He looked past me at the ranks behind my back and smiled in a way that only men who have eaten their last clean meal can. "Question each gate. Question each priest. Question the courtyards where the old men play chess in the wind. Question the granaries, though you burned them. Question the wells; you will find no reflection you like."
"Where is he?" I asked again, because the thing inside me enjoyed the repetition.
"You were always patient," he said, soft now, soft enough that the wind almost kept it. "You are not patient anymore. That frightens me more than your soldiers."
"Your letter said mercy."
"It did," he said. "For them. Not for me."
"Then understand me," I said. "No house is spared for a price I do not ask. The butchering will begin with your men. Their blood will cool the stones you borrowed from their houses. When the streets remember their names, then perhaps the city learns to speak differently."
His head lifted as if someone had pulled a string through his spine. For the first time, the word brother left his eyes. "You accept my surrender to spare the city," he said, very clearly, so the yard could hear it. "You accept, and then you carve the promise into kindling."
"I accept your surrender," I said, "to end this faster."
Wu Kang stepped forward. He moved as if the sling were a piece of theater and not pain. "You were the quiet one," he said, close now, close enough for me to smell the stale medicine on his breath. "You were the one who would not step on ants because you did not like the crunch. You insisted on counting to ten before killing a spider. We used to laugh and call you wife-hearted. What lives in you now, Wu An?"
I did not answer. He looked for my eyes and found a place where a river used to be.
With the speed of a remembered habit, he went for me. The knife came from inside his sleeve. Pain cut him in half mid-step. The blade scraped my cuirass and skittered away like a small fish that had lost its river. He folded, one knee hitting stone, breath torn.
Spears were on him in a blink, but Shen Yue's voice cut through: "Do not kill him!"
Her command was sharp, more felt than heard, and the points hovered just shy of blood.
"Bind him," I said. The cold in my voice made the nearest torches lean backward. "If he bites through his tongue, break his jaw and wire it shut. If he begs, grant him water and nothing more. He goes to Ling An with his face uncovered."
Shen Yue flinched—not at my words, but at the way I said them. She looked at me as if seeing a stranger wearing my face, then turned and oversaw the binding herself, rough but precise.
Wu Kang laughed around his pain, and the sound had nothing left but truth. "Parade me, then," he said. "Show the North that brothers are made for meat."
When they dragged him away, I turned. "Search for the Emperor," I said to the captains. "Every house with two doors. Every shrine with extra rooms. Every cellar that smells of new dust. Arrest the scribes and water them until the ink runs. Take the merchants' ledgers; the rich hide kings when it profits them. Move."
They moved. The city seemed to flinch in all four directions.
Shen Yue lingered at my side, her jaw tight. "We could have spared them," she said softly, almost a whisper.
"We have spared them what comes with a longer war," I said.
"And given them a short one with an ugly ending." Her hand rested near the hilt of her sword but did not grip it. "Your acceptance was a courtesy that taught them nothing."
"It taught them to open their gates."
"And then what?" she asked.
"Then they learned what happens when a city chooses the wrong brother," I said.
Shen Yue's throat worked once. She turned her face toward the square where Wu Kang had stood, but she said nothing more. Her silence was heavier than most speeches.
I walked on, deeper into Huailing, and the thing inside me walked with me.