Turnsheet 10

You dispatch your letter to the Empress and a few months later, shortly after your return from Egypt you receive a reply. This is the last letter you receive from the East before the Gerard Canal is closed due to fighting.

To Ambassador Tsung Chang Mai, daughter of Tsung Shu Wen, Son of Tsung Tang Lee, Son of Tsung Chi Chuan

There follows a long and immaculately calligraphed letter in a hand which is recognisably not that of Chang Ping, but instead that of a highly trained scholar. It gives an account full of honorifics and patent inaccuracy about the Imperial Court and the progress of the Empress' armies which, if one were to believe the letter are close to capturing the North Pole and yet somehow haven't quite reached Beijing.

From Her Imperial Majesty the Empress of the Great Ming Dynasty, Daughter of Heaven, Lady of Ten Thousand Years.

Enclosed within the first letter is another letter which is clearly in the Empress' hand:

Dearest Chang-Mai,

If I may address you as such? I hope that you will allow me to speak to you as a friend for there are few now in Cathay that I may now address with such informality. Even sending this letter to you will require a most unImperial sleight of hand which would occasion painful gossip were I to be discovered. It is a strange life being Empress, circumscribed so and yet with power to do so much harm with a careless word or even gesture.

But enough with my complaints. Allow me to once more wish you and your wife happiness and if my blessing is of any worth then I gladly enclose it with this letter too. May your lives be full of the joy of one another and your ancestors smile upon you both.

My scribes will have told you that the war with the Manchu invaders goes well and it is true. Our victories are not so glorious as they say or our advances so swift but we advance northward nonetheless. Within the next two years I expect to be upon the threshold of Beijing and the Forbidden Palace should my actions remain pleasing to Heaven and the Jade Emperor.

The scion of the Lang family, Mei Qian, has visited me. He is a good warrior and skilled in the ways of training men to fight and live. It is a shame that he is not a better man. Not one filled with malice or evil I think but with little thought for his fellows. Perhaps even little imagination that others are different from himself. He has taken his share of glory in driving the Manchu back.

But it is another matter of which he has informed me that I wish to tell you. He has given me maps to a fountain, apparently the tale is well-known in Albion where it is referred to as “The Fountain of Youth”. Have you heard tell of this place? Lang Mei Qian claims that its waters will bring youth and help, but I believe there to be a price to such things. It is likely he journeyed to the fountain with others and either he or they may know more of it. Should your duties allow it I would ask you to divine the truth of this matter.

I have left the most serious matter for last. Rumour spreads fast and I suspect that you have already heard tales of what has happened in, or perhaps I should say to, Nippon. These tales are true. My own ships have scouted where once those islands were. They are there no longer. Utterly destroyed and the seas where once they lay an utter featureless white. Even the sky there holds no colour now. Chang-Mai I fear something terrible has been unleashed, though I know not if it was the o'erconfident Nipponese or some other agency. My reports mention a few fishermen who saw a great giant, taller than the mountains in the west of this land that scrap the very sky, who was made of shadow and great rivers of molten bronze. And where he stood the land was bleached of colour and then unmade.

The auguries scare me Chang-Mai, my astrologers tell me that the star themselves - blessed agents of Heaven that they are - were themselves afraid. If you can discover anything of this I shall count you my most revered servant and faithful friend.

Yours,

Chang Ping

With Lang Xiao-Lang [aka the Countess Vargfalle] keeping a close eye on her it seems that the Princess has much less opportunity to see her young stable lad. However she is no happier and still wishes to return to her homeland, away from cold and miserable Albion and the humiliation she has endured. Her English is improving, but she is completely indifferent to your gift of wolves.

You believe that with her improving English there are those who now know her identity and location and may see her as a valuable prize.

From South America you and Lang-Long [a dragon] sail west, across the Pacific, to reach Cathay once more. Lang Xiao-Lang is sent back with Lady Morag to keep an eye on Princess Chaiama as you wished and with orders for the Silver Cheeseknife to join you in Cathay.

The Silver Cheeseknife arrives in Cathay about 2 weeks after you arrive on the White Tiger and begins pillaging Manchu shipping and conducts some small raids against villages and isolated watchtowers along the northern coast. After the successful naval battle six months ago the Manchu forces are weak and more than a little afraid of Albion-built ships and give the White Tiger little trouble. There are a large number of privateers from Albion in these waters, and tall tales of the daring do of Captain Smashing in particular begin to reach you.

You yourself disembark with your men and join up with Empress Chang Ping 1). She has begun her summer campaign, driving north against the Manchu invaders, and has used the time in which you were absent to drill and equip an impressive army.

You are shown into the large pavilion in which she is camped with her army and note that your eldest brother is dressed as a senior advisor. You exchange some polite pleasantries with Láng È-le but as normal he's a bit stiff and proper around you. He does however gain you a private audience with the Empress. You do your best to charm the Empress and your previous feats of arms in her service, and the loyalty of your family, go some way to helping. The Empress is clearly still somewhat cold to you due to the whole matter of the Princess Chaiama however.

You give your council that the she should not personally engage in battle and she sighs and agrees. It is clear that her reluctance to stay at the rear of the lines is not because she wishes to plunge into battle but because she wishes to share the hardships of her men. Nonetheless she has received the same council from her Ambassador Tsung and others and will not do so again. She is also most pleased to accept your offer of training for her men and details you a force of several hundred men to further improve. They are those who have shown promise in basic training and may be turned into elite troops with training and experience. Finally you tell her about the Fountain of Youth and your remaining maps.

When you are satisfied with the training of the force you have been granted, the Wolf and Dragon, as they come to be nicknamed by the rest of the army you fight many battles and even greater number of raids against the Manchu. By the end of the season and your return to Albion the Ming dynasty armies have advanced as far north as Hangzhou and have captured that city on the Yellow River and are beseiging Xian further west.

You give your advice to your third brother that Tungning should remain separate from Cathay and the Ming. He indicates that the Empress is not yet interested in imposing her will on the nobles and kingdoms of Cathay. Her target for the time being is the Manchu and more specifically Beijing and until the Imperial Capital is retaken she is content to have allies.

At the end of your campaigning you are in the city of Hangzhou and take the White Wolf and Silver Cheeseknife to Nippon before your return to Albion.

The Nipponese closed their islands to most foreigners, even Cathayans, some ten years ago and now restrict them to a man-made island named Dejima in the bay of the city of Nagasaki. There are a great number of Cathayan and Korean merchants there and more than a few from Portugal. The merchants of Albion are not well-represented but there are a handful.

The shores of the bay of Nagasaki is guarded by a number of Tachikomas, similar to those you fought in the battle of Formosa, those these are far more impressively decorated with intricate scrollwork and in many cases considerably larger. They also march with squads of samurai swordsmen.

You give those who seem important on the island gifts of cheeseknives. Regrettably these means a certain amount of dispensing of these beautiful implements for the cutting of cheese to other than nobles but eventually you do become friendly with the bugyō (governor) of the island. It was apparently he that was responsible for the unauthorised and frankly illegal sale of tachikomas to the Manchu.

The bugyō is willing to see if he can quietly acquire some new tachikomas for you and the Ming. It will be several months before he can arrange to have some ready to be smuggled however. From discussions with him it becomes clear to you that Nipponese magic is primarily like the Albion idea of invention but that they are exclusively powered by demons rather than any other kind of spirit. Nipponese inventions seem to be exclusively self-propelled machines, and the bugyō hints that the forces of the Shogun have devices that make the tachikomas at his disposal look like toys. Of course this is rather hard to confirm stuck on an island removed from the main affairs of the country.

As you are sailing out of Nagasaki, carried southwest by a strong breeze but still within sight of the land you see an appalling sight. To the east and west the sky suddenly turns white; not glowing or bright for it casts no shadows on the deck of your ship. Instead it's as if all the colour had been bleached from the sky, simply removed. And standing, striding with unbelievable speed, is an enormous man-shaped figure that towers larger than any mountain. Even those you have heard tell of if in the far west of Cathay can surely not be so enormous. The figure is made from shadows bound with molten bronze, like enormous rivers of magma set in total darkness. And as you look at the figure you are filled with the certainty that it is evil beyond compare, that it seeks to destroy everything.

The land that you can still see on the horizon, the green grass and blue waters and all the wood and banners of Nagasaki are bleached white and lose their colour. Then there is an enormous flash of white light, which once more fails to cast any shadows, and in a titanic explosion in which the figure of black and bronze seems to exult and laugh everything is destroyed. The noise is deafening and your ship is hurled forward for dozens of leagues and out of sight of it all by the enormous storm of wind it creates, even as the waters stream past in the opposite direction to fill the hole where Nippon used to be.

But the ordeal is not over. Your shaken crew sails east, eager to put themselves on the other side of the world from what they have seen. As you approach the Gerard Canal there are new horrors. For days you have been smelling smoke and now you find the source. Great pillars of smoke climb into the sky all along the western side of the Canal and cannon fire and screams of battle reach you. The Ottomans who you have encountered many times using their canal are locked in battle all along its length with demons! A great army seems to have surged forth from hell and devoured the land. The largest pillar of smoke is from the location where you are told that Cairo stands.

You sail quickly down the Canal, having to fight off numerous attacks upon your ships by great scaled beasts and sulphur-smelling monsters; cannons blazing the entire harrowing trip and every man not manning a gun or vital to the sails is upon the decks with a sword. You yourself cut down at least thirty of the demons before you are safely through and into the deeper waters of the Mediterranean. The great pillars of smoke dot the southern shore of that sea for at least forty leagues as you sail by.

From the log-book of the Maximilian, an independent trader plying the seas between East Asia and Albion. The ship was at the time some hundred miles south of Nippon.

At the changing of the watch, some few hours before dusk in those waters, the majority of the crew were gathered upon the deck and all agreed that the following significant and outlandish events had been observed. That first the sky did change hue from a clear blue to a perfect white above the island of Nippon. That this white was not the shade of fog or cloud and that it did appear at once and did not coalesce gradually or drift upon the wind, nor did it cast any light or cause any shadow, but did appear as if the sky had been robbed of all colour.

Second that some few who were most often selected for the post of watch did claim to see a great figure in the whiteness, and it did appear to be made of shades and glowing veins of metal. All did see a shadow as of a man but only these few did make out the details. All did agree that the black figure did appear to be most gigantic and that the sight of it did put fear in the hearts of all.

Thirdly that shortly after the appearance of the white sky and shadow figure there was heard a mighty roar as if a gunpowder arsenal had caught fire all at once. A great wind came suddenly up from the east and carried the ship west while the waters did flow the opposite direction.

Fourthly that the mast being cracked in the sudden gale the Maximilian was carried to the east towards the shores of Nippon, a land that has been forbidden to foreigners by the government of the land, but that it did not reach that land though it should have within but a few hours. In fact that no evidence of the islands of Nippon were discovered at all though the course passed through that land.

Fifthly that the waters through which we sailed were white and wholly devoid of all colour for the whole of that time in which the Maximilian did sail upon areas that were marked upon our charts as land of the Nipponese.

This I record as the master of the good ship Maximilian.

With the assistance of the East India Company the Empress Chang Ping continues to war against the Manchu invaders. Proprietor Mandrake has taken a continuing interest in the situation in Cathay and ensured that the Empress is well-supplied. The Empress is now in firm control of the entire south of the country and has most recently succeeded in taking the port of Hangzhou on the Yellow River. The “Ambassador” Lang is known to have been fighting on her behalf in her most recent campaigns. Lang is also known to have continued the raids and privateering against the Manchu. A more important role has been played by Captain Smashing and other members of the Venerable order who have inflicted immense damage upon Manchu shipping.

Tsung Chang-Mai, until recently a trader and translator for the East India Company, has been appointed by Ambassador by the Empress of Cathay. She has established her embassy in the headquarters of the East India Company, which demonstrates her continuing friendship with the Companies. The Ambassador is to be treated with the greatest of respect and her wishes to be fulfilled as much as practical to ensure the continuing friendship between Cathay and the Companies. Any slight against the Ambassador is to be treated as an insult to the Companies and treated with the utmost seriousness.