They wanted names, and I gave them numbers.
When the captains returned from the streets they did not come with faces but with pages. Lists scrawled in hurried ink. Men had written the names of the dead as if they were inventories. They told me of priests who had two rooms behind shrines, of courtyards with extra doors, of granaries that smelled of late wine and fresher lies. I read the lists the way a man reads weather: not to pray, but to decide where to shelter.
"Question each gate," I had said. "Question each priest." The captains had been efficient. They brought the city to me folded into paper.
General Sun stood by as the orders were given. He moved like a man consulting a ledger he keeps under his ribs. When I named blocks and household names, when I said the words that mean seizure and the words that mean death, he did not blink as if he had never been surprised by arithmetic.
"List them by trade," I told the officers. "Scribes, merchants, vintners, teachers. Start with those who keep ledgers. A kingdom's heart is often hidden in ink."
They shuffled the pages; a boy slid a charcoal tally into a book and a captain glanced to make sure his hands were steady. The efficiency made my chest feel like a bowl of cold metal. There is a particular quiet in men who are about to become the instruments of your will.
We began with the courtyards nearest the wall—those who had power to close doors or open them. Men were roused by drum and shouted names. Some woke to hands on their shoulders. Others were pulled from children's beds while their wives still dreamed. They came to the square in ropes, eyes bleached by shock, feet learning how to be prisoners.
I had not wished for spectacle, but spectacle is the city's easiest teacher. We strode into the market as if we had come to bargain. The captains set the ropes like tidy lessons. A few boys from the guard—small hands still—tied the knots with practiced efficiency picked up from watching older men tie nooses on oxen. The ropes had been taught how to be correct.
General Sun read the indictments aloud. He did not yell; there was no need. The words were clear and short, what we call "justice" in other rooms. "For concealment of emissary," he said. "For harboring men in the night." Each phrase translated into a small, neat death. The square swallowed them one by one.
I felt nothing as the first men went. That is true and not true. You cannot say you feel nothing when you have given the order and watched it follow. You feel arithmetic turn into blood and the numbers sit heavier than they did on paper. Their faces had no more meaning to me than the seals on the scrolls that had condemned them. That is a dangerous clarity.
Shen Yue watched with a surgeon's detachment until the child bent beside my boot sobbed — a small sound that would not stop. She looked at me then in a way that was not a question but a ledger: counting what I had become against what she had once known. For a moment, I saw the whole of it reflected: the little hands she had trained, the first dead men she had wept for in secret. She closed her jaw and became useful again; her fingers moved, precise and cruel, instructing where the prisoners would be taken, which houses to be sealed, which wells to be emptied.
"Do not let them rot in the cellars," she barked to an officer. "If they must sleep in the dark, we decide whose dark. We are not savages; we are efficient."
The words would have been obscene from any other mouth. From hers they cut like discipline.
We proceeded by neighborhood. Where doors were two deep we beat the hinges until confessions came like loose teeth. Priests were unceremoniously unmade; their beads were ripped and their faces bathed in ash until they confessed names they might not have known. Someone wept for the old gods; someone else promised to trade his son for silence. I signed lists with the same hand that had once signed treaties. My hand did not tremble.
At midday we took the granaries. Men who had been trusted with plenty looked at us with the shame of men who know, in the end, that coins have teeth. We opened the stores and inventory books, and when the ledgers refused to reconcile with reality, when sacks were lighter than recorded, we did not forgive. For every sack short, a house was marked. For every marked house, a man was taken. There is an economy to terror: make their mouths find other uses than yelling; make their children sleep with one eye open.
The priests of the southern rites were the last of the first list. They had been careful with their rooms and careful with their rites. They thought prayer would shield them. They thought wrong. We burned their prayer mats after the confessions. Smoke learned to taste of ash and also of pacts broken.
Between the formal arrests, smaller cruelties were taught as lessons. A midwife found hiding in a cellar was brought to the square—she had helped a family hide a messenger—and before the captains dragged her away they cut her palm and dipped it in ink and forced her to sign what she had not done. When she refused they bound her to the well and forced the city to watch her name go down into the water until the letters smudged and read nothing. There are punishments meant for law and punishments meant to be omens. We practiced both.