The signal took ti.
Batu stood at the eastern base and tracked it through the cut by sound.
The rate of release from the heights dropped as the command moved through n who were still in the middle of sothing and had to read the change and act on it.
Then the ridgeline fire stopped on the eastern face. A breath after that, the western face.
The fighting ran down through the narrows in sections, slower at the western base where Chaidu’s elent was still in close contact, faster at the points where the plunging fire had done its work and the mass below it was no longer moving.
A rider ca out of the entrance. Unard, hands visible, moving at a walk.
Batu walked to et him at the channel mouth.
"Siban asks for terms," the rider said.
"Siban cos out himself."
The rider returned.
Three minutes passed. Torghul’s depth position was holding the southern flat, the warriors visible in formation across the open ground.
At the western base Chaidu’s riders held their ground, the contracted line still facing the outer edge of the entrance where the external force had been pressing.
Nobody moved toward the passage from either side.
Siban ca out on horseback, alone.
He had a cloth binding on his left forearm, wrapped and tied before he rode out.
He stopped six ters from Batu and looked at him with the sa flat assessnt Batu had seen across a breakfast table months back.
A man reading his position with the sa care he’d managed his record, finding now that the record hadn’t been enough.
Batu looked back at him.
"Your force is enclosed. Your arrow supply is gone. The depth position at the south is held."
Siban said nothing.
"Standard tribute terms. The Irtysh detachnt resus its border function under Jochid command authority, no independent operation without written order from this camp.
Your ho territory riders are released after weapons collection and tallying."
Batu kept his voice even.
"Penalty levy. Five hundred horses, my selection.
Your senior riders stays in my camp for one season."
"The senior riders," Siban said.
"They go ho at the end of the season."
"My n in the channel."
"They co out. The wounded get what my camp can give them. The dead get burial."
Sothing moved in Siban’s jaw. Brief.
"You take a staff function under Torghul," Batu said. "Five years.
Your pay cos from the Jochid account.
Your detachnt stays under the officer I assign it for the sa term."
Siban looked at him.
"Davud," Batu said. "The grain rchant from the Kerait post.
He ca northeast when the network closed. He’s in your territory."
Siban’s eyes didn’t move.
"He’s delivered to my camp within ten days of your return.
His goods and assets are confiscated on arrival.
Two years in the Jochid supply train after that.
No rank. No independent trading rights when he’s done."
"I don’t know where he is," Siban said.
"Then you find him." Batu held his gaze. "Ten days."
Four seconds.
"It’ll be done," Siban said.
"Torghul handles the weapons collection.
You ride with until it’s finished."
Siban turned his horse and rode back toward the entrance without another word.
Batu went to find Torghul.
The count took two hours.
Torghul ran the weapons collection at the channel entrance while the ridgeline forces held their positions and Chaidu’s elent stayed at the western base until the last of Siban’s external riders had laid their weapons.
Batu moved through the ground with Torghul’s count rider and read the tally as it assembled.
Thirty-five riders from Chaidu’s elent were still holding at the western base when the exchange stopped.
Twenty-two dead.
Four more had gone down in the early exchange and been pulled back before the line contracted, too badly wounded to hold their position but alive.
Among them Altai, who had co through the Sarat engagent and rebuilt with the elent in the weeks that followed, and Narun and Kesen, both riders who had joined the elent after Sarat.
Batu took the remaining nas down and kept them.
The mangudai elent at the southern point had lost more.
The exchange on open ground south of the narrows had run closer to even, and the count showed it.
Bodai was among the dead. Forty-four in total from that elent. Fifty-five wounded.
The ridgeline forces had drawn return fire throughout the full duration of the engagent, archers in the cut shooting upward at n who could drop below the crest between shots but who were themselves targets while drawing.
The skill had been real and the ti long enough for it to find results.
Thirty-six dead across both faces. Seventy wounded.
The depth position’s improvised position at the southern flat had been the engagent’s fastest resolution.
The flanking attempt that turned into a frontal press against the full tun’s main body had broken quickly.
Twenty-eight dead there. Fifty wounded.
The total ran to approximately one hundred and thirty dead.
The wounded count was still assembling as Siban’s riders moved out in organized groups as the tally progressed, but would settle near one hundred and eighty.
The floor of the cut needed no accounting.
More than a thousand dead in the passage alone. The wounded were still being tallied.
Batu held the numbers without reaching past them.
Torghul ca to him when the tally was nearly complete.
He had blood on his right sleeve from the depth position’s anchoring and hadn’t addressed it.
Torghul looked at the contracted line. "The western base was two sections short when the flanking attempt ca around the south."
"The situation produced the cost," Batu said. "Next ti the depth position holds that contingency before the engagent opens."
Torghul held that without arguing with it.
He had the look of a man who’d already run the sa numbers and arrived at the sa answer.
"The ridgeline fire held longer than the arrow supply should have allowed," he said.
"The supply riders pushed the additional arrows up the slopes the evening before the engagent," Batu said.
"Docunt it as standard preparation before any ridgeline action.
Penk’s function carries it forward."
Torghul nodded once and went back to the tally.
Batu left the main working ground and walked to a section of the eastern base away from the activity.
The afternoon was past its midpoint.
Siban sat his horse at the entrance and watched without speaking to anyone.
Batu thought about what the engagent produced for Guyuk’s picture.
The Borte-Qol channel would carry it east in whatever form Batu decided it took.
Every node Guyuk had built here was gone.
Chanar, Beke, the Hasal family’s function, the grain chain that had run through Kerait.
What Guyuk held of the western situation was several months out of date on every material point, and it would stay that way for as long as the channel ran clean.
Guyuk’s n would already know the channel had gone dark.
Arslan’s silence was its own signal, and the n around Guyuk were careful.
They would be building a new read from whatever reached them through other routes.
What the narrows had produced would reach them. It would reach them through Berke.
He looked south.
Berke’s territory was well to the south.
The engagent would travel faster than any rider he sent.
Clan riders at the margins, rchants on the circuit roads, the sound of several thousand horses on the northeastern approach and the smoke of fires and the movent of a column going north that had not been seen coming back.
Berke would have a partial account of the outco before the last of his n had finished clearing the narrows.
Berke had been waiting on one specific thing.
Whether Siban had held, broken, or submitted.
The three outcos gave him three different situations.
Two of them left him room.
The third changed his position in a way he hadn’t prepared for.
The third one had just finished.
A rider appeared on the steppe south of the tun’s position, coming up the road from the direction of the lower Ural approach.
Moving fast.
He reached the outer periter and was passed through and ca toward Torghul’s position at a pace that said the distance behind him had been covered without stopping.
Torghul looked across at Batu.
Batu ca over.
The rider was from the Yargach clan.
The headman had sent him north before dawn after seeing a rider on the lower Ural approach road the previous evening.
Moving north. Alone. Fast. No clan markings.
Berke had sent soone north to read the outco himself.
Batu looked at the channel entrance where Siban still sat his horse, watching the last of his n move through the tally.
By morning, Berke’s rider would reach this ground.
He would find a cleared passage, weapons stacked, Siban’s riders moving under Jochid authority.
He would turn south with that picture.
What Berke built from it, he would build without Siban in it.
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