Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 16: The Reason

Suuqai’s man came at the second watch.

Batu was still awake. He’d been working through a supply allocation problem that Orel had flagged before the evening meal and hadn’t resolved it yet.

When the knock came he set the document aside and opened the tent flap.

The man handed him a sealed piece of felt and said nothing. The seal was Mersek’s unit mark.

Batu broke it and read.

The message was short. Six lines in the Uighur administrative script, the formal hand that Jochid officers used for correspondence that needed to look official.

A man writing informally in a hurry used his own shorthand. A man writing this way at the second watch had prepared the materials in advance and was using the formality as cover for the urgency.

The content confirmed what Batu had needed it to confirm. Temur’s situation was being reviewed. The chain was at risk. The recipient needed to go dark until further word came.

He read it twice and set it down.

"Where was the rider intercepted," Batu said.

"Eastern gate. He’d cleared the inner perimeter and was moving toward the northeastern road. Suuqai’s man on the outer rotation flagged the timing."

The second watch. The specific hour when the overnight rotation changed and the brief gap in coverage was widest.

Mersek had known the rotation schedule because he’d been the one to delay its implementation for ten days.

"Keep the rider separate from the general holding," Batu said. "Tell Suuqai I want Mersek brought to me before the morning watch."

The man went.

Batu sat with the felt letter and thought about what Mersek had done and why he’d done it the way he’d done it.

A formal letter in administrative script dispatched at the second watch meant Mersek had decided to move the moment the Temur rumor reached him, not after sleeping on it, not after considering alternatives.

A man who moved that fast on incomplete information was a man who’d been waiting for a trigger.

The message going east confirmed what he’d needed it to confirm since he’d marked the operational log.

He put the felt letter with the log and went to sleep.

Mersek arrived before dawn with Suuqai’s man two paces behind him.

He sat down without being told to, looked at the two items on the table between them, and read each one in order. The felt letter. The operational log from the Tergesh preparation, open to the attendance record and the marked line.

He read them without hurrying. Then he looked at Batu.

"How long," Mersek said.

"The road passage clause," Batu said. "Kirsa told me the rider who came to the Khotor knew it. You were the only council officer present when it was discussed outside the general summary."

"That’s circumstantial."

Batu looked at the felt letter on the table.

Mersek looked at it too. Something moved in his jaw, a brief tightening, the first time Batu had seen his composure do anything at all.

He’d been careful for a long time. Careful men recognized the specific moment when careful ran out.

"What happens now," Mersek said.

"Your unit is folded into Torghul’s command structure. Your men get a reassignment order, no explanation. You report to Suuqai’s detail in the morning.

Movement restricted to camp perimeter until I’ve determined what to do with you."

Mersek sat with that for a moment. "My men. Will they be told anything."

"No."

He nodded once and stood. At the tent entrance he stopped, not turning fully.

"I wasn’t working against you," Mersek said. "I was maintaining a connection that kept my clan’s position viable when the eastern pressure came.

Whatever Guyuk does when Ogedei dies, my clan needed to be on a list that survived it." He paused. "I didn’t know about the assassination attempt until after it happened."

Batu looked at him. "I know."

Mersek left with Suuqai’s man.

Batu sat with the two items on the table and ran what Mersek had said against what he knew.

The claim about the assassination attempt was probably true. A man feeding supply intelligence and movement data to an eastern contact was building a survival position, maintaining access to whichever eastern faction came out ahead.

Guyuk’s assassination contract had been placed through a separate channel entirely, through Temur. Mersek’s connection had been a clan hedge against an uncertain succession.

The threat was smaller than Batu had first read it. The reasoning behind it was clear.

Neither fact changed what Mersek’s position in the camp could be going forward.

The camp outside was beginning its earliest stirrings. He could hear the horse lines, the change of the overnight watch.

Batu kept the felt letter, returned the operational log to the records stack, and went to find Torghul before the morning meal.

The handover took forty minutes. Torghul asked two practical questions about Mersek’s unit composition and asked nothing else.

He’d seen enough of how Batu operated to understand that the unit arriving without its commander was the whole explanation.

Batu was walking back across the central ground when he saw Siban’s aide moving toward the administrative tent at a pace that was slightly faster than the general morning traffic.

He didn’t follow. He found a position at the supply rack near the eastern granary and waited.

The aide came out of the administrative tent ten minutes later and walked back toward the eastern officer quarters.

Khulgen appeared from the tent entrance and crossed toward Batu.

"Siban’s aide asked whether the departure could be moved to today," Khulgen said. "He said Siban had received word that the Irtysh border detachment needed his attention earlier than expected."

"What word."

"He didn’t specify."

Batu looked at the eastern officer quarters across the ground.

A man who had planned to stay and observe was now leaving ahead of schedule, and the reason he gave was operational rather than personal, which was the kind of reason that left no thread to pull.

"Approve it," Batu said. "Give him a standard departure provision. Two days of supply from the eastern stores."

Khulgen went back to the administrative tent.

Siban would ride northeast with the specific knowledge that Mersek had been removed overnight and that whatever picture he’d built of this camp’s internal situation had changed in a way he hadn’t anticipated.

He’d carry that back to his detachment and recalculate.

That recalculation was more useful to Batu than holding him.

He was still watching the eastern officer quarters when Orel appeared at his elbow with the particular expression of a man who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it.

"Yusuf is at the gate," Orel said. "He arrived this morning. He says he has a counter-proposal on the river route terms."

A counter-proposal meant Yusuf had spent the days since their first meeting building a position.

A merchant who came back with a counter-proposal instead of a simple acceptance had done the arithmetic and decided he had something worth negotiating from.

Batu looked at the eastern gate.

"Bring him to the command tent," he said. "Give me an hour."