Batu spent the morning doing what the camp expected him to do.
He reviewed the horse lines. He listened to a supply report from his quartermaster. He ate with two of his senior officers and said very little.
By midday the camp had settled into the rhythm of a normal day, which was exactly what he wanted.
Khulgen found him near the eastern paddock.
"The rider Temur described," Batu said without looking up from the horse he was inspecting. "Has he moved."
"Not yet. He’s still with the supply train. A man nad Arslan, passes himself off as a grain rchant’s assistant."
"How long has he been attached to the supply train."
"Eleven days."
Batu handed the horse’s lead back to the groom.
"The supply train rotates out in three days."
"Yes."
"Then he’s planning to leave with it."
He walked toward the paddock fence.
"I want him watched but not touched. Every man he speaks to, every tent he enters, every ti he relieves himself. I want a na attached to every contact."
Khulgen nodded.
"Don’t use anyone from the watch rotation. Use soone he has never seen near my tent."
"I have a man in mind. Jebe’s younger brother. Sharp and not yet known to outsiders."
"Use him."
Batu looked across the paddock. The horses moved in slow circles, fat and rested.
He had a good string. That was sothing.
"There is another problem," he said.
Khulgen waited.
"Temur gave us the chain. Rider to middleman to guardsman to tent. That chain works if soone handed Arslan the information he needed before he arrived."
"The watch rotation schedule. The tent layout. The timing of the third rotation. That’s not information a grain rchant’s assistant finds by walking around the camp."
He could see Khulgen processing it.
"Soone inside the council gave it to him," Khulgen said.
"Soone inside the council gave it to whoever sent Arslan, yes. And that person is still sitting in my morning etings."
The paddock fence creaked in the wind. Grass bent flat beyond it and straightened again.
"How many n have access to the watch rotation schedule," Batu said.
"As it was structured, eight. The watch commander, his two deputies, and five senior council mbers who receive the nightly security summary."
"Five council mbers," Batu said. "Good."
Khulgen looked at him. "My lord."
"I’m going to give each of those five n a different piece of information today. Small things. Routine details. A supply delivery, a scouting report, a change to the horse rotation schedule."
"Each version slightly different. One will be false in a specific way."
He paused.
"When that specific false detail moves, I’ll know which direction it ca from."
Khulgen was still for a mont. Then he said, "And if more than one of them is feeding information east."
"Then more than one version moves and I have two nas instead of one."
Batu turned from the fence.
"But I don’t think it’s more than one."
He started walking back toward the main camp.
"I need the five nas and their current assignnts on my table before the afternoon eting. No record of why you pulled them. Just the nas."
"Yes, my lord."
"And Khulgen."
Batu did not slow down.
"The new watch rotation. I want the third slot on every overnight cycle filled with n who’ve been with for more than two years. No exceptions."
"Understood."
Khulgen peeled off toward the command tents. Batu kept walking.
The afternoon eting covered routine matters.
Fodder stocks for the coming month. A report on bridge conditions along the western supply road.
A complaint from two minor nobles about grazing rights on the northern pasture that Batu resolved in thirty seconds by drawing a line through the middle of the disputed area and assigning the eastern half as a military fodder reserve, which neither man could object to without appearing to argue against army readiness.
He watched the five council mbers throughout.
Not looking for guilt. Guilty n were often good at etings.
He was looking for attention patterns, where each man’s eyes went when certain subjects ca up, which topics made them sit slightly straighter or slightly stiller.
Nothing definitive.
But one man, a senior logistics officer nad Borte-Qol, consistently looked toward the tent entrance when matters of supply movent were raised.
A small thing. Possibly nothing. He filed it.
After the eting he called each of the five n separately, spaced through the late afternoon under different pretexts.
To each he gave a minor piece of operational information as if in passing. A side note in a broader conversation.
The kind of detail a man might reasonably ntion to a contact without thinking it was sensitive.
To the first he ntioned that the eastern scouting patrol was being delayed by two days due to a la horse in the lead unit.
To the second he ntioned that a supply shipnt of salted at was arriving from the northern camps on the fourth day of next week.
To the third he ntioned that Temur, the rchant’s runner now in custody, had been released that morning after providing nothing useful.
That last one was the sharpest edge.
If that version moved, it would move fast. Whoever received it would know Temur was free and could be silenced before he said more.
The urgency would compress the tiline.
To the fourth and fifth he gave two more variants, both inert enough to not cause damage if they moved but distinct enough to trace.
He did not tell Khulgen which variant he had given to which man. He told no one.
The only way the test worked was if the versions stayed clean.
That evening Batu sat alone in the repaired tent and read through the watch commander’s notes from the past month.
He was building a picture.
Not just of the leak, but of how his own camp functioned. What information moved quickly and what moved slowly. Who talked to whom.
Which officers had friendships that crossed council lines.
He had spent two decades in another life building these ntal maps of organizations.
The principles were the sa regardless of century.
Every structure had its gravity. Information flowed downhill toward the people who needed it and sideways toward the people who wanted it.
The gap between those two flows was where vulnerabilities lived.
His camp wasn’t badly run.
The man whose body this had been had maintained reasonable discipline.
But reasonable was a floor, not a ceiling.
And the floor had just had a hole cut through it.
He marked three structural changes in the watch command that he would implent after the leak was identified.
Not before.
Changing the structure now would tell whoever was watching that sothing had shifted.
He folded the notes and set them aside.
A rider had co in from the west that afternoon.
A minor thing on its surface, a trade dispute between two Kipchak clan leaders over winter pasture on the Ural steppe.
Both clans were nominally under Jochid authority. Both were testing whether that authority would respond.
In the old history, Batu’s attention had been east during this period.
Court politics. Karakorum obligations.
The western steppe had been managed loosely, which was why the Kipchaks had needed a full military campaign to subdue later.
He was not going to manage it loosely.
He pulled a piece of felt toward him and scratched a short instruction.
The dispute would be adjudicated.
A Jochid officer would ride west within the week, carrying Batu’s ruling and the authority to enforce it.
Not a large force. Ten n was enough to make the point.
The point was not violence. The point was presence.
The western steppe needed to understand that the hand on the reins had changed.
He set the felt aside and looked at the lamp fla.
Arslan was still in the supply camp.
One of five council mbers was carrying false grain.
And sowhere to the west, two Kipchak clan leaders were about to learn that ignoring Jochid authority had a response ti now.
Small moves.
But the board was larger than last week.
He blew out the lamp and lay back on the sleeping mat, which had a new cover now, the old one cut up for bandaging the night before.
His ribs still ached.
He slept anyway.
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