Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 4: Both Ends of the Chain

The report came before breakfast.

Suuqai slipped into the tent while Batu was still reviewing the morning fodder tallies.

He was Jebe’s younger brother. Jebe had been dead years by then, gone on the northern campaign, but the name still meant something in any Mongol camp worth the name.

He was nineteen and had the kind of stillness that most men his age hadn’t learned yet.

Batu had noticed that about him yesterday. He noticed it again now.

"Arslan packed his saddlebag last night," Suuqai said. "After the second watch change. He wasn’t supposed to move for three more days."

Batu set down the fodder tally.

"Who did he speak to yesterday."

"Two men from the supply train in the morning. A Kerait trader at midday. And one of your council officers in the late afternoon, near the eastern granary."

"Which officer."

"Borte-Qol."

A moment passed.

He’d marked Borte-Qol two days ago as a pattern, not a certainty. A man whose eyes moved toward the exit when supply matters came up.

He’d filed it and kept it separate from the false grain test because one data point wasn’t a conclusion.

Now he had two.

"Did Borte-Qol approach him or the other way around."

"Borte-Qol passed within ten feet. He didn’t stop. He didn’t look at Arslan directly. But he slowed for about four steps and then kept walking."

A brush contact. Short and practiced enough that a man not specifically watching for it would have seen two strangers who happened to walk near each other.

"Arslan’s variant," Batu said.

He was thinking out loud, not asking.

"Borte-Qol received the version where Temur was released and provided nothing useful."

That was the one with urgency built into it.

If Temur was free, Arslan’s cover could unravel within days. He would need to move.

The trap had worked in under forty-eight hours.

Faster than expected, which meant Borte-Qol was either panicked or had a standing protocol to relay anything time-sensitive immediately.

Either way it didn’t matter now.

"Where is Arslan at this moment," Batu said.

"Still in the supply camp. I have a man sitting on him."

"Keep him there. Don’t touch him until I send word."

Batu stood.

"And Suuqai."

The young man looked at him.

"You did well. Stay available today."

Suuqai left without ceremony. Batu appreciated that too.

He found Borte-Qol at the eastern granary an hour later, overseeing an inventory count.

The man was in his late forties, heavyset, with the organized efficiency of someone who had spent a career managing supplies.

He was good at his job. That was probably how he’d kept himself useful this long.

Batu dismissed the two clerks helping with the count without explaining why.

They left quickly. Borte-Qol watched them go and then looked at Batu with an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral.

It wasn’t quite getting there.

"Walk with me," Batu said.

They walked east along the granary fence line, away from the main camp, until the nearest cluster of tents was fifty paces behind them.

The wind was coming off the steppe from the north. It was cold and flat and there was nothing in any direction but grass.

Batu stopped.

"I know what you passed to Arslan yesterday," he said. "I know the line it came from and where it runs. I know who’s at the other end."

Borte-Qol said nothing. His face had gone very still.

"I’m not here to give you a version of the conversation you had with Chortan," Batu said.

"You’re not a frightened boy who got talked into something. You made a choice. You’ve probably been making it for a while."

A muscle moved in Borte-Qol’s jaw.

"Here is what I need you to understand," Batu said.

"The chain doesn’t end with you. You’re useful because you’re in the middle of it. The moment you’re dead, it breaks, and the man at the eastern end finds another channel and I start over."

He paused.

"I don’t want to start over."

Borte-Qol looked at him carefully.

He was a smart man. Smart enough to have run this without being caught for however long it had been running.

He was reading the conversation the same way Batu was.

"You want to use it," Borte-Qol said.

"I want to use you," Batu said.

"What reaches the east from this point forward will be what I decide it is. Supply figures that are almost right. Troop positions that are slightly wrong. I’ll tell you what to pass. You’ll pass it."

"And if I refuse."

Batu looked at him without changing his expression.

"Then I handle this the way I handled Chortan. Except you’re a senior council officer, so it won’t be clean and it won’t be fast, and everyone from here to Karakorum will know what you were. Your family included."

The wind moved through the grass. A hawk was circling somewhere high to the north.

Borte-Qol looked at the ground for a long moment.

Then he said, "How long."

"Until I say otherwise."

"And when you say otherwise."

"You’ll have time to put your affairs in order. You have my word on that."

It wasn’t much. They both knew it wasn’t much.

But it was something to hold onto, and a man with nothing to hold onto made desperate decisions.

Borte-Qol nodded once.

He had just handed Batu a controlled line into Guyuk’s operation.

Every report that moved east from this camp would now be Batu’s composition.

That was not a small thing. That was the difference between being hunted and doing the hunting.

"Good," Batu said.

"Arslan leaves with the supply train as originally scheduled. He carries nothing from you for the next week. Let the silence run."

"When I want something sent east I’ll come to you directly. You’ll know it’s real because I’ll give it to you myself."

He started walking back toward camp.

"My lord," Borte-Qol said behind him.

Batu stopped without turning.

"He’ll send someone else eventually. When the reports stop being useful. He’ll know something changed."

"Yes," Batu said. "He will."

He kept walking.

Arslan departed with the supply train three days later, same as scheduled.

He carried a saddlebag with normal trading goods and a set of mental notes that Batu had constructed specifically for whatever debrief waited for him in the east.

Batu watched the supply train from a distance as it rolled out along the eastern track.

Forty carts, two hundred men, the usual noise and dust of a large caravan moving.

Arslan was somewhere in the middle of it. One man out of two hundred.

He was now a sealed letter.

And Batu had written its contents.

He turned back toward camp.

The investigation was done.

What had started as a reaction to knives in the dark had ended with Batu holding both ends of a channel that ran directly to Guyuk’s operation.

Every piece of intelligence flowing east from this camp would be calibrated.

Not false enough to be obviously wrong. Not true enough to be useful.

He had a window. He didn’t know how long.

Guyuk was reckless but he wasn’t stupid, and the men around him weren’t either.

Eventually the picture they were building in Karakorum would stop matching what they saw with their own eyes, and they’d know the channel was compromised.

But that was months away at best.

He had months.

He thought about what to do with them as he walked back through the camp.

The Kipchak rider sent west. The watch rotation reform still being implemented. The guard restructuring.

The three structural changes in camp security he’d been holding until the leak was confirmed.

All of that could move now.

And underneath all of it, the thing he hadn’t let himself focus on fully yet.

Because it was too large to think about in pieces.

He was sitting on the western edge of the largest land empire in human history.

An empire held together by velocity and fear and the personal authority of a single man drinking himself to death in a palace in Karakorum.

The moment that man died, the velocity would stop and the fear would redistribute and the personal authority would shatter into competing claims.

He had maybe six years. Possibly less.

Six years to build something in the west that could stand on its own when the east fractured.

Six years to make himself necessary enough, dangerous enough, and legitimate enough that no one in Karakorum could simply order him home.

The list was long. He knew where it started.

The watch reforms went in that night.

Three structural changes, implemented before the camp stirred.

The kind of thing that looked like nothing from the outside.

Foundations never announced themselves.

He had six years to build walls no one in Karakorum could see yet.

He intended to be several layers deep before anyone thought to look.