Shen Yue's face betrayed more than duty. Once, as a prisoner was dragged past, his daughter, not yet eight, clung to her father's leg and smiled with that oblivious courage only children can afford. Her eyes met Shen Yue's. For a breath the soldier who had learned to be a blade saw a woman he had loved before she became a soldier. Shen Yue's hand trembled, and in that trembling there was a question: How many names will make me forget the one for mercy?
She answered by tightening a knot she had taught a hundred men to tie. She gave the child over. The child did not scream. Children are efficient at accepting the sum the world feeds them.
General Sun's jaw drew a line. He looked to me and the look was not obedience so much as an inventory entry to be kept for later. He stepped aside, took a prisoner's ledger, and wrote a small note: "Reserve cohort 4 for bargaining — keep alive." He signed it with the same hand he would later use to claim supplies. Practicality is a shape people wear when they do not wish to be remembered.
Wu Kang watched without pleading. He spat on the ground as each throat went quiet. Men who had once followed him fell into the earth and learned the lesson of falling. The courtyard swallowed names like a mouth practiced on meat.
When it seemed enough, when the captains reported the lists reconciled, I gave the order: stop. The torches were put out, a courtesy that made darkness into a ledger you could not read. They dragged the ropes away; bodies were shifted into carts. We did not bury them. Dirt would not be honest enough yet. The city had to remember.
They dragged Wu Kang from his crate and knocked him to his feet. He lurched but did not break. "Parade me," he said, voice raw, and the crowd spat and shouted and some found the courage to hurl rotten fruit. I smiled for him with none of the warmth he expected.
"Take him to the stocks," I said. "He will go to Ling An at dawn. His face uncovered. Let the North see that brothers have been counted."
They led him away, chest heaving, face bleeding. He looked at Shen Yue once — not with hatred; something more private, like a tally of losses.
Afterwards, the captains filed their papers. General Sun tucked away the merchant I had spared and went about arranging the reserves; he did so with the kind of efficiency that becomes guilt when you do not kill quickly enough to forget your work.
Shen Yue stood away from the last of it and finally, when the torches had guttered to small polite flames, she found me in the shadow where the law had been executed.
"You have made them fear you," she said. Her voice held not triumph, but a grief tight as a noose.
"I have made them remember," I answered.
She swallowed, and the tiny movement was its own tragedy. "Fear is not the same as rule," she said.
"Fear is faster," I said. "Faster than the slow cruelty of hunger. It buys hours."
She looked at me then and the look was younger than the war. "Do you know what you will be when the dust settles?" she asked.
"I will be what keeps the roof," I said. "Or what breaks it."
She placed a hand at my shoulder—brief, not a plea, not a blessing, only contact—and then she stepped back to watch the men who had been spared be fed into cages for bargaining.
Beyond the square, two riders in southern garb slipped through a side alley with folded papers and faces that looked like coffee left too long on the lip of a cup. The South watches, I thought, and noted nothing else. The ledger in my mind closed another page.
I walked toward the cart that held the dead. The dust under my boots made a spiral where the blade had fallen. I felt the silence under my ribs listen and not answer; it was growing patient, and patience is a kind of storm.
They will remember Huailing's names, I thought. They will know that the math I prefer can be counted in blood.
A voice from the cart, small and rasping, said, "You will not sleep."
I bent. A man, half-alive, lifted his head and met my eyes. He smiled with something like the resignation of men who have read their accounting and found it wrong.
"Neither will you," he breathed.
I did not answer. I signed another sheet.
We left Huailing with our list updated and our hunger not yet sated.
The ledger sleeps for a night and wakes hungry.