The floor’s attention was on him from the moment he stood.

He looked at the full assembly of gathered princes. At Ogedei at the session’s head.

"I know the ground," Batu said. "I’m already there."

He sat.

The floor was silent for two beats. Then three or four voices from the outer rings found each other in confusion, the sound of several hundred men catching up with a simple statement.

"That’s it?" said a voice from the Toluid outer ring.

"That’s it," someone near him confirmed.

From the minor princes’ northern side, a pair of men exchanged words.

"No argument. Just, there he is."

"There he is."

From the Ogedeid section, nothing.

Ogedei looked at the session. His eyes traveled the full width of the gathered princes and came back to the center, and whatever he had been thinking through the morning he had finished. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

He rose.

"The Eternal Blue Sky has witnessed this gathering," he said. His voice reached without effort. "What the princes of the Great Mongol people have determined, the Sky witnesses alongside them."

He looked at the session floor.

"The western campaign marches under the authority of Batu Khan, senior prince of the Jochid ulus. This assembly has determined it. It is determined."

He sat.

The floor received it with sounds from every direction at once, the ambient noise of thousands of men releasing what they had been thinking through an entire morning.

"About time," said the Kipchak prince from the northern side, loud enough to reach the outer rings.

"Took long enough," someone from the middle section agreed.

"The west opens," said another man.

"The west has been open," answered the voice beside him. "We just didn’t have a name on it."

From the Ogedeid section, Batu heard nothing.

He looked across the floor at Guyuk’s position without turning his head fully in that direction. Guyuk was watching Ogedei.

Orda was to Batu’s left, unmoved. His face had no surprise, which was almost no expression at all.

The session registrar called the morning’s close.

The session began to dissolve in the way of a large formal gathering that has finished its business, factions finding their feet, the outer rings filling with the noise of men who had been in their positions for hours and were now moving.

The Kipchak prince passed by Jochid section’s on his way out. He nodded once in Batu’s direction, not stopping, the nod to acknowledge a fact, and kept walking.

Afterwards, there were days of formal ratification through sessions that worked less like a debate and more like record-keeping, each faction’s affirmation entered into the register, the oaths across two afternoons, the subordinate command assignments named and confirmed in a row.

In a separate series of sessions, the eastern campaign against the Southern Song was authorized and given to the princes of the eastern lines. That was the kurultai’s other business and Batu had no part in it.

The gifts from the Great Khan were presented at the closing ceremony in the form the tradition required.

Then the assembly changed in the way all large gatherings changed when the decision had been made, the factional pressure that had sustained itself through the games and sessions dissolving into the pressure of an empire that had authorized a war and now had to become one.

Supply manifests moved between camps. Rider counts arrived from every command. Subordinate commanders began appearing at the session staff’s outer tent in the organized sequence of men who already knew where they were going and needed only the record to confirm it.

Batu came back to his tent after the camp’s fires had dropped to their overnight level.

He had been walking the assembly camp’s outer side for the past hour, watching what the transition looked like from the outside, which armies were already in active preparation, which were still integrating what had been authorized into what it meant for the next months of their lives.

The Khar Kheshig had come with him, as they always did. Nobody had needed anything that couldn’t wait.

The tent was as he had left it. A lamp at its low glow. A supply tally from Khulgen’s last dispatch sitting where it had been for two days.

He moved the tally to the side, pulled the map from the storage space beside the table where it had been rolled for the whole time the tumen had been at Karakorum, and spread it open on the surface.

It was large, much larger than the carved wooden board he had used for the kurultai planning before the departure, and it had a different purpose.

He had been building it piece by piece across the months of the southern route, from the merchant accounts the Ayas caravanserai network had on the western territories, from what the Islamic cartographic collections in Bukhara and Samarkand had on the ground beyond the Rus territories, and from his own prior-life record rendered in private hours onto the felt.

The mountains were across the eastern third of the map in a dark curved line that bent north to south and back north again, the entirety of the Carpathian range.

West of them the felt was largely open, flat and pale, representing the Hungarian basin, the great plain running from the mountains’ western face toward the Danube’s course.

The Vistula marked the north. The Danube marked the south. The passes through the mountains were indicated where the merchant accounts had confirmed their positions.

To the east, there were the Rus territories. The Grand Principality of Vladimir, the Republic of Novgorod, the Kievian Rus. Those would be their first real obstacles in their march west.

And further east, there was Volga Bulgaria. A region that wasn’t quite as rich, but it was necessary to conquer first to reach the Rus territories.

That was where Batu would march when he returned to the western steppes.

However, that was only the beginning. As for the rest of the campaign, he took carved pieces from a leather pouch and set them beside the map.