Blood Royal Page 17

  “Because I did not hypnotise you this time to make you believe me,” she said with a sigh. “Or put it this way; you don’t. But would it not pay to play along with me for the time being? It would appear to me that you have little other option.”

  “Nimrod and I could take control of this vessel. We outnumber you,” Ulysses said.

  “Yes, you are probably right,” Katarina conceded, “except that you won’t.”

  “And what makes you so sure of that?”

  “Because, right at this moment, we are pursuing the creatures that abducted the child and the woman from the train.” Unable to help himself, his heart racing, Ulysses ran to a window and peered out into the night, thinking that he might see the wolves below them, but he could make out nothing. “Because you want to rescue your women from the wolves, and because I want their master.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The Land That Time Forgot

  THEY CONTINUED TO climb until the dwindling peaks of the mountains receded behind them.

  Within only a matter of hours the curve of the horizon ahead purpled and became tinged with orange. A golden line of fire ignited the horizon, presaging the coming dawn and, not long after, the sun rose. However, Agent K insisted on drawing the drapes, that she might not be blinded by the light, saying that the dazzle would distract her while piloting.

  That day they made steady progress. They picked up the pack again as it left the higher wooded slopes and moved east. Sometimes they saw the wolves themselves; lean black shapes moving at a gallop across the frozen tundra. Sometimes, only the tracks they had left.

  Agent Kharkova rested during the day, retiring to her aft cabin and letting Nimrod and Ulysses take control of the airship.

  As well as taking his post at the wheel Ulysses spent much of each day continuing to try to fathom Victor Gallowglass’s coded notes; translating page after page of chemical equations, blood analyses and gene-codes, which were almost as baffling to him as the code itself had initially been.

  During their time aboard the airship, Agent K saw fit to reveal a little more about the man she was hunting. His name was Prince Vladimir of Bratsk, a nobleman whose ancestral lands were located at the eastern-most limits of Siberia. But that was all she would tell them, for the time being at least, and Ulysses was left to reconcile what he had learned of Gallowglass’s work from the dead man’s journal with what the mysterious Hermes, and now the Russian agent, had told him. Whichever way he looked at it, the mystery only deepened, and he was now in it right up to his neck.

  “I know where we are,” Ulysses stated, stumbling from his cabin just after dawn on the fourth day of their journey. They had been heading north-east for the last day and a half and had reached the very limits of the seemingly endless lands of Mother Russia.

  “You do?” Katarina said, eyebrows arching at Ulysses in surprise from behind her dark glasses.

  “The Central Siberian Plateau,” he said with something like awed reverence in his voice. “We must be close to the borders of Mongolia.”

  Ulysses gazed down at the crumpled contours of hills, mountains and winding river valleys beneath, the plateau casting a long shadow which disappeared into the horizon behind them.

  Mongolia was a wild and desolate land, as well Ulysses knew. The scrub was home to the barbarian tribes that were the bastard descendants of the great Genghis Khan’s mighty Golden Horde. The bleak rocky uplands and deep, glacier-scoured valleys were home to primeval monsters once thought to have been extinct, but which were now husbanded and herded by the Mongol people.

  “But, begging your pardon, sir,” Nimrod interjected. “If this is Mongolia then surely we have travelled too far. Agent Kharkova said that this nobleman’s demesne lay within Russia.”

  “On the Russian border,” Katarina corrected him.

  “And how close are we to his lands?”

  “Not far,” she said, hastily consulting her airship’s navigation instruments.

  “What’s that?” Nimrod said, wincing against the brightness of the crisp morning light.

  “An airship!” Agent Kharkova exclaimed, pulling the ship hard to port, forcing the two men to grab hold of anything they could to stop themselves careening across the cabin. “And heading north.”

  Ulysses had a clear view of the vessel himself now, and although one zeppelin looked a lot like another, there was something disconcertingly familiar about this one. He was reminded of Dr Pavlov’s last minute escape once again.

  “And what happens when we catch up with this vessel?” Ulysses asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that, the Potemkin can look after itself.” Agent K said, smiling.

  “Alright, so this thing packs a bit of a punch, does it? Very good, but what about –”

  His words were abruptly cut off as something slammed into the side of the airship; a deafening, reptilian squawk reverberating throughout the Potemkin.

  Ulysses was the first to recover. As a result he was the first to catch sight of the rending claws and great leathery wings of the beast.

  With great beats of its wings, the gigantic pterosaur disappeared from view as it climbed.

  There was a sound like the rending of metal, another sound like sail-cloth being torn and then a loud bang. The Potemkin lurched and began to lose height.

  Ulysses turned to see a second creature flying directly towards the gondola with a fur-clad Mongol, holding a set of rough reins, saddled on its back.

  A second later the Potemkin was smashed round from the rear as the giant pterosaur rammed it from behind. The force of the attack sent the airship spinning as the high-pitched whine of a failing engine turbine filled the cabin.

  The view through the cockpit spun. The spearing points of treetops rushed to meet them.

  “Brace yourselves!” Katarina screamed. “We’re going down!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The Khan

  ULYSSES, NIMROD AND Agent K stood before the vast triceratops-hide tent, hands tied behind their backs with rough hemp-rope, all of them tired and sore after their forced march.

  To call the mass of tents and temporary wooden corrals a camp was to do the Khan and his horde a disservice, for this was no mere Cub Scout jamboree.

  Where the hills dropped down to the expansive flatlands, where the sparkling sapphire waters of a broad, slow-moving river snaked its way across the steppes, the Mongol encampment was laid out more like a mobile town than a simple caravan. Acres of tent-cloth and animal-hide covered the steppes for as far as the eye could see. Rudimentary roads criss-crossed the network of yurts and huts. The smoke from a hundred cooking fires rose lazily into the crisp morning air; the smell of roasting meat making Ulysses salivate in hungry expectation.

  As well as pavilions and marquees, there were also numerous animal pens housing everything from yaks and mammoths to styracosaurs and pterosaurs, and even sabre-toothed hunting cats.

  Spread out along the river bank for half a mile or more, the tribe’s women-folk laundered clothes, collected water in dino-leather buckets and led their goats to the cool, clear glacial run-off to drink.

  A polyphony of noises drifted across the meadows; the sounds of armourers’ hammers, weapons being put to the whetstone, the bleat of goats, the grumble and fart of the saurian herbivores, the shouts and laughter of children, the prattle of the womenfolk and the boasts and jeers of men.

  Ulysses, Nimrod and Katarina had been prodded and poked all the way through this warren of tented habitations and animal pens, the Mongols having left their saurian steeds at a corral on the edge of the camp. And then they had come before the battle-khan’s tent at last – a grand conglomeration of several tents erected together.

  The hairy brute that had brought them this far gestured towards the open tent flap with his axe, as he barked something in Mongolian.

  “He wants us to enter the tent,” Katarina translated. She looked especially weary. The trek across the steppes had weakened her more than it had either
of the men. Ulysses put it down to the fact that she had barely slept over the past few days.

  “Well here goes nothing,” Ulysses said, and ducked inside.

  The opulence on show inside was not what Ulysses had been expecting. Fine Chinese silks, painted with willow pattern designs, as well as red and gold dragons adorned the space within, while dozens of the finest Persian rugs had been scattered across the floor. Shuttered, fretwork lanterns hung from tent-poles and cushions embroidered with gold thread formed islands of comfort, while a smouldering brazier filled the pavilion with warmth as well as the aroma of frankincense.

  But more than these, Ulysses was taken aback by the other – incongruous – items scattered around the tent.

  There was a Spode teapot (complete with knitted tea cosy), being kept warm on a cook-stove, while a King George table had been laid with a very English-looking Royal Doulton tea service. To his right, Ulysses saw a de-commissioned British Army Wellington-class war-droid and a wooden mannequin wearing the garb of a Scots Guardsman, complete with bagpipes and kilt. There was even a Union Jack – the flag rather threadbare now, its ancient dyes faded – but nonetheless displayed proudly, strung as it was between two poles behind the khan’s throne.

  Considering the peculiar decorations, Ulysses would not have been surprised to find himself faced by a leather-faced Oriental gentleman wearing the latest in Savile Row fashion and spats, but the figure seated upon the throne fitted Ulysses’ imagined idea of how a Mongol warlord should look perfectly.

  He was dressed in furs, a tunic and yak-hair trews. On his head was a fur hat and his legs were wrapped with leather bindings. And he was fat. He sat slumped within his darkwood throne, his belly bulging. His face looked like a bag of billiards balls and his corpulent chin was covered with thick stubble. His hair was dark, almost black, his skin, what they could see of it, like tanned leather. His moustache was full and followed the Oriental fashion, but was as unkempt as the rest of him. Ulysses could see crumbs of food caught within the grease-matted whiskers.

  The only thing that obviously connected the Khan to the eclectic decor of the pavilion was a strip of medals that were pinned to the breast of his goatskin tunic, and which Ulysses found it hard to believe had been won fighting campaigns on behalf of the Magna Britannian army in far flung, foreign climes.

  In a stand next to his throne stood his sabre and hunting spear, and on another tailor’s dummy rested the khan’s helmet and lacquered armour. His throne was adorned with intricate carvings of predatory dinosaurs.

  “Good day to you, sirs and lady,” the khan said, bowing his head. “How do you do?”

  “And a good day to you, sir,” Ulysses said.

  “How wonderful,” the warlord said, suddenly clapping his hands together, a boyish twinkle in his eye. “A proper pair of English gentlemen,” he said, not even bothering to shoot the Russian agent a glance. “Be welcome, gentlemen, welcome. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  INTRODUCTIONS OVER, THE Khan had the ropes on their wrists cut and then invited them to sit with him while they partook of tea, accompanied by a curious yak dish, that was as chewy and as strongly flavoured as shoe leather.

  Targutai Khan – or Targutai Khan, Khagan of the Golden Horde, to give him his full title – was, or so he asserted, heir to the lands and hereditary titles that the legendary Genghis Khan had once claimed as his. The fact that much of the thirteenth-century warlord’s Asia-spanning domain was now shared between Russia, China and Eastern Europe was dismissed as merely an inconvenience, a situation that he tolerated, knowing that, by the will of his ancestors, they really belonged to him.

  “Although I am the heir to Genghis Khan’s noble legacy,” the Khan said as he tucked into the meal, “I also consider myself a man of the modern age and there is no finer example of all that evolution has achieved than the modern English gentleman. What do you think of my collection; it has taken me some thirty years to collect.”

  “Tawdry,” Nimrod muttered under his breath.

  “A marvel, khan,” Ulysses said, a little too loudly as he nudged Nimrod in the ribs.

  “The Mongols might have conquered the world,” Targutai went on, “but the character of the English gentleman is unsurpassed. With your Oxford University, your Buckingham Palace, your polo and your aristocracy; there is something for everyone to aspire to, don’t you think?” The Khan took another sip of tea, the little finger of his right hand protruding accordingly.

  “If you say so, khan, if you say so.”

  “And it is with that in mind that I must apologise for the rough way in which my riders treated you. But you have to understand that these are wild lands and you cannot be too careful. However, that said, I shall nonetheless have them flogged.”

  “Oh no, khan, not on our account please.” Ulysses said.

  “What about my airship?” Katarina muttered.

  Ulysses shot her a disapproving scowl and hissed, “Not now.” Turning to Targutai again he added, “I must say, khan, that your English is excellent. Have you spent some time on English soil? Did you study at Oxford yourself?”

  The big man laughed and blushed. “You flatter me, sir. No, I have never seen your glorious sceptred isle for myself and yet I wish to travel there, in the guise of a proper English gentleman, and meet your Queen for myself. That is my dream.”

  Ulysses wondered what the real reason was for the Khan never having visited England, if he was so keen. Surely a man of his power and wealth would have made it happen already, if he had really wanted to.

  “Now then, drink up, what-what?” the Khan badgered them, putting his own teacup down on a bronto-foot table beside his throne. “You must excuse me, but I am impatient to introduce you formally to the rest of my golden horde. Besides, you do not want to face the customary trial by combat on a full stomach. There will be time for feasting later.”

  The cup stopped inches from Ulysses’ lips. “Trial by combat? Khan, I thought we were friends.”

  “And we will be, we will be, I am sure of it. But my warriors found you straying into my territories without so much as a by-your-leave. Why, for all I know you could be spies,” he laughed.

  “What? But –”

  “Think of it as an ancient custom. I know how much you English love your traditions. Come.”

  Targutai rose to his feet and Ulysses realised, for the first time, that the warlord’s great mass was as much about muscle as it was middle-aged spread brought on by good living and yak butter.

  “Besides, nothing works up an appetite quite like a good fight, don’t you think? What?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Blood Brothers

  ULYSSES, NIMROD AND their Russian accomplice had their hands tied again and were led, under armed guard, to a cleared circle of dusty ground at the centre of the encampment. Targutai Khan, an attendant party of slave-girls and yak-butter greased warriors went before them. Ulysses noticed that every single man, woman and child they passed acknowledged their khan by averting their eyes and bowing their head.

  A large crowd had already gathered around the ring, word having travelled quickly throughout the camp that there would be a show worth watching that day, one that would be spoken of around the campfires for years to come.

  An awning almost as grand as the khan’s tent offered shade from the sun that blazed down on these high altitudes, without the interruption of cloud of any sort.

  Targutai Khan took his heavy-bladed sabre from a cowering slave and approached Ulysses. Spinning the weapon around a supple wrist, in a dramatic demonstration of his swordsmanship, he raised the edge before him and then brought it down with one sharp twist, slicing through the leather thongs binding Ulysses’ wrists.

  Was this match to be fought with sabres? Ulysses wondered, and found himself pining for his own sword-cane, still lost somewhere in the wreckage of the Potemkin. And if blades were the chosen weapon, was it to be a duel to the death or merely first blood?

  Ulysses didn’t fan
cy facing the warlord with an unfamiliar weapon, but then Targutai executed another couple of whirling windmill strokes before returning the sabre to his underling. Turning, he strode over to the dino-hide panoply, where, Ulysses noticed, Katarina was already taking shelter from the sun, and took his seat upon a backless chair among his harem. He clapped his hands together, barking something in Mongolian.

  In response, the crowd began to hoot and cheer.

  “And now we fight,” Targutai said. “My champion! My bastard son, Chuluun!”

  This brought another wave of cheering and hand-waving from the assembled Mongols. The crowd of eager spectators was growing all the time, no-one wanting to miss the spectacle.

  And then something rather more akin to the snowbeast Ulysses had wrestled within the smoky halls of Shangri-La than a man, shouldered its way into the ring.

  The giant had to be a head taller than Ulysses at least. From the waist down he wore mammoth-hide trews, his legs were bound with leather thongs, and on his feet he wore yak-skin boots.

  “Your champion? Ah, your champion. Of course, I see,” Ulysses said with a sigh of relief, tensed muscles relaxing at the realisation that he wasn’t going to have to fight the Khan himself. “Then let me introduce my champion,” Ulysses announced with all the gusto of a showman.

  “Your champion?” Targutai laughed.

  “Yes, my champion, noble khan.”

  “Alright then, why not? What?”

  Ulysses turned to his manservant. “Nimrod?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do the honours, would you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your butler?” the Khan said.

  “I’d be lost without him.”

  “Very well then,” the khan agreed, nodding to his men to cut Nimrod’s bonds.

  Before entering the ring, Nimrod removed his jacket, offering it to a bewildered-looking Mongol that he might hold it for him.