Three days passed.
The wolf-track seal returned from the craftsman on the second morning, pressed into a hardened felt disc and mounted to a short bone handle.
Orel set it on the table without comment.
Batu picked it up and pressed it once into a blank strip of felt.
The impression came out sharp on the first try. Clean edges. The right forefoot print stood clear enough that nobody would mistake it for another seal.
He handed it back.
The Yusuf guarantee went out that same afternoon under the new mark.
Orel sent copies to all three sub-commanders along the western line together with Torghul's written order enforcing the change.
The levy stopped.
Two commanders complied at once and sent no reply.
The third sent a question through Orel asking whether the guarantee applied to non-Bulgar cargo as well.
Torghul answered personally. The order covered all cargo without exception. The written directive allowed no separate reading.
The sub-commander accepted the answer. No further objections followed.
The question itself mattered more than the compliance.
A man who obeyed immediately had already decided resistance would cost him more than cooperation.
A man who tested the limits of the order before accepting it measured things differently.
He was not looking for a reason to refuse. He was looking for space inside the command. A place where he could keep operating without openly challenging authority.
That kind of problem surfaced slowly.
Batu memorized the name and turned to other matters.
The training ground continued its cycles.
Penk's coordination signals held together three days out of four now. Better than before, but still not enough. Torghul understood that without explanation.
The eastern flat had changed as well.
Before Sarat, Batu could read the field in a glance. Now the camp was denser, harder for an outsider to understand quickly. Still, the order beneath it remained visible to anyone who knew where to look.
On the third evening, Batu walked toward the eastern holding pen.
The structure sat low against the camp perimeter. Two guards stood outside in the same positions Batu had assigned after the assassination attempt.
He had never changed the arrangement.
He also had not returned to the pen since that night. Neither had anyone else.
Those had been the instructions. The guards had followed them exactly.
One guard lifted the entrance flap as Batu approached. The other stayed at his post without turning.
Inside was a single plain room.
A sleeping mat. A water vessel. A lamp kept low through the night watches so the prisoner never sat in complete darkness.
Temur sat on the mat when Batu entered.
More than two months in the same room.
The stillness in him was familiar. Batu had seen it before in prisoners who had exhausted every line of thought and reached the same answer each time.
Temur looked up but said nothing.
Batu crossed the room and sat on the low stool near the entrance.
Silence lingered between them for a moment.
Then Batu studied him the same way he had during their first meeting. Not as a man. As something to be read carefully and broken apart into useful pieces.
"The rider from the east," Batu said at last. "The one who brought the contract. What did he know about this camp before he arrived?"
Temur's expression barely moved.
Two months of isolation had worn away most of the calculations he tried to maintain during the first interrogation.
What remained was simpler. A man who understood his position clearly enough to stop pretending otherwise.
"He knew your tent layout," Temur said. "He knew the watch rotations. He knew which section used the youngest riders during the third rotation."
He paused.
"He also knew which council officers carried debts they never reported."
Batu leaned forward slightly. "Which officers?"
"He gave me two names. I didn't recognize either one."
Temur's eyes drifted toward the lamp.
"He wasn't telling me because I needed the names. He used them to prove he had access."
Batu considered that in silence.
Using unverifiable names as proof only worked if the speaker believed the information would survive scrutiny later. A bluff would have been too dangerous.
That pointed to a network confident in its own sources.
"How long had he been in the territory before contacting you?" Batu asked.
"He didn't say."
Temur kept his voice flat.
"But he knew about the Kipchak pasture dispute in the western sector. Not the general dispute. The actual grazing boundary."
Another short silence.
"That conflict started two seasons before you arrived."
Before Batu arrived.
Before the reincarnation. Before the consolidation campaigns. Before the western line had begun to change under his hand.
The pasture dispute was not the sort of thing an outsider learned by chance. It was local friction. Small, stubborn, regional.
A man only learned details like that by staying in the western steppe for a long time or by working through people who had.
Which meant the assassination contract had entered a network already studying the region for its own reasons.
"The silver," Batu said. "You said it passed through two intermediaries before reaching you. Who were they?"
"A supply rider stationed at the Kerait trading post."
Temur shifted slightly.
"He passed it to a grain merchant who traveled between the post and the western camps."
A pause.
"The grain merchant gave me the story about the servants. He's the one who knew how to disguise the delivery as camp supply traffic."
Batu watched him carefully. "Is the grain merchant still at the trading post?"
For the first time since the conversation began, Temur met his eyes directly.
"I don't know," he said. "I've been in this room."
Batu stood.
At the entrance, he stopped and glanced back.
"The council officers," he said. "Think about the exact wording the rider used."
Temur remained silent.
"When I return, I want his words. Not your reading of them."
Temur nodded once.
Outside, the camp had already fallen into its evening routine.
Batu walked back toward the command quarter, sorting through the information without forcing conclusions too early.
A network familiar with the Kipchak pasture boundaries before his arrival.
A grain merchant operating through the Kerait trading post with enough experience to move information through camp supply channels unnoticed.
Two council officers named as proof of access and penetration.
The Borte-Qol channel was feeding false supply intelligence eastward into a network that had likely been studying the western steppe for at least two seasons before Batu began consolidating power.
Which meant the network had already compared the false information against older regional knowledge.
Any contradictions would have surfaced by now.
The Kerait trading post sat northeast of the camp.
The grain merchant was either still operating there or already gone.
Before Batu reached the command tent, he sent for Khulgen.