The knife went in wrong.
That was the first thing he noticed. Not the pain. Not the dark. Not the sound of boots scraping dirt or the way the tent walls shifted with moving bodies.
The knife went in wrong. Whoever threw it was already a dead man.
He didn't know how he knew that. He didn't know much of anything in those first few seconds. There was a body, and the body was moving before his mind caught up. Rolling left. Hand finding a short blade beneath the sleeping mat. The motion was muscle memory that did not belong to him.
His name was Batu.
He knew that the way he knew how to breathe. Not remembered. Just known.
The tent flap moved. A figure came through low and fast, the way men moved when they expected a sleeping target. Batu's arm swung. The blade opened the man's throat in a single stroke. The figure folded without a sound.
Batu sat up.
His ribs screamed. The thrown knife had glanced off bone along his left side. Not deep. He pressed a palm against it and felt blood but not the wet pulse of something critical. Survivable. He filed that away and moved on.
Think. What do you have.
He counted without standing. One man down inside the tent. The flap still swaying. Outside, he could hear at least two more sets of footsteps moving in the dark, circling toward the rear of the tent wall. Trained men. They had a plan. Kill him quietly, stage it as a midnight accident, be gone before the camp stirred.
They had underestimated the gap between the plan and the execution.
He pressed the wound tight with a strip torn from the sleeping mat and stood. The body of the first man lay near the entrance. Batu took his bow. Four arrows in the quiver. A short sword at the hip. He took that too.
Something shifted inside him as he moved. Like two rivers running into each other in the dark, each with its own current. One set of instincts said crouch low, breathe slow, let them come to you. The other set said the same thing but knew why. Knew the geometry of ambushes. Knew that the men outside were probably splitting, one to block the entrance and one to cut through the rear wall.
He wasn't surprised by the knowledge. There was no time to be surprised.
The rear wall rustled.
Batu moved two steps left and waited.
The blade came through the felt at chest height, exactly where a sleeping man's body would be. It punched through and swept sideways. Then the hand followed, then the arm, then a man leaning in expecting to find resistance.
Batu put the short sword through the gap and into the man's shoulder. Not a killing blow. He pulled him forward by the arm, yanked him through the slit in the tent wall, and broke his neck against the ground. Fast and quiet. The man shook once and went still.
Outside, a voice said something low. A question. Waiting for a signal.
Batu stripped the man's outer deel without rushing. The body went against the wall. Then he picked up the bow, nocked an arrow, and stood at the side of the tent entrance.
He waited.
Seventeen seconds. He counted them.
The flap opened again. A shape came through expecting to find two men already finished with the work. Batu put the arrow through his eye from four feet.
He stood in the silence after that and listened.
Nothing moved.
He stepped outside.
The camp was asleep. Fires burned low between the gers. A horse shifted somewhere to the east. The sky overhead was enormous and black and full of stars, and for a moment Batu simply stood in it, breathing cold steppe air, letting the two currents settle.
They had found their channel. Almost one.
He had died before this. He was almost certain of that. There was a memory behind the memory, thin and fading like smoke. A different uniform. A different kind of war. Maps with satellite overlays instead of carved wood. Briefings in lit rooms. A rank on a collar that no longer existed.
He let it go. It did not matter.
What mattered was this. Three men were dead. Someone had sent them. And whoever had sent them was operating inside his own camp.
He looked at the bodies with the same eyes he used to read terrain. No identifying marks on the deel. Standard Mongol riding boots, but the soles were worn on the inner edge, the way a man walks when he grew up on horseback rather than on foot. Steppe-born. Not hired foreigners. That narrowed it.
He went back inside, cleaned the blade, and sat.
His name was Batu Khan. Grandson of Genghis. Son of Jochi, whose legitimacy half the empire still whispered about behind cupped hands. He commanded the western Jochid tumens by birthright, and that birthright had just tried to kill him.
He knew who he was. He knew what century he was in. And unlike the young man whose body this had been an hour ago, he understood exactly what was coming. The great western campaign. Subutai's operational genius. The subjugation of the Rus princes. Hungary. Poland. The doorstep of a continent that had no answer for Mongol cavalry.
He also knew why it stopped.
Ogedei would die drunk in Karakorum. The army would turn east for the kurultai. Europe would exhale. The Golden Horde would fracture and drift and spend three centuries fading into history.
He had no intention of letting that happen.
He sat in the dark with blood drying on his side and three dead men on his floor, and he thought about Rome. How it split. How one half kept breathing for a thousand years after the other collapsed. How the key was not conquest. It was administration. Loyalty. Legitimacy that did not depend on a single man dying in the right order.
The Mongol Empire would split. He would make sure of it. East and West, like a river finding two channels. And the West would not stop marching because a man drank himself to death in a tent on the other side of the world.
But first, the man who sent three assassins into his camp needed to understand the cost of failure.
Batu stood.
He walked to the entrance, stepped over the body there, and raised his voice just enough to carry across the nearest firepit.
"Get me Khulgen."
A guard scrambled upright from the dark, saw the blood on Batu's deel, saw his face, and ran without asking questions.
Batu looked at the stars again. The steppe stretched away in every direction, flat and endless and cold. Half the world. That was what was out there. Half the world with no permanent owner.
He was going to fix that.
Inside the tent, one of the bodies twitched. Reflex. Already dead.
Batu watched it without expression.
Khulgen arrived in under two minutes, still buckling his armor. He stopped at the sight of the bodies. His eyes moved fast, soldier's eyes, reading the scene. Then they moved to Batu.
"Three of them," Batu said. "Steppe-born. Inside the camp perimeter. Someone passed them through."
Khulgen's jaw tightened.
"I want the night watch roster for this section. I want the name of every man who had access to my tent layout. I want them held separately and under guard before sunrise." He paused. "No one talks to anyone until I say so."
"My lord." He didn't ask why. Didn't ask how Batu was still standing. He turned and went.
Batu went back inside and sat with the dead and waited for the names.
Someone in this camp had gone to sleep confident tonight.
They would not wake up that way.