Fifty thousand came like weather.
From the willow ford to the dry terraces, the Golden Dragon Army poured in ranks so thick the land seemed printed with armor. Standards rose and fell like a many-headed tide; drums made ribs remember themselves. The earth gave a slow, unhappy sound each time their weight settled into it, as if the plain had learned a new verb: endure.
We had twenty thousand.
Black Tigers, the Lord Protector's scarred elites, and those who still remembered orders given without ink. Enough to hold a city. Not enough to comfort a god.
Wu Jin sent me a general I did not ask for. He came with a small escort and a face the wind did not move.
"General Sun," he said, bowing with the correct number of inches. He was spare and angular, a blade that had decided being a man was the least distracting shape. A narrow scar split one eyebrow and refused to heal gracefully.
"Sun of where?" I asked.
"Of debts," he said. "Most paid."
He moved as if measuring every step against a ledger I could not see. Men watched him with the attention you give a physician whose cures taste like iron.
The Golden Dragons made a black shore around us. Liao Yun's ditches smoked where charcoal remembered to be patient. Shen Yue's cohort knelt beneath the broken crenels, their spears tilted like prayers that meant it. Priests kept their hands at their sides and their mouths shut. They had been warned more than once.
"Fifty to twenty," General Sun said mildly. "Divide by mercy, multiply by mud. We can bleed them until dusk. After that, you will require arithmetic you haven't taught me."
"Hold the north wall," I said. "Show them three teeth for every missing one. Give me hours. I will pay you back with a debt the city can spend."
He did not nod. His gaze tipped past me to the east, where the road from Huailing showed its torches like a necklace for a throat about to be cut. "Hours can be bribed," he said. "Bribe them."
He went to his line and men learned the difference between order and arrangement.
The first Golden Dragon surge hit like apology refused. Rams found the gates; ladders found the seams; arrows found soft places in men who had been told they were stone. We answered with oil and angles. A ladder lifted, then tilted, then carried a neat cargo of screaming back to the ground. The ditch belched flame at the moment a captain remembered to be brave. When a ram broke a brace, the brace learned to break back.
They were still too many.
I rode the inner ascent and dismounted where the wall learned to be honest. From there, the field was a book written in mud and blood, both of which turn the pages themselves. I read quickly.
Wu Kang's center did not waver. He drove it like a nail into an old table. Each time we bent it, it sprang back, pleased to be tested. I could taste his voice in the way their drumline changed its mind. He was not careful. He was certain.
Shen Yue's voice moved along our parapet like a ruler laid over trembling hands. "Lower," she told an archer, and the man learned the difference one finger-width makes in whether a life ends in a word or a gurgle. "Closer," she told a spearman, and that man did not die the way he'd intended. She did not shout. She edited.
General Sun planted his banner six paces behind the worst of it and did not step toward or away. Messengers came and went from him like rain deciding which roofs deserved to be dry. When a section wavered, he did not add men; he took two away. The gap made the remaining soldiers stop thinking about death and start thinking about geometry. The line straightened, as lines do when shame teaches them posture.
"Your general is cruel," Shen Yue observed, joining me briefly on the wall.
"Cruel people pay attention," I said.
She granted that and moved on.
The Golden Dragons' third push cost us a hundred and bought us a bell's worth of air. Men learned the taste of their own copper again. The crows decided not to move. Smoke climbed, found no wind, and sat like a tired guest.
Below, at the dead angle near the broken kiln, a group of boys who were learning to be men all at once tried to hold against a ladder that wished to belong. The ladder insisted; the boys insisted back. The ladder was more patient.
General Sun lifted his hand. A runner snapped his head as if memory had bitten him and sprinted away. The boys held exactly long enough for a cart to arrive, piled with sacks that smelled of dried fish and crushed mint. The cart tipped; the sacks burst; the steps glistened; men fell; other men stamped their faces into grass. It was not heroic. It was effective.
"Mint?" I asked when the runner returned to report.
"Smell teaches fear where eyes fail," General Sun said. "Also, the mint was rotten."
A horn from the south—two long notes and a broken tail. Liao Yun's signal. The ditch fire had found a new seam. We'd set it, we knew, but it always feels like a gift when it remembers you.
They came again because fifty thousand is a very large number, and numbers like to prove their shape. Shields overlapped; pikes angled; the press reached the gate and pushed until timber remembered it was once tree. We braced and shoved and taught the gate to think of endurance as decorum.
I felt it then—the thing under my ribs remembering a song. Not loud. Not eager. A coolness that does not ask consent. The lamps along the eastern corridor leaned a fraction toward where I stood and then pretended they had not. Dust at my boot made a shape a child would be proud of and then blurred as if embarrassed.
"Not yet," I told it, because even tides have a schedule.
It listened, which should have comforted me.
A runner in Wu Jin's colors slid to a stop at my shoulder like an apology. "Instruction from the minister," he panted. "General Sun is to commit no more than two of the reserve cohorts to the north wall. The remaining must be held back to protect the inner court and treasury."
Shen Yue turned a fraction, enough to let me imagine the exact shape of the derision she refused. "Treasury," she said, more a diagnosis than a complaint.
"Tell Minister Wu," I said to the runner, "that if the north wall falls, the treasury will belong to the first man who remembers where it is. Remind him what number comes after zero."
The runner swallowed and fled.
General Sun's eyes had followed the exchange without appearing to. "The minister worries about the day after," he said.
"He uses the present to bribe the future," I said. "The future is a poor creditor."
Sun said nothing. His banner did not move.