The grass was shorter and paler than when they had left, and the air off the steppe had the first cold from the north.

The horses’ stride had changed somewhere in the last two days, the particular settling that came when an animal recognized its own ground under its feet.

The Jochid riders around Batu felt it too, though none of them said anything about it. The camp was set up with the efficiency of a force that had spent two seasons making camp on unfamiliar ground and now did not have to think about it.

Saran was already waiting when Batu came off Daichin. She had her attendants around her, and she was not happy with them.

"I’ve plans," she was saying. "And none of them involve me sleeping like a log in the camp."

"My lady, the physician said-"

"I know what the physician said. I was there."

She turned when she heard Batu approach and looked at him in the most straightforward way possible.

"Tell them I’m coming."

Batu looked at her. The march had exhausted her in a way she would not acknowledge, and the attendants were correctly worried about it. It was visible in how she held herself, the specific kind of fatigue of a woman that had to spend energy for more than one.

"You rest," he said. "I’ll have Khulgen give you the full accounting before evening."

She stopped with that for a moment. Her cheeks puffed once, briefly, met with a decision she disagreed with and found she could not contest. Then she exhaled.

"Fine. But I want everything. Not a summary."

"Khulgen doesn’t summarize," Batu said.

He turned toward the horse lines.

He rode to the city with six of the Khar Kheshig, Suuqai at the near position. The eastern river came up on the left as the road passed by a low rise. The water was darker than the sky above it, the current still running in the way a narrow channel ran even as the main Volga’s margins began to slow toward their autumn state.

The old trees at the bank were where he had see them the first time he had walked this ground, their lower trunks marked with the sediment line of the spring flood. Now, there were buildings above that mark.

The construction had honored the limit he had established. The records structure sat above the flood mark, the administrative building behind it on the same rise, the market district’s first permanent stalls running along roads that brought them to the city.

The city was still in its infancy.

Khulgen was at the city boundary before Batu had come down from the rise. He had arrived before being sent for, which was Khulgen’s way. He was on foot, a document case under one arm, his hands going flat at his sides when Batu dismounted, the habit that had arrived after the earliest days and never left.

Kirsa was with him, standing slightly apart in the way he stood everywhere.

Batu looked at Khulgen. Khulgen looked at Batu. The months that had passed were in their eyes and did not need to be named.

Then Khulgen’s hands came up from their flat position, and he opened the document case.

With Kirsa, Batu extended his right forearm. Kirsa gripped it below the elbow, one pressure, and released.

"The kurultai results reached me," Khulgen said. "I have prepared accordingly."

"Show me," Batu said.

They walked into the city.

The records building was first. Its walls were mortared river stone at the base and brick above, the roof properly sealed against the coming winter. Inside, four Uyghur scribes sat at their low tables, three who had arrived from the eastern settlements in the spring, a fourth who had come through the Ayas network in late summer.

Their pens moved at the pace of people who had been at the same work long enough to find their rhythm. The documents were in Orel’s system, organized in felt-wrapped bundles on the shelving structures, each labeled in Mahmud’s hand.

"Two more scribes are expected before the river freezes," Khulgen said. "Every tributary submission comes in with the household count and the levy in the same document. The cross-check runs automatically. If the numbers don’t align, the submission goes back."

"Have any gone back?"

"Six in the first month. One since then."

Khulgen glanced at him.

"The headmen adapted to what we are checking now."

The market district was built along the streets south of the administrative quarter. The permanent stalls were up along the first row, fourteen of them, built from the timber that had come up the channel in the spring loads, solid enough to withstand the winter.

A Persian merchant in a Khorasan coat was examining a bolt of cloth at one stall in a secondary street, speaking to its owner without urgency. Farther along, two men were arguing in Turkic over a scale’s calibration. Someone at the far end called something in a northern tongue Batu recognized from the Khar Kheshig’s norsemen.

"The Ayas network is routing through on three regular stops per month," Khulgen said. "The Persian merchant arrived on the last relay. He’s been here four days. He’ll continue west in another six."

He looked at the stall.

"He’s been asking about the tanning workshops."

"What’s his cargo?"

"Spices and eastern silk coming west. He’s buying felt for the return."

Khulgen kept walking.

"The rates we set up are standard. They’ll return due them."

At the channel’s eastern bank, the dock sloped down into the water the way Ahmad had set it. Ahmad was crouched at the edge, pressing the flat of his hand against a stone in the lower course. It was the same motion he used on any surface he needed to understand.

He glanced up when Batu’s party reached the bank, looked at him with decades of accumulated professional attention, nodded once, and turned back to the stone.

"He’ll want to argue about the drainage at the southern bank before you leave," Khulgen said.

"Let him."

Kirsa spoke then, the first time since the forearm grip.

"The western tributary patrols were found three clans probing when you left. We pushed the enforcement riders through them in the fourth month. Two paid immediately. The third required a second visit."

"Which clan?"

"Burjin’s second elder."

Kirsa kept his eyes on the river.

"He had been on the mind to contest Jochid authority. He understands now."

"And the northeast?"

"Two new clans from the Bashkir steppes came to us asking about terms. I gave them the terms and put riders with them."

A pause.

"They submitted."

Batu looked at the dock and at Ahmad’s back turned toward them.

Khulgen delivered the rest of the report as they moved along the bank. Dorbei’s consolidation of the southern territory was complete, his tumen returned north in late summer to prepare for the Bulgar expedition.

The third tumen had expanded to cover the vacated southern ground. One force where two had been required. The wolf’s track seal on every tributary document from the lower Ural south to the former Berke territory was running without challenge.

"The fire-weapon craftsmen," Batu said.

"The Kashgar contact has been approached through the Ayas network. He’s considering the contract. The second craftsman was located east of Samarkand. A rider went out with the offer, and we’re waiting for the return."

Khulgen looked at him.

"The third is still unlocated." 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"When the first two commit, I want to know before anything is signed."

"Of course."

The market district’s far end gave way to the residential quarter, where buildings and ger settlement existed alongside each other in the way of a place still working out what it would be. Workers were setting foundation stones at the site of the next administrative building.

The city was thin by a mature city’s measure and real by any honest reading of what five months of work created.

They came back around to the administrative building, where Mahmud was waiting outside the entrance with a document case of his own. He was a broad man past sixty with the posture of decades at a desk, and he looked at Batu with direct attention.

"The formal registry."

He said. "I’ve been using ’eastern river capital’ in the headers. The Ayas network uses ’Jochid Volga station.’ The tributary correspondence from the census riders uses three different names depending on who wrote it."

He looked at his case and then at Batu.

"I need one name for all of it."

Batu looked at the records building, at the dock and the river, at the market stalls with the Persian merchant still at his examination of the cloth.

"Sarai Batu," he said.

Mahmud made the notation. Beside him, the clerk wrote it into the registry header that had been waiting for it since the spring.