Dawn came gray and cold.
Batu sat where Khulgen had left him, back straight, hands resting on his knees. The bodies were still on the floor. He hadn't moved them. He wanted every man who walked through that entrance to see them exactly as they were.
Khulgen returned before the sun cleared the horizon. He had four men with him. Guards, not prisoners. They stopped outside and Khulgen entered alone first.
"The watch roster," he said, and held out a folded piece of felt with names scratched in charcoal.
Batu looked at it without taking it. "How many men on this section last night."
"Six. Two per rotation. I have them separated. No one has spoken to anyone since the second hour."
"The ones from the third rotation. Where are they now."
"East side of the horse lines. Apart from each other."
Batu stood. His ribs had stiffened in the cold and the pain was a dull bar across his left side. He ignored it. "Bring the first one."
The guardsman's name was Chortan. Twenty years old, maybe less. He came in and saw the bodies and his face did the thing faces do when the mind is trying to stay calm and failing. His eyes moved to Batu, then away, then back.
Batu said nothing.
He watched Chortan stand in the silence for a full minute. He had learned this a long time ago, in another life, on another continent. Silence did more work than questions. Most men filled it badly.
Chortan filled it badly.
"My lord, I swear I saw nothing out of the ordinary during my watch. The perimeter was--"
"I didn't ask you anything," Batu said.
Chortan stopped.
Batu walked around him slowly. Not theatrically. He was reading posture, breathing, the way the man's balance shifted. Chortan wasn't a fighter processing guilt. He was a frightened young man processing the wrong kind of fear. Not the fear of punishment for something he did. The fear of punishment for something he knew about.
"You passed someone through," Batu said.
It wasn't a question. He said it the way a man states the weather.
Chortan's shoulders dropped a quarter-inch. Barely visible. Enough.
"I didn't know what they were going to do," Chortan said. His voice had gone small. "He told me they were servants. That they had a delivery for the night steward."
"Who told you."
A pause that lasted two seconds too long.
Batu stopped in front of him. "The man who gave you that story is already thinking about how to make sure you don't survive this conversation. You understand that. Think carefully about which direction your interests point."
Chortan looked at the bodies on the floor. He looked at Batu. Whatever calculation he ran, it ran fast.
"Temur," he said. "He's a merchant's runner. He operates between the western camps and the Kerait trading post. He came to me three days ago."
"Where is he now."
"He camps with the supply train. Near the salt stores."
Batu looked at Khulgen. That was all. Just a look.
Khulgen was already moving before Batu turned back to Chortan.
He processed the remaining five guardsmen the same way. Two more had seen Chortan speaking with strangers near the perimeter but had said nothing, which was its own kind of failure. The other three had seen nothing and were telling the truth. Batu could tell the difference.
By the time the sun was fully up, he had a complete picture of the previous night's access points. The breach was narrow. One man, one entry, one story that should have triggered questions and didn't. That was the vulnerability. Not malice distributed across the watch. One weak point that someone had correctly identified and used.
Whoever sent the assassins understood his camp layout. They knew the watch rotation schedule. They knew the third rotation was the youngest and least experienced. That was operational intelligence. That required either a spy embedded long-term or someone with access to his command structure.
Neither option was comforting.
Khulgen returned with Temur an hour later.
Temur was a small man in his thirties with the weathered face of someone who had spent years moving between camps and trading posts. He came in without being dragged. He walked calmly. His eyes moved across the bodies and then to Batu and he composed his expression quickly, which told Batu more than the expression itself.
This wasn't a man encountering something unexpected. This was a man assessing how much had already been uncovered.
"You contracted three men to enter my camp last night," Batu said.
Temur opened his mouth.
"Don't," Batu said.
Temur closed it.
"I'm not interested in the story you prepared. I'm interested in who paid you. The story doesn't help you. The name does."
Temur looked at the floor. He was calculating. Batu gave him the time because rushing it would only produce a false name designed to buy hours.
"If I give you the name," Temur said slowly, "I'm a dead man regardless."
"You're a dead man regardless," Batu agreed. "The question is what kind."
He let that sit.
Temur understood. Most men did, eventually. There were different ways to die and the gap between them was the only currency left in a conversation like this one.
The name Temur gave was Guyuk.
Not a minor noble. Not a local rival. Guyuk. Son of Ogedei. The Great Khan's heir.
Batu kept his face exactly where it was.
"Say that again," he said.
Temur said it again. He gave details without being asked. A rider from the east, arriving two weeks prior. A pouch of silver passed through two intermediaries before reaching Temur. A specific instruction: clean, no traces, make it look like a camp accident.
Batu listened to all of it. Then he nodded once.
He looked at Khulgen. "Take him to the eastern holding pen. Post two men on him. No contact with anyone."
Khulgen moved. Temur went without resistance. He had the look of a man who had just done the only useful thing left to him and wasn't sure if it was enough.
It wasn't enough. But that was a decision for later.
Batu walked outside.
The camp was awake now. Cook fires, horses, the low noise of several thousand men beginning a day. Men glanced at him as he moved. Word had spread, the way word always spread in a camp. Something had happened in the Khan's tent. Three bodies. The Khan was walking around with dried blood on his deel and the expression of a man reviewing a logistics problem.
He stopped at the open ground between his tent and the main horse line.
"Bring Chortan," he said to the guard behind him.
They brought Chortan.
Batu didn't make a speech. He didn't explain the offense or recite the law or gesture at the bodies still visible through the open tent flap. He simply looked at the men who had begun gathering and said, "This man passed strangers through the perimeter at night. Three men died in my tent. This man helped put them there."
He nodded to the guard on his left.
It was over in a moment.
The assembled watch stood very still.
Batu looked at them. Not with anger. With the same flat attention he had used during the interrogations. He was filing faces. Reading who flinched and who didn't. Who looked sick and who looked calculating.
"The watch rotation changes today," he said. "Khulgen will post the new assignments by midday. Any man with questions about the new structure brings them to Khulgen. Any man who thinks the old structure was acceptable brings his questions to me personally."
No one said anything.
Batu walked back toward his tent.
He sat with the three bodies for a few minutes more. Servants would come for them soon. He looked at their faces without feeling much. They were instruments. Someone had pointed them at him. That someone was the problem, not these three.
Guyuk.
He'd expected rivalry. He'd expected friction from within the Jochid line, from his brothers, from nobles who resented his father's legitimacy questions. He hadn't expected the heir to the Great Khan to move this early and this directly.
Which meant either Guyuk was reckless, or Batu had done something recently that alarmed him enough to act fast. Or someone close to Guyuk had persuaded him that Batu was a threat worth removing before he became one.
None of those options made Guyuk look like a careful man.
That was useful.
He stood. Called for a servant to deal with the bodies. The watch reform, the guard restructuring, the vulnerable rotation slots, all of it was still on the list. But the list had a new first entry.
Six weeks ago, Batu had been a regional commander that Karakorum tracked the way it tracked weather. A variable. Something to account for, not something to fear.
Guyuk had just changed that. He'd reached across the steppe and tried to remove Batu quietly, which meant someone at the center of the empire had already looked west and seen something worth killing.
That meant Batu was further along than he'd realized. And it meant the eastern rider Temur described was still out there somewhere between here and Karakorum.
Find him, and Batu would have a chain. A line connecting a dead man on his floor directly to the Great Khan's heir.
He intended to pull it.