Tales of the Empire: Emperor’s Bane by S. J. A. Turney

Author:S. J. A. Turney [Turney, S. J. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911420415
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2016-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

Spring

It was the Year of the Unwashed Dog and Tenzhin, now aged fourteen years, had been back in the capital for only a month since his sojourn in the south. Having at least nominally mastered the 31 forms of purity, he had been released and returned to Jiong-Xhu. After years of enforced serenity, he had hoped against hope to be presented to the battle trainers, though, in the event, he had just been dropped straight back into calligraphy, ceremonies, academia and drudgery.

Two weeks earlier, the oldest of the princes, Sang Zhuo, had been given his adult robe and left the palace to take his place in the world. He had ridden west, commanding a cavalry force, to join the Kaidu province’s military on a campaign of ‘chastisement’. It seemed that several of the western horse clans had crossed the imperial border in a region as yet unwalled and gone on to commit the most violent incursion in a thousand years. Towns had been burned and slaves taken. Tenzhin had been surprised that the empire bothered chasing the clans back across the border, given how inherently difficult it was to bring nomads to battle, and had questioned his tutors over the matter. It was through his subsequent lessons in imperial defence policy that he came to understand the difference between what was happening in the west and what had happened to his people seven years before.

Incursions and invasions were different. The horse clans were not invaders. They were far too fractious and disorganized to ever hope for conquest. All they wanted was to sack, loot, rape and take slaves, and after doing that they would return to their own lands. Usually their raids only extended a few miles across the borders. The Aina of the Eastern Islands, who raided the coast, behaved the same way. Such incursions were left to run their course and then the aggressors were chastised in retaliation. It served twin purposes: the military were exercised in enemy territory, which kept them alert and sharp; and it reinforced the value of imperial protection to the rest of the empire.

When the Khmar tribes had come south, though, they had clearly been executing an invasion, and their forces had been so numerous it would have been over-costly to try and stop them en route. And so the Jade Emperor had sacrificed the outlying northern cities to the invader in order to exhaust the Khmar, eventually allowing them to dash themselves to pieces against the capital’s walls before he finished them off. Again, it served as a warning to other regions, but it also meant that the entire Khmar people could be easily exterminated in one place, saving the Jin army from spending long, costly years scouring the Badlands for them.

But this particular year, the horse clans went beyond their usual light raids, delving deep into the empire and sacking the city of Zhidoi, the hub of the western trade routes. Even so, they would probably have got away with a

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