They came to me with names tied to ropes.
The captains read from tablets as if reciting taxes: names, trades, addresses. I signed each line. Ink dried like a verdict. The public square was swept clean for the purpose of teaching. The market stalls were shut. The priests at the outer shrines were roped and made to sit with the same dignity they had once taught the dead.
Wu Kang was led in like a rentsheeted flag — hands bound, face open to the sky. He wore the thin smile of a man who has already eaten his last clean meal. They seated him upon a crate in the center so the city might watch its ruin learn a name.
General Sun read the charge with a voice like a ledger closing. "For harboring emissaries: thirty-seven." He looked up with those precise, unreadable eyes. "For concealment of correspondence: twelve." He drew breath and the list moved on like an accountant turning pages.
"Do it quietly," I said.
"Quiet" is a courtesy that makes horror colder. It strips away theater and leaves only counting — a kind of arithmetic that does not allow for pity.
They began at sun high. Men were led in single file, nets over their heads like fish that had been taught they were already caught. The captains had learned to be neat. A blade at the back of the square offered the clean cut for those who wished it; most did not.
Shen Yue stood near me, spear in hand but unused, her jaw a line of steel. She had overseen worse battles than this; she had not been the one to name neighbors for execution before. Her hands did not tremble until they found the child — small, curled against an old woman's skirts, eyes wide and believing. For a moment she looked as if she might unsheathe and cut the bonds that tied law to flesh.
She did not. She did not because even the fierce have rules. She did not because she believes order, which made her a commander rather than a miracle. Her fingers closed around the haft until the knuckles shone white.
"Bind him," I said.
The command was small. The torches leaned inward, which meant embers tilted toward the place I spoke.
The first throat was cut with the quiet of a man closing a ledger. A single, clean sound. Men bled and the blood made no poem. It soaked the dust like ink. The captains did not celebrate. They reset the ropes. A boy carrying water tripped and cried out; he was roughly told to attend to his duties. He did. They always do.
General Sun supervised the ordering as if he were arranging chess pieces; cruelty for him was a geometry problem. He ordered one man spared from the line — the merchant who had information about a secret pass. He told the captains to set that man aside, bind him, and keep him alive for questioning. He made the judgment with a small grace that was not kindness but calculation.
The crowd watched and learned. The market's wives held babies close. Men who had once shouted for war now counted steps between them and the nearest door. Someone tried to sing a prayer and the song broke off like a snapped string.
As the hours crawled, small things happened that had nothing to do with orders.
Dust near my boots coiled in tiny spirals where the blade had fallen. A pigeon dropped from the eave, as if the sky had decided that day was not for birds. A bow snapped amid an archer's hand; he blinked as if the world had taught him to forget how to finish a thought. Men froze mid-gesture and then, embarrassed, finished the motion as if nothing had happened.
They told each other the house with two doors had been correct. They told each other the granary with the extra room had been honest in its deceit — and then they watched it become a hole. We saved a stack of ledgers for ourselves. Ink will not blame you if you keep it.