"Empress," he added, turning to the crimson veil. His tone was still courtesy. It was also the edge of a gate slamming shut. "The inner halls will need calm. Attend them."
A dismissal wrapped in silk. For a long breath, the wire under her throat did not move.
"As Your Majesty wishes," Wu Ling murmured.
I had thought of him as a painted dragon on a festival banner: splendid, weightless. In the plain light of ledgers he was something else. He was a pond that hides depth under stillness. He was a patient hand refusing to tremble.
Something in me—habit, pride, the boy who learned to measure the room by his father's shadow—shifted aside. A new calculation took its place.
A scribe stumbled in, face dusted gray, fists full of ash that was not ash. He fell to his knees and pressed brow to plank.
"Forgive me—there is—beneath—"
"Speak," the Emperor said.
"In the Hall of Judgement," he gasped, "under the dais. We thought a coal had fallen under the step. But the lacquer swelled… and—" He swallowed. "Carved, Your Majesty. Fresh. In the stone itself."
No one ran. Men do not run before the dragon. But our steps struck faster, like patrol boots on frost.
The great doors gaped, breathing shallow. Ash filmed the marble. Lanterns along the pillars burned with angry, tight flames. The dais waited with its matting peeled back like a lip from a tooth. The lacquered riser was pried an inch; the pry-bars lay where small hands had dropped them in fear.
Underneath, the stone everybody trusts—to hold the hall steady when hundreds of men shift weight at once—had been cut. Not gouged. Inscribed. Lines laid like a brush knows the page before the hand touches it. A spiral within a spiral, and a finer one nested within that.
The tide under my breastbone leaned forward. My breath misstepped. Shen Yue's fingers found the needle points at my wrist and invited the world back into my body.
The Emperor stood at the edge of the ash, close enough for soot to kiss his shoes. He did not summon priests. He did not flinch. He watched as if reading a difficult character in bad light.
"Who crossed this threshold after the decree?" he asked.
Blue-robed eunuchs fell to their knees. "No one, Your Majesty. We swear it."
"So." My voice came out quieter than I intended. "The city writes here now."
"Counting does not change the number," I heard myself say before I could stop it.
Shen Yue's head snapped toward me. "Do not finish it," she hissed.
Wu Kang advanced as if the stone were winter water and he meant to dare it. He had nothing to swing a blade at; it made him smaller.
Wu Ling did not cross the sill. She stood between pillars, perfect as a drawn character. If fear visited her, it held its breath.
"The hall can be cleansed," a minister offered, voice bright with the hope of paint. "Salt… incense… new lacquer—"
"It will be cleansed," the Emperor said, "but we will not mistake paint for stone."
He turned from the cut the way a man turns from a river he intends to dam. The lamplight found his eyes and made them coals waiting for wind.
"Seal the Hall of Judgement," he said. "No chamberlain enters without my hand on his shoulder. The court moves to the east pavilion until I say otherwise."
A murmur bled out, shocked, small. The Hall had stood longer than living memory. To seal it was to admit that something older than decorum had entered the palace and chosen where to sit.
His gaze came back to me. "Your task stands. Westward wards. The first man you speak to will be a clerk with burned fingertips. He will try to pray with lies. You will not let him."
"Understood," I said.
The spiral pressed once against bone—testing the bars of its cage, then settling with the patience of a tide that knows cliffs eventually forget their shape.
We filed into a night that had thinned. In the passage, Liao Yun breathed through his teeth. "Spiral under the dragon," he murmured. "Bold."
"Patient," Shen Yue said.
We took the turning toward the west. Boards and nails passed us toward the sealed hall, held in the mouths of boys too young to know what door they were closing. At the angle of two corridors, a thin figure stood where shadow made its own choice.
Wu Shuang. Hood low. Hands folded like a novice who had forgotten why she had taken vows.
No one stopped her. People do not stop omens; they pretend not to see them.
Her eyes found mine as if the night had been built for that one line to be drawn.
"The bells," she said mildly, "are not done."
"Who strikes them?" I asked.
"Heaven," she said, and her voice did not mock. "Or someone who learned Heaven's wrist." Her gaze dipped, just for a breath, to the place beneath my ribs where only I could feel the sea. "If it calls you by another name, do not answer."
She moved past us, light as breath that has learned to leave.
We went the other way, toward alleys that had learned new letters. The bells staggered, found a step, lost it. Ash combed the eaves with its thin teeth. Somewhere in the city, men told their children to sleep while counting beads they claimed were only wood.
Behind us, carpenters set the first nails in the dragon's hall. Ahead, the westward wards waited with their chalk and their burned hands.
And under the ribs that had carried me through two wars and a hundred lies, the spiral listened with me—patient as winter, hungry as mathematics.