Tang Dynasty, Chang’an
Outside the walls of the Daming Palace, the city of Chang’an pulsed with the energy of over a million souls.
It was the grand eastern terminus of the Silk Road, where Persian rchants, Arab envoys, and Indian monks rubbed shoulders with Tang bureaucrats in the endless, bustling markets.
Inside the Dragon Throne room
Emperor Xuanzong leaned forward, resting his chin on a hand weighed down by rings of imperial jade.
He was not the soft, pampered ruler the rebels claid him to be. He had personally survived purges, assassinations, and the political bloodbaths of his own family to keep this throne.
He still commanded the Shence Army... two hundred thousand professional, heavily armored, fanatically loyal soldiers garrisoned within striking distance of the capital.
But a king is only as powerful as his reach, and right now, Xuanzong was realizing his arm had been severed at the elbow.
Kneeling on the floor fifty paces below the dais was Chancellor Li. To his left stood General Gao, the Supre Commander of the Imperial Vanguard.
"Let ensure I am hearing you correctly, Chancellor," Xuanzong’s voice echoed off the cavernous ceiling,
"Because if I am, soone in this room is going to be short a head before noon."
Chancellor Li swallowed audibly, pressing his forehead against the cold marble. "Your Divine Majesty... the reports from the eastern seaboard are confird. Jiedushi Shen... the Military Governor of the Pinglu Circuit... has vanished."
"Vanished..." Xuanzong repeated the word, "A man vanishes, Li. A horse vanishes. A bag of silver vanishes. You are telling a military governor vanished?!"
"It is not just him, Your Majesty," General Gao barked, "Shen took the entire Eastern Fleet. Three hundred deep-water junks. He took fifty thousand professional soldiers, ten thousand auxiliary craftsn, and forced a dozen farming villages onto those ships at sword-point."
Xuanzong’s eyes narrowed, "Fifty thousand n?"
"Yes, Majesty."
"And the coastal blockades? The regional imperial inspectors? Did the entire eastern half of my empire suddenly go blind?!"
Xuanzong roared, his composure finally snapping.
"Fifty thousand heavily ard troops do not just go for a midnight stroll onto three hundred ships without soone noticing the logistics! That is an invasion force!"
"The local governors were... bribed, or coerced, Your Majesty," Chancellor Li stamred, his face still pressed to the floor.
"Shen has been hoarding the provincial taxes for three years. We thought he was preparing to join the Huang Chao uprisings to the south... We had the Shence Army dig in to defend Chang’an. We never anticipated he would... leave the continent entirely."
"Where did he go?" Xuanzong demanded, "Where does a warlord take fifty thousand n and a stolen navy?"
General Gao gestured to two scribes, who hurried forward and unrolled a massive map of the known world across the floor.
It detailed the sprawling Tang Dynasty, the vast deserts of the Silk Road, the Abbasid Caliphate, and further west, a distorted, fragnted edge of the map labeled only as the ’Barbarian Isles.’
"Here, Your Majesty," Gao pointed the tip of his scabbard at the distorted edge of Europe.
"Our spies in the trading guilds squeezed a Persian navigator who had been on Shen’s payroll. Shen believed the Dynasty was dood to a century of civil war. He sailed the fleet south around the Indian Ocean, past the Caliphates, and headed toward the frozen rocks in the extre Northwest. A place the rchants call Alba... Or England."
Xuanzong stared down at the map, utterly bewildered. The rage was montarily replaced by sheer confusion. "England? What is England?"
"It is an island of savages, Majesty," Chancellor Li offered, finally daring to lift his head an inch.
"Mud huts. Worshippers of dead gods. n who fight with crude iron axes and wear the skins of animals. It is the very edge of the world...There is nothing there but rain and sheep."
"If there is nothing there but mud and sheep, why would a calculating bastard like Shen take my fleet there?" Xuanzong asked softly,
"Tell exactly what he took from the armories, Gao. Don’t sugarcoat it."
General Gao’s jaw tightened. He knew this was the killing blow. "He took the Alchemists, Majesty. The Heavenly Fire division."
Xuanzong stood up slowly, "He took the gunpowder?!"
"All of it from the eastern reserves..." Gao confird, "Your Majesty. He has gone to conquer it, fortify it, and build his own empire. With our most closely guarded military secrets..."
"Do you realize what this ans?" Xuanzong said.
"He is surrounded by barbarians, Majesty," Li pleaded, trying to soothe the Emperor. "The savages of those islands will throw themselves at his cannons with wooden shields. They will be slaughtered. Shen will grow bored, or his n will freeze to death in a few winters. The logistics of maintaining an empire that far away—"
"You are a fool, Li," a new voice echoed from the back of the hall.
The mahogany doors swung open, and a man walked in, flanked by two Imperial Guards. He was dressed in the rich, multi-colored silks of a high-ranking Silk Road rchant. It was Lord Wang, the Head of the Imperial Trade Syndicate.
"Apologies for the intrusion, Divine Majesty," Wang said, dropping to one knee before rising at Xuanzong’s impatient wave.
"But Chancellor Li is relying on maps drawn fifty years ago. I just rode three days without sleep from the western border checkpoints. You need to hear what the Arab rchants are whispering about the Northwest."
Xuanzong stopped pacing. "Speak, Wang. Are the barbarians not fighting with mud and sticks?"
Lord Wang shook his head, "No, Majesty. The political landscape of the far west has fractured. There is a new power rising in the frozen north... They call him the Iron Father."
General Gao scoffed. "A chieftain of savages. Let Shen’s cannons blow him to pieces."
"He is no savage, General..." Wang countered sharply. "The rchants say this Iron Father commands a city made of black iron. The Vizir of Granada just bought the rights to a machine that prints books with tal letters. A machine designed by this Iron Father."
Xuanzong’s breath caught in his throat. He looked at the map, then at Wang. "Machines that pour steel? Printing presses?"
"Shen sailed directly into the territory of a man who is dragging the western world into a new age." Wang said.
Xuanzong stared at the crude drawing of the British Isles on the floor.
"Shen has fifty thousand Tang soldiers, brass cannons, and our gunpowder," Xuanzong muttered, pacing around the map.
"This... Iron Father... has mass-produced steel, ironclad ships, and god knows what else."
The Emperor stopped, looking up at his top general and his chief rchant. "If Shen wipes out this Iron Father, he gains access to that industrial steel and becos a superpower we cannot stop. But..."
"But if the Iron Father slaughters Shen," General Gao finished the thought, his eyes widening in horror, "the barbarians capture our gunpowder, our cannons, and our engineers. They will reverse-engineer the Heavenly Fire..."
"And then they will look East," Xuanzong whispered.
"General Gao," Xuanzong’s voice was no longer furious.
"Majesty?"
"I want an expeditionary force of one hundred thousand n ready to march within the month. Send riders to the Abbasid Caliphate; tell them we are opening the overland military routes, and if they resist, we will burn Baghdad to the ground."
Chancellor Li gasped. "Majesty! You cannot empty the capital’s defenses! The rebels in the south—"
"The rebels in the south are peasants with pitchforks!" Xuanzong roared.
Xuanzong turned back to the map, his eyes locked on the jagged shores of Alba.
User Comments
0 comments from readers