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 named Arslan, passes himself off as a grain merchant'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 time he relieves himself. I want a name attached to every contact."
Khulgen nodded.
"Don't use anyone from the watch rotation. Use someone 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 something.
"There is another problem," he said.
Khulgen waited.
"Temur gave us the chain. Rider to middleman to guardsman to tent. That chain works if someone 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 merchant's assistant finds by walking around the camp."
He could see Khulgen processing it.
"Someone inside the council gave it to him," Khulgen said.
"Someone inside the council gave it to whoever sent Arslan, yes. And that person is still sitting in my morning meetings."
The paddock fence creaked in the wind. Grass bent flat beyond it and straightened again.
"How many men have access to the watch rotation schedule," Batu said.
"As it was structured, eight. The watch commander, his two deputies, and five senior council members who receive the nightly security summary."
"Five council members," Batu said. "Good."
Khulgen looked at him. "My lord."
"I'm going to give each of those five men 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 came from."
Khulgen was still for a moment. Then he said, "And if more than one of them is feeding information east."
"Then more than one version moves and I have two names 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 names and their current assignments on my table before the afternoon meeting. No record of why you pulled them. Just the names."
"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 men who've been with me for more than two years. No exceptions."
"Understood."
Khulgen peeled off toward the command tents. Batu kept walking.
The afternoon meeting 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 members throughout. Not looking for guilt. Guilty men were often good at meetings. He was looking for attention patterns, where each man's eyes went when certain subjects came up, which topics made them sit slightly straighter or slightly stiller.
Nothing definitive. But one man, a senior logistics officer named Borte-Qol, consistently looked toward the tent entrance when matters of supply movement were raised. A small thing. Possibly nothing. He filed it.
After the meeting he called each of the five men 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 mention to a contact without thinking it was sensitive.
To the first he mentioned that the eastern scouting patrol was being delayed by two days due to a lame horse in the lead unit.
To the second he mentioned that a supply shipment of salted meat was arriving from the northern camps on the fourth day of next week.
To the third he mentioned that Temur, the merchant'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 timeline.
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 mental maps of organizations. The principles were the same 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 implement after the leak was identified. Not before. Changing the structure now would tell whoever was watching that something had shifted.
He folded the notes and set them aside.
A rider had come 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 men 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 flame.
Arslan was still in the supply camp. One of five council members was carrying false grain. And somewhere to the west, two Kipchak clan leaders were about to learn that ignoring Jochid authority had a response time 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.