thump-THUMP that struggles against the wind, a stubborn assertion of order in the face of chaos.

From his position, Nemeh watches the first wedge begin its advance, a slow, canting walk that quickly breaks into a ground-eating lope. The camels, despite their distress, respond to the familiar urgency, their long legs eating up the distance. He can see the riders leaning forward, their eyes straining to pick out the tell-tale signs of the pits, their bodies tense as coiled springs.

He does not pray. He does not fret. He watches, a sculptor observing the first chisel strikes on a block of marble. The smoke swirls around the advancing wedge, swallowing the flanks, making them seem like phantoms. The drums beat on, a sound that is both ridiculous and profoundly grim—the soundtrack to a calculated sacrifice.

The first rank hits the Tepr's first line of brush-covered pits. The world seems to lurch. Two camels in the front vanish as the earth itself opens up beneath them, their terrified screams cutting off with a sickening, wet finality. The sound is brief, but it echoes in the sudden silence that follows, a silence the drums quickly rush to fill.

Nemeh's expression does not change. He merely notes the location, the depth, the spacing. The sieve is working. The weak—the unlucky—have clogged. The path is now clearer for the strong who follow.

...

The night is a shroud, but it cannot hide the smell. The wind still blows, a constant, grieving moan across the steppe, carrying the ghost of the day's transgressions. Here, in the lee of a great earthwork berm, a single fire struggles against the gloom, its flames flattened and whispering as the poisoned wind sighs past like a spectral surf. The light it casts is fitful, painting the three women's faces in flickering strokes of orange and shadow.

Keliz sits. Her hands, usually so capable and calm, are clenched into white-knuckled fists in her lap. She is a woman woven from the old ways, her soul steeped in the rhythms of the sky-burials and the sacred silence of the open plains. Her gaze is fixed on Gani, and in it burns the clean, hot fire of betrayal.

"This wind," Keliz begins, her voice low but sharp as a flint blade. "It does not carry only smoke. It carries a stain. A stain on the land, on our honor, on the memory of our ancestors. We have taken what was meant for the sky and the earth and the sacred circle of return, and we have turned it into a weapon. This is a violation of the old burial laws. It is an offense to mercy. What will the animals eat tomorrow? And what will they become?"

The words hang in the smoky air, an indictment that seems to make the very fire flinch. The old laws are not just rules; they are the covenant between the people of Tepr and the spirit of the land itself.

Lizem sits besides them, a figure of practical sorrow. She stirs a pot of bitter tea over the fire, the motion steady.

"The law's heart, Keliz, has always been the keeping of the living," Lizem says, her voice weary but firm. She does not look at either woman, but into the flames, as if seeking an answer in their chaotic dance. "The laws of sky-burial were made so that disease would not fester among the tents, so that the living would not sicken from the dead. Is this so different? A field burned today, sown with salt and sorrow, may yet grow wheat for our grandchildren tomorrow. It is a terrible sowing, but is the harvest of survival not sacred too?"

She is reframing the argument from one of desecration to one of brutal, tragic necessity. It is a lawyer's argument, a diplomat's plea, and it fails to touch the raw, spiritual nerve that Keliz has exposed.

Gani has been silent, her posture as unyielding as the berm at their backs. She finally lifts her head, and the firelight catches the absolute, lucid certainty in her eyes. There is no rage there, no defensiveness. Only a profound, and terrible, peace.

"Then let memory damn me if it must," Gani says, her voice quiet yet carrying over the wind. "Let the songs forget my name, or sing it only as a curse. Let the spirits of the air and earth turn their faces from me in the next world." She leans forward slightly, and the fire seems to burn brighter in her gaze. "But if our grandchildren breathe the free air of this steppe—if they live to curse my name or bless it—because I was the villain who dared to stain my hands so theirs could remain clean… then my bones will sing in the darkness. I will wear my damnation as a crown."

The confession is so absolute, so stripped of any desire for redemption, that it steals the breath from both women. Keliz looks as if she has been struck. This is not the defiance she expected; it is a full, conscious surrender to infamy. It is a price Gani has calculated and is willing to pay, down to the last coin of her eternal soul.

For a long moment, there is only the sound of the wind and the crackle of the fire. The gulf between them is now a chasm, carved not by disagreement, but by fundamentally different understandings of what it means to be Tepr, and what cost is too high to pay for its survival.

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Finally, Keliz rises. Her body is stiff with a pain that is more than physical. She looks down at Gani, and her expression is a heartbreaking tangle of revulsion and a sorrow so deep it borders on love. "May the wind forget your name," she whispers, a curse that is also a release. "And may the earth, in its mercy, remember your reasons."

She turns and melts into the darkness beyond the firelight, leaving her blessing and her condemnation hanging in the air together, inseparable.

Lizem watches her go, then lets out a slow, shaky breath. She says nothing. Instead, she stands, moves to where Gani sits, her own body trembling with the unspeakable weight of the day and the night. With a tenderness that is both maternal and elegiac, she reaches out and adjusts the fold of Gani's heavy cloak, tightening it against the insidious chill of the wind. It is not forgiveness—forgiveness is too small a word for what has been done. It is an acknowledgment. A silent pact between two mothers that, in this terrible new world they are making, they will not let the other stand entirely alone in the dark.

...

Dawn does not break so much as it bleeds into the world, a thin, watery light struggling through the particulate haze that still clings to the earth. The wind has not relented; it is a constant, nervous presence, whipping at pennants and stinging the eyes of the waiting Tepr. In this grim half-light, the final, meticulous rituals of war are observed.

Lanau moves through the ranks of the home Banners like a restless spirit. The youthful bravado of the previous days has been burned away, replaced by a pale, focused tension. Her voice is a low, steady drill, cutting through the ambient anxiety.

"Blacken the barrels," she commands, and the warriors obey, rubbing soot from cold firepits along the metal to kill any betraying gleam. "Check your flints. A spark is a life. A dull edge is a death." She moves down the line, her sharp eyes missing nothing. She pauses before a young woman whose hands are trembling so violently she can barely hold her musket. Lanau does not chastise her. Instead, she places her own steadying hand over the girl's, guiding her through the motion of priming the pan. "The fear is just a wind in your gut," Lanau murmurs, for her ears alone. "Let it blow through you. It cannot steer the shot. Only your breath can do that."

Nearby, the horse-archers of the screening force work with a different, quieter intensity. They grease the bellies of their bows with mutton fat to keep the strings supple in the damp, foul air, their movements economical, practiced. Theirs is the old way, the swift and silent death, and they cast occasional, skeptical glances at the clunky, noisy machines the Banners clutch.

At the center of it all, Tseren stands with Gani. He looks older in the weak light, the lines on his face etched deep by fever and the weight of command. He holds a small, worn cup of kumis. He does not offer it to the sky gods or the spirits of the earth. Instead, he kneels, with a painful slowness that speaks of his infirmity, and pours the milky liquor onto the soil at Gani's feet.

"For our Khan," he says, his voice thick with an emotion that is both old love and terrible, newfound iron. The gesture is unequivocal. He is ceding the moral and martial authority of this day to her. He honors not just the ruler, but the ruthless architect of their survival.

Gani meets his gaze, and in that look passes a lifetime of shared sunsets and this single, shared descent into necessary damnation. No words are needed. The pact was sealed in the night.

Around them, the final preparations are made. Signalers take their positions, holding painted pennants ready to mark shifting gaps in the drifting smoke banks. Crews of youths, their faces set in masks of grim determination, smear fresh, wet loam over the lids of the pit-traps, erasing the scars of the previous days' testing.

From the Yohazatz lines, the world is a smear of ochre and grey. The "feeler" wedge, a hundred camels strong, canters forward, a probing finger into the murk. The drumbeat is faster now, a frantic pulse trying to outrace the fear. The riders lean low, their eyes raking the ground ahead, searching for the subtle tell-tale dip, the slight variation in the grass that spells a hidden grave.

The Tepr response is instantaneous and fluid. A swarm of skirmishers—horse-archers and lasso riders—peels away from the main berms. They are ghosts on horseback, riding parallel to the advancing wedge, letting loose a thin, mocking cloud of arrows that mostly clatter off shields or bury themselves in the dirt. Their purpose is not to kill, but to enrage, to distract, to draw the eye away from the ground and up to the elusive, taunting foe.

It works.

A young Yohazatz rider, his face contorted with a mix of fear and fury, spurs his camel forward, breaking the wedge's cohesion in his eagerness to crush one of the darting skirmishers. His mount's front legs hit a camouflaged brush-lid that splinters like rotten bone. The world opens up. The camel disappears into the darkness with a shriek that is cut off with a wet, final crunch. The rider is flung forward, his body snapping against the far edge of the pit. A moment later, a second camel, unable to check its momentum, plunges into the same trap, its scream joining the first in a brief, horrific duet.

On the berm, Lanau watches, her jaw muscle bunching. She raises a hand, holding the Banners in check. "Hold your fire," she growls, her voice tight. "Let the pits do their work. Wait for the heart of the wedge."

The Tepr skirmishers, their lethal dance complete, wheel away, melting back towards the safety of the lines. They have done their job. The Yohazatz wedge, though bloodied, is now enraged, its focus torn between the hidden earth and the retreating enemy.

From his vantage point, Nemeh observes the carnage with the dispassionate eye of a strategist. He sees the two pits, their locations now grimly marked. He notes their depth, their spacing. He sees how the Tepr smoke is thickest to the west, a bank of almost solid gloom. "The pits are shallow but many," he murmurs to a captain. "The smoke is their strongest shield on the left." His decision is made with chilling speed. "Commit the left and center wedges. Full charge. The right wedge will sweep wide, around the second berm. Go where the air is clearer."

The order goes out. The drums change their rhythm, becoming a relentless, driving thunder. The main body of the Yohazatz host begins to move, a tide of fur and muscle and steel, splitting into two powerful fists. The left and center, thousands strong, drive directly into the heart of the smoke and the pits, while the right peels away in a wide, flanking arc.

On the berm, Lanau watches the colossal wave of the main charge begin its descent, her hand still raised, the order to fire burning on her tongue, waiting for the perfect, terrible moment.

The world shrinks to the space between the berm and the advancing wall of fur and fury. The thunder of thousands of camel hooves is a physical pressure, a vibration that climbs from the earth into the bones of the waiting Banners. Lanau stands before them, a rock in the storm. Her voice, trained to carry over gales, cuts through the din.

"Prime!"

The action is a frantic symphony of fumbling horns and shaking hands. Black powder spills, a costly dark rain on the dirt.

"Present!"

Forty muskets rise, the long barrels wavering like reeds in the wind, seeking targets in the swirling, smoke-choked chaos. The Yohazatz wedge is a nightmare of rolling eyes and gnashing teeth, so close now the Banners can see the intricate stitching on the riders' saddles.

"On my word—" Lanau's shout is a drawn wire. "Fire!"

The line erupts.

It is a stuttering, discordant symphony of fire and failure. A third of the muskets roar, belching great gouts of flame and smoke that blend instantly with the morbid haze. The results are as messy as the volley itself. A Yohazatz rider screams, his shoulder exploding into a red mist, his arm hanging by a shred of sinew. A camel stumbles, a leg shot out from under it, ploughing a furrow in the earth with its face. But most plow forward, the lead balls whistling past them or embedding themselves with sickening thuds into heavy leather armor, maddening the beasts but not stopping them.

Another third of the muskets cough out a pathetic pfft of sparks from the pan—a misfire. The boys holding them stare in dumb horror at their silent, treacherous weapons. The final third fire high, the shots tearing uselessly through the air above the riders' heads, or too soon, the balls spent and buried in the ground twenty paces short.

The acrid, eye-watering cloud of their own gunpowder smoke blinds them. A boy, choking, fires his reloaded musket straight into the back of the comrade in front of him, who collapses without a sound.

"Misfire pairs, forward!" Lanau bellows, wading into the chaos. She physically shoves a terrified youth whose weapon has failed, pulling the boy from the second line into his place. "Swap and load! Now!" Her eyes scan the disintegrating formation. She sees a file leader, a boy no older than sixteen, frozen, urine darkening his trousers, his musket shaking so violently it clicks against his helmet. She grabs him by his collar, yanking him back so hard he gasps.

"Breathe," she snarls, her face inches from his, the scent of his fear sharp in her nostrils. "Count. One breath, you little fool, or you're dead!" She shoves him towards the rear, turning her attention to the larger tactical disaster. The volley has not broken the charge; it has sheared its edges, but the core, a dense column of rage and pain, is now funneling into the clearest lanes between the smoke banks.

"Oblique fire!" she screams, pointing her sword. "Files three through five, target the left lane! Six through eight, the right! Don't aim at the front, cut the sides! Shear the wedge! Make it bleed from the edges!"

The momentum of the camel charge is a force of nature. It slams into the zig-zag elbows of the main berm like a tsunami hitting a rocky coast. The sound is a monstrous cacophony of splintering wood, shrieking animals, and screaming men. The second, deeper line of pits does its gruesome work, swallowing dozens of camels whole, their horrific bellows cut short as stakes punch through their chests. But for every beast that falls, two more clear the trenches, their powerful hind legs propelling them over the gap, and crash into the wagon lunettes.

The battle disintegrates into a hundred desperate struggles.

Tepr lancers, waiting in the lee of the berms, spur their horses forward. They slash at its flanks like wolves harrying a bear. They hook stirrups with their lances, yanking riders from their saddles. They lean down, sabers flashing, to hamstring the great camels, which collapse with earth-shaking thuds, throwing their riders under the hooves of their own comrades.

A unit of Banners, their second volley even more ragged than the first, breaks. The sight of a wounded, frothing camel, its rider gone, barreling directly towards them is too much. They turn to flee.

Lanau sees it. She kicks her horse forward, cutting off their retreat. "Turn around," she says, her voice low and deadly. "Your death is that way if you run. This way, you might live. Now, TURN AROUND!" The sheer force of her will is a physical blow. The boys, white-faced, stumble back into line, leveling their muskets like clubs.

Near a shattered wagon lunette, a camel, its belly laid open by a pit-stake, staggers in a blind circle. With a final, groaning shudder, it collapses sideways. The heavy wooden cart, filled with stones, splinters under its weight. Two young Banner youths, trying to reset the defense, are crushed beneath the beast and the wreckage. One is silent, her body flattened. The other screams, a high, thin sound of terror and agony, her legs pinned.

Tseren is there in moments. He slides from his horse, his old body protesting. Ignoring the battle swirling around him, he wedges his shoulder under the cart's edge, his muscles cracking with the strain. He cannot lift it. But he creates a fraction of an inch of space. He reaches in, his hand closing on the girl's tunic, and with a final, gut-wrenching heave, pulls her free. The girl's legs are a ruin of blood and bone.

Tseren shoves a wad of cloth into her hands. "Press!" he commands. He then grabs a fleeing skirmisher by the arm, his grip like iron. He points towards the rear, where a red pennant flies over the aid tents. "Take her! Run to the left red pennant. Now! Her life is in your speed!"

The man, shamed into action, scoops the weeping girl into his arms and staggers away from the front. Tseren stands, panting, his hands slick with blood, his eyes scanning the line where courage and calculation are being tested. The pits are nearly spent. The smoke is thinning. But for a single, suspended moment, it holds its breath.

Gani rides the line. Mounted on the massive black stallion that was once the vessel of Noga's own legend, she is a figure out of a darker, older tale. She named it Erghën. The horse is a creature of pure midnight, its coat gleaming with a savage vitality even through the layered grime of battle, its eyes rolling to show moons of white, intelligent and fierce. It moves with a power that seems to still the air around it, each hooffall a declaration of dominion. Gani's cloak snaps like a war banner in the wind, and in her eyes is the same cold fire that lit the corpse-pyres.

She rides past the battered Banners, their faces smeared with powder and terror. She raises her voice, and it rings out, clear as a bell cast in some high, lonely mountain forge, cutting through the din.

"FOR OUR KHAN!"

It is not a cheer. It is a reminder. A re-anchoring. It speaks to Naci, far away, who entrusted her with this beast and this burden. The wavering Banners stiffen, their grips tightening on blood-slicked muskets.

And across the swirling dust, Nemeh sees it.

He sees the horse.

The careful, calculating fanatic, the sieve-master who viewed pain and death as tactical variables, vanishes. Something ancient and feral shatters behind his eyes. The world narrows, the roaring periphery fading into a muffled haze. All that exists is the black stallion and the woman upon it.

A memory, unbidden, scalds him. A campfire, years ago. The scent of roasting meat and the vast, star-dusted sky. An old Yohazatz storyteller, his voice full of wine and wonder, speaking of the Khanzadeh, Noga. "And when he rode," the old man had sighed, "it was not a man upon a horse. It was a single spirit, a storm made flesh. The earth knew its hoofbeats as its own heart." The praise, once merely a tale to admire, now curdles in his soul into a poison of absolute, consuming hate.

His gaze locks with Gani's across the hundred paces that separate them. The distance is nothing. The understanding is instantaneous and absolute.

Gani sees the recognition, the shattering. She sees the man her daughter talked about. And she speaks, her voice carrying not as a shout, but as a statement of fact, each word a stone dropped into the sudden quiet that has fallen between them.

"You can chant his name until your throat bleeds." She leans forward slightly in the saddle, and Erghën stamps a hoof, a sound like a cracking stone. "You will never be Noga."

It is the only insult that could truly wound him. It does not attack his strength, his strategy, his right to rule. It attacks his soul. It tells him that for all his fasting, his training, his cultivated aura of divine favor, he is and will always be a counterfeit. A shadow chasing a sun that has long since set.

A sound tears from Nemeh's throat, half roar, half sob of pure, undiluted rage. His composure, his icy control, explodes. With a violent, jerking motion, he rips the scabbard free from his saddle. It is not just any sword. It is Altan Kherem, the Golden Scourge, the legendary blade of Qaloron Khan, his own father, its hilt wrought of gold and wolf-bone.

He draws it.

The sun, struggling through the haze, finds the blade. Light lashes along its impossible length, a single, brutal stripe of fire in the gloom. It is not a gentle gleam; it is a challenge, a scream of light, a promise of annihilation.