Batu let Khulgen’s answer settle and moved past it.

"The format can be modified," he said to Tükel. "What I want to discuss is the tax structure."

He looked at the goods on the table, the eastern side and the northern side together.

"Part of the tax comes in goods, specifically timber from the northern loads. Sarai’s construction needs timber and the lower steppe doesn’t produce enough. Hemp rope together as an additional. Fixed amounts per season, written into the document."

Tükel looked at the table as if reconsidering what the transaction was worth against this proposal.

"I can accommodate that for my own wares," he said. "What I can’t do is commit the traders who come after me to the same terms. I can’t speak for them."

"The document covers your merchandise," Batu said. "Traders who follow negotiate their own terms within the same contract. That’s all."

Tükel considered that for a moment. "Agreed."

"Good. Then what comes to Sarai first."

The trader looked at him, uncertain what was being asked.

"Seasonally," Batu said. "When the river opens. What reaches a Volga market first."

The trader’s attention focused into the question. He’d been in selling mode before. This was something else.

"The Kama river opens late spring," he said. "The first batches to come south are from the winter trapping season. White fox and sable, taken through the cold months and brought to the river when the ice breaks. Those arrive at the Kama-Volga confluence before anything else."

"How long a season for the furs."

"Maybe half a season. After that the loads thin. The gathering season on the Baltic coast ends early summer and the loads move south through the river system from there. By the time they reach the confluence it’s well into summer."

Saran was looking at the silk on the eastern side of the table.

"The paper," she said. "What does getting it here on a regular cycle actually require."

Tükel looked at her with the attention he’d been giving her since her question about the road documentation.

"The Ayas relay runs goods on fixed cycles through spring and summer," he said. "Currently Sarai is a terminus on the relay, goods arrive here and turn back south. If Sarai is added as a through-stop instead, the goods come on the cycle without a separate route needed."

"It’s already on the relay as a priority stop," Batu said.

The trader looked at him.

"There’s an existing contract with the Ayas network. Priority access from Samarkand to the Volga. Getting Sarai moved from to a through-stop is a conversation I can have with the network directly."

The trader’s thinking was visible before he answered, revising what he’d assumed about how much groundwork Sarai had already laid.

"That changes the spring timeline," he said. "I’d assumed several seasons to get the relay sorted. If the conversation with the network happens before spring, the first cycle could include Sarai as a stop."

"I’ll send word to the Ayas contact after this agreement is sealed."

Tükel looked at the table and then said, "What do you want to know about my volume."

"Your own loads in a full trading season. What does it look like."

He gave it in goods terms. Eastern goods by count, northern goods by pelt number and approximate weight. The quantities were substantial and consistent, the account of a man who had been running the same operation for years and knew exactly what it produced. He didn’t inflate the numbers or understate them, and the detail made it clear he hadn’t been asked to account for it this way often.

Khulgen had been writing steadily through the goods discussion. The format was taking form without anyone directing him toward it.

When the accounting was done, Tükel reached across and touched the lacquered box.

He opened it.

Inside was a shallow bowl fitted into the box’s base, no larger than a man’s palm, rimmed in darker lacquer and partially filled with water. A thin sliver of wood floated at the surface. A needle rested on the sliver, worked with a lodestone until it held a charge, pointing in one direction. The interior of the box lid had four markings in Chinese characters at the cardinal positions.

Tükel rotated the box slowly. The needle held its direction. The box turned around it.

"It points north," he said. "Every time, regardless of how the box is held. The Chinese use it at sea when there are no stars to navigate by. It works the same on land."

He pushed it across the table toward Batu.

"A gift to mark the agreement."

Batu picked it up and rotated it the way Tükel had demonstrated. The needle stayed where it was while the bowl turned.

He kept his face where it was. What he recognized immediately was not what anyone else at the table recognized. He naturally knew what a compass was.

A screen rider on a long overcast route could hold a bearing without looking for stars or terrain, and a flanking force could carry a written bearing far east and confirm its position at any point in the march.

In the reed channels on the route to Suvar, where the sky had been a strip of gray and the felt markers had been the only reference, this would have been a different kind of tool entirely.

"Can more be procured."

"Yes," Tükel said. "The craftsmen who make them are in the eastern workshops. They’re not common goods, but they’re available through the right contacts in the network."

Batu set the compass down beside the document Khulgen was finishing.

Khulgen read the terms back when the document was ready. He did it in his usual note, what was agreed, what the deal required, what the format covered for future traders who followed. Tükel listened without interrupting. The terms were what they’d agreed on.

The wolf’s track pressed into the wax at the base. Batu pressed it. Tükel placed his own mark beside it. Both men received the copy the other had sealed.

Khulgen opened the commercial register beside his case and made the entry. The first of its kind in the record.

Tükel gathered the amber and the Arctic fox pelt from the northern side of the table. The eastern goods he left where they were, the silk, the paper, the sealed pepper jar, the lacquered box. The compass he left as well, because it was the gift. He said what merchants said at the close of business, brief and in the polite tone. Then he went.

Saran picked up the amber when he was gone and held it to the light from the east window. The insect inside was visible when the light caught it, small and intact, preserved longer than they could imagine.

"He knew what he was asking for before he arrived," she said.

"Makes him a useful contact," Batu said.

She set the amber down and looked at the compass on the table.

Batu picked it up and put it in his coat. Khulgen closed the case with the register inside. Through the open door of the room, the fire in the brazier down the hallway was audible, low and steady against the winter.