The first screams reached me before the runner did.
They came from the lower cisterns, muffled by stone, as if the water itself was chewing them down. By the time I arrived with torches and steel, General Sun had already posted his lines—men with cords at their wrists, torches bound in threes, eyes wide but unblinking like cattle taught to stand at the slaughter-gate.
The air stank of wet iron. The spirals carved above the lintel were not old; the chisel-marks still wept chalk. Men had gone in. They had not come out.
"Two missing," Sun said. His jaw was locked hard enough to crack a tooth. "The cord snapped as if cut."
I entered.
The ceiling bowed low, hung with old moss that dripped water slow as hours. My torch guttered, though no draft touched it. Shen Yue followed a step behind me; she would not be left out, even if the dark wanted her.
The first chamber was shallow, a basin where water should have gathered but did not. Instead it leaned, as if the surface remembered a slope the stone denied. The light bent too, torches stooping toward my chest as though gravity had opinions.
A spear lay on the stones. Its haft was slick, as though pulled from a river no man had walked. Beside it, a boot without a foot.
Shen Yue bent, touched the spirals scratched into the floor. They were not drawn with hands that trembled. They were steady, precise, like a priest's hand copying scripture. Only the scripture belonged to no god we name aloud.
The silence under my ribs pressed forward, pleased. The dark here was kin to it.
A whisper ran along the cistern walls—not language, but the sound of language remembered wrongly. Sun's men clutched their cords and muttered prayers they had been told not to speak.
"We should seal it," Shen Yue said tightly. Her torch trembled, only once. "Now. Tonight."
"Not yet," I said. My voice filled the stone like water poured into a jar. "We need to see what it eats."
We left the missing men behind us. Better to call them accounted for than pretend.
When I returned to the Hall of Frosted Reeds, the court was already waiting. Not for me, but against me.
The ministers' faces bent like reeds in different winds: some toward Wu Jin, some toward my father, none toward me. Their silence was its own petition.
Wu Jin smiled with the warmth of a man lighting another's pipe. "The purge has shown its lesson," he said gently, as if speaking to an ill child. "But the court must also breathe. Fear buys obedience, yes, but memory of mercy buys loyalty. Allow me to suggest we cut shorter lists tomorrow."
The Lord Protector's gaze burned me from the dais. He did not rebuke Wu Jin. He rebuked me with silence.
"I will consider," I said, the way an executioner considers a neck.
Wu Jin bowed, too deep for a cousin, too shallow for a servant. The court exhaled in relief, mistaking delay for reprieve.
That night, Shen Yue found me alone beneath the old pine in the inner garden. The branches shivered as if wind bent them, though the air was still.
"You are becoming what they fear," she said. Not accusation. Not plea. Statement.
I turned, studied her in the half-light. "Fear is fast. It bends cities quicker than hunger."
Her jaw clenched. "And when fear eats loyalty?"
"Then loyalty was never more than convenience."
Her hand brushed her sword-hilt without knowing it. She realized only when I looked down, and she pulled her hand away slow as if from fire. Her eyes said what her lips refused: she no longer knew whether she stood beside me—or before something that wore my shape.
"You will lose yourself," she whispered. "And then you will lose me."
The silence under my ribs stirred, amused, as if the threat was already a memory.
By dawn, General Sun returned. His report was simple. "We sealed the cistern. But the water still leaned. It leaned toward Ling An."
His words sat in the chamber like a new law.
I looked to Father. His eyes darkened, not at Sun's words, but at the way I did not flinch.
And then another runner entered—robes wet, lungs broken with haste. He bowed until his head struck stone.
"Wu Kang," he gasped. "He has spoken."
The hall froze.
My father rose slowly, like a mountain shifting. "What did he say?"
The runner swallowed. "He said: the Emperor sleeps. And he sleeps where bells do not reach."
The torches bent toward me. The silence under my ribs laughed without sound.