The River of Black Blood

The night was moonless, a black, velvet shroud thrown over the remote northern frontier. On a rocky cliff overlooking a fast-flowing tributary of the Selenga River, three figures stood silhouetted against the star-dusted sky. The leader of the small group was Batukhan, a young Mongol warrior whose eyes burned with a fire that had consumed all traces of youth. He was a survivor of the Tergin clan, and every waking moment of his life since Yuan Shikai's 'Butcher's Demonstration' had been dedicated to the singular thought of vengeance. He saw Altan's merciful choice at the Wolf's Jaw Pass not as a moment of strategic brilliance, but as a profound and unforgivable betrayal.

"Altan is weak," Batukhan hissed to his two companions, both of whom had also lost their families to Yuan's purges. "Her mercy to the Qing general was a betrayal of our dead. She talks of honor while our people starve in chains. The Russians offer us a real weapon. A weapon of pure vengeance, not of foolish pride."

Behind them, a fourth figure emerged from the shadows. It was Dmitri Volkov. He was a shadow of his former self, his revolutionary idealism burned away by failure and fear, leaving only a hollowed-out shell filled with a nihilistic desire to see the world burn. In his hands, he carried the open metal case from Colonel Morozov.

"The Colonel was clear," Dmitri said, his voice as empty and dead as the plains around them. "This will cleanse the land. This will make the Qing pay for their crimes in a currency of suffering they cannot ignore."

He held out one of the sealed glass vials. Batukhan took it without hesitation. He saw not a biological horror, but the ultimate tool of revenge against the destroyers of his world. To him, this was justice. He turned, raised the vial high, and with a guttural cry, he smashed it against the sharp edge of a rock. He then carefully, almost reverently, tipped the dark, granular powder into the river below. The current caught the anthrax spores immediately, a silent, invisible tide of death, and carried them south, towards the heart of the lands now occupied by both the remaining Mongol nomads and the new Qing agricultural settlements. The plague had been unleashed.

Two weeks later.

The scene in the Qing settlement of Ping'an was one of bewildered horror. A settler, a Han farmer named Wei, stood staring at his two prized oxen. They lay dead in their paddock, their bodies unnaturally bloated, with dark, tarry blood seeping from their mouths and noses. Yesterday they had been strong; this morning they were dead. He looked around in terror. His neighbor's sheep were also dying, collapsing in their fields. A silent, unseen killer was sweeping through their livestock.

A few miles away, in a makeshift Mongol camp, a nomad named Gerel wailed over the bodies of his horses. They were his wealth, his transportation, his family's soul, and they lay dead in the dust, their legs stiff, their eyes wide and glassy. He had no idea why. He could only assume it was a curse, a punishment from the heavens.

The news traveled fast, carried on the winds of panic. A scout, his face pale with terror and his horse lathered in foam from a hard ride, finally reached Altan's hidden mountain encampment. He stumbled into the center of the camp, collapsing before her.

"It is a plague!" he gasped, his voice ragged. "A black-blooded curse! From the Selenga River south, the animals are dying! Horses, sheep, cattle… all of them! The land is dying! The Qing settlers are burning their carcasses in great pyres that blacken the sky. They say it is a Mongol curse. Our own people say it is the wrath of the heavens for our weakness!"

Altan's face turned to stone. The blood drained from her own cheeks, and her heart grew cold with a terrible, sickening certainty. She knew instantly what this was. There was only one possible source.

"Dmitri," she whispered, the name tasting like ash.

She stormed across the camp towards the yurt where Dmitri was being held under guard, her second-in-command, Khorchi, at her heels. She tore the flap of the yurt aside. Dmitri looked up from the floor where he was sitting, and when he saw the look on her face, he knew that she knew.

"The plague!" she accused, her voice shaking with a cold fury. "It was you! I destroyed the vial! How?"

Dmitri looked up at her, and for the first time since his capture, a mad, triumphant glint appeared in his haunted eyes. "You destroyed one vial, Altan," he said with a weak, cracking laugh. "A gesture. Did you really think my Colonel would entrust such a vital mission to a single point of failure? I held others back. I did what you had not the courage to do! I gave the weapon to true patriots, to men like Batukhan who understand that victory requires sacrifice!"

"Sacrifice?" Khorchi roared, drawing his sword, his face contorted with rage. "You have sacrificed our people! Our land! I will kill him! For what he has done, I will send his soul to the lowest hell!"

"No!" Altan commanded, grabbing Khorchi's arm. Her mind, reeling from the horror, was already racing, calculating the catastrophic consequences of this act. "No, Khorchi. Killing him now is too easy. It is what he wants."

She turned her furious gaze back on Dmitri, her eyes boring into him. "You have not created chaos, you fool," she said, her voice dropping to a low, venomous hiss. "You have created a desert. You have given General Yuan, the butcher, the perfect excuse to do what he has always wanted to do: to completely eradicate every last Mongol from these lands under the righteous guise of 'quarantine' and 'disease control.' He will not see this as a weapon against him. He will see it as a gift. An opportunity. You have not given our people a new sword. You have signed their death warrant."

Dmitri's triumphant smile faltered. In his nihilistic desire for vengeance against the Qing, he had never considered how his enemies might turn his own weapon to their advantage. He had thought only of destruction, not of its political exploitation.

Altan stood over him, the leader and the symbol, now faced with an enemy she could not fight. This was not an army to be outmaneuvered. This was not a general whose honor could be used against him. This was an unstoppable, invisible tide of death that did not distinguish between Mongol and Han, between soldier and child. The great game she had been playing with Meng Tian, the war of wits and honor, was over. It was now irrelevant. Her enemy was no longer just the Empire. It was the very plague her former ally had unleashed, and the monstrous political opportunity it had created for her most hated foe. Her war of resistance had just become a desperate race against a biological holocaust.