Beneath us, the field turned from map to meat. Golden Dragon companies rolled and flattened and unrolled again. Priests carried wounded who shouted at them for breaking formation. A captain cut a man who turned his back and finished his sentence without breathing out of time. I watched, I counted, I did not pray. Cold is a better fuel than hope.
A sudden pressure—like a thought with weight—ran along the parapet. Men glanced up as if someone had called their given names politely. I looked to the high tower.
Wu Shuang stood there, hands inside her sleeves, face unreadable, hair tied with a strip of plain blue cloth. She was still in the way a stopped bell is still, full of the suggestion of noise. The crows favored that roof. They faced her, not the battle.
"Your omen is punctual," General Sun said.
"She is my cousin," I said.
"That is also a kind of omen," he murmured.
We did not speak of her further. It is impolite to comment on weather during a flood.
The fourth Golden Dragon push came with ladders like a forest and men who had rehearsed dying. They did not scream when they burned; they sang, which is noise improved by intention. The song made some of mine forget to be efficient. Shen Yue reminded them which hand is for killing and which for art. They learned, which is to say: they lived long enough to understand.
Where the wall stepped down into the old kiln, the enemy made a seat. Three ladders held long enough to become furniture. The press swelled; the stone sweated. I moved.
"Hold your banner," I told General Sun.
"Banners hold themselves," he said. "Men are more trouble."
I took the inner stair and came into heat. The kind of heat that makes breath pretend to be a luxury. A Golden Dragon lit from the waist down swung at my head; I ducked, because I am not an allegory. Shen Yue appeared on my left with the exact murder required. Liao Yun shouted from below about sand we had not yet taught to be cunning. Men were falling; more men insisted on the concept.
The silence inside me stood.
It is not a thing with a face. It is not a pact with a name. It is a tide that remembers which shore I am. It lifted like a cool hand pressed to a fevered brow. The air changed its weight. A ladder that should have settled found itself unwilling to agree with gravity. Arrows twitched the smallest distance between poetry and math. Men paused without cause, the way geese pause before the lake resigns itself to winter.
I did not order it. I did not forbid it. I stepped where the dust made spirals and the spirals straightened to let me pass. My sword found the seam between a man's intention and his decision. He died surprised and, perhaps, grateful.
"Left," Shen Yue said, and I was there. "Down," Liao Yun barked, and I was the angle the ladder regretted. A boy glanced up into my face, expecting a man; he found a winter and decided to live.
The press eased, not because we killed enough, but because hesitation taught numbers humility. It did not last. Numbers are stubborn when fed by grief.
A horn blared from the Golden Dragon rear—the long, pulling call that means a commander is walking forward with a promise he intends to keep personally. The ladder fronts stiffened; the drums squared their shoulders.
He came into view like an argument the room had tried to avoid. Armor without vanity, jaw-scar white as salt. Wu Kang spoke to his men with his spine. They remembered chins and lifted them.
He did not look up at me. He looked at the gate and told it what it was. The gate, being wood, listened out of habit.
"General Sun," I said softly without turning, "if I die, spend me expensively."
"Some men are hard to change," he replied. "I will try."
Wu Kang's vanguard surged. Our gate held because shame is a kind of hinge. Spears on both sides accomplished their vocation. A ram withdrew to breathe and came again singing.
"Bring him," I said to the silence under my ribs. "Bring him to where the map lies."
It listened. The pressure around my heart widened the world by a finger's width. The lamps below leaned until they remembered they were attached to walls. The crows on Wu Shuang's roof beat their wings once and then reconsidered.
I dropped to the stair and into the yard behind the gate, where the space between pushes allows a man to think quickly and punish himself for it later. Shen Yue matched me, eyes dry, hands steady. General Sun's runner appeared and disappeared, either useful or dead.
"Open on my count," I told the gate captain.
"Prince—"
"Open," I said. "Teach the ram the difference between forward and falling."
He swallowed. Men set hands to iron. The ram thudded. We answered not with denial but with courtesy. The bars lifted. The jaws unclenched.
The Golden Dragons flowed in, triumph learning to shout. They knew breaches; they did not know invitations. The first rank stumbled on the invisible edge between outside and inside. The second rank struck them and blamed the floor. The third rank tried to decide whether to be brave or obedient and chose noise.
We stepped sideways. Not back. Sideways. The yard became a mouth with bad teeth. Liao Yun's sand turned to glue under the first ten pair of boots and then to ice under the next. Shen Yue's cohort cut across not at the neck but at the hand—the sword hands, the shield hands—teaching men that fingers matter more than throats. General Sun's reserve came in from the right with spears low and no voices at all. They do not sing.
I walked into the center of the confusion where the dust liked me. The silence in me did not roar. It pressed. Ladders at the gate wavered and decided modesty was a virtue. Drums faltered, then corrected, then confessed their confusion by being a fraction late.
He saw me then.
Across the yard, past men who thought they were the point and men who were, Wu Kang's face found mine. There is a flavor of recognition that tastes like iron. We both had it.
"Brother," he mouthed. No one heard it. Everyone understood.
We moved toward each other in a line no map had approved. Between us, men died as politely as war allows.
General Sun's voice came to me from a place I could not see. "Spend him expensively," he had promised. I considered the bill and kept walking.
The Golden Dragons heaved, then shuddered, then learned to breathe in a yard they did not expect to own. I did not look to the tower. I did not need to. Wu Shuang would be there, a stillness that taught lamps posture. Wu Jin would be wherever numbers admire themselves. The Lord Protector's elites would be counting, counting, counting.
I reached the place where numbers end and names begin.
"Wu Kang," I said.
He did not answer with a title. He answered with a sword.
The silence under my ribs smiled without lips.
The day did not end. It unfolded.