Shen Yue stepped nearer, her shoulder brushing mine with the smallest apology. "If the South parades him," she said to me, not to Wu Kang, "Zhou will move. They do not tolerate gods in other countries. The passes will fill with men who think old banners can be resurrected with the right drum."
"Good," Wu Kang whispered. "Let the passes choke. Let the rivers choose words."
"Shut your mouth," I told him. There was no heat in it. Heat is for men who have not become weather.
His smile returned: patient, devout. "Make me," he said. "And then make the South."
I turned to the door. "Bind him," I said to the guard, "but keep the ropes kind. He is a ledger we still need to read. If he bites through his tongue, wire his jaw. If he sleeps, wake him every hour. Mercy dulls faster than hate; do not let either blunt."
Shen Yue followed me into the corridor. The torch there leaned the width of a string toward my chest and then remembered its manners. She let three steps become five before speaking.
"If the Emperor is in their hands," she said, "he will not come back as clay. He will come back as a blade."
"Yes," I said.
"And you?" she asked, almost not asking. "What do you come back as, when this is finished?"
"Roof," I said. It felt like an unfunny joke told to the last man in a burning house.
We walked without speaking. A drip from the ceiling took too long to fall. Somewhere, deep in the palace's organs, wood remembered to groan.
The Lord Protector was waiting in the small northern hall, the one with the painted carp that always look like they are laughing at the wrong funeral. He stood as if he had been standing since the dynasty began.
"Well?" he asked.
"South," I said.
His lids lowered, the old mountain narrowing to study the valley that had decided to be a sea. "Alive?"
"Alive enough to be useful," I said. "To them."
He did not hit the table. He did not shout. He did not tell me I had been right about Huailing and fear and roofs. He only nodded once, the way men nod when they see winter set its tent up without asking.
"Then we buy time," he said. "We cut the lists in half."
"No," I said.
"Wu An," he said, and the syllables were a hand on the back of my neck, the way you steady a child who has not yet hurt the right amount, "the South must see we keep balance. Zhou must see we do not devour ourselves. The court must see that obedience is not the same as terror."
"The court will not save you when a god arrives," I said. "Lists will."
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat. Opened them. "Purge with a ladle," he said, echoing Wu Jin's oil-slick counsel without knowing it. "Not a bucket. If you drown the ants, the harvest still fails."
"Ants carry more than grain," I said. "They carry plague."
We held one another's gaze until the air between us learned to be glass.
"Go to the cisterns again tonight," he said at last. "If the South has him, the South will want the old doors open when they march. See that they are not."
"I already ordered it," I said.
"Then order it again," he replied.
I left him staring at the carp that would never stop laughing.
Outside, the lamps along the colonnade bowed. It would have been comical if it had not been true.
Shen Yue caught my sleeve. "Do not run toward their god," she said. "Make them bring him to a place you choose."
"I will choose a place he already belongs to," I said.
"And where is that?" she asked.
"Between two knives," I said. "One of them mine."
She let go. She knew where she would stand when knives argued. Knowing is not comfort.
Night opened its mouth. The cistern stairs were wet with the same breath as before. General Sun met me at the lintel with a face that had stopped pretending to change.
"We sealed the third sluice," he said. "It unsealed itself. I posted pairs. One pair is now a single man who swears his cord untied itself from his wrist."
"Does he lie?"
"He is too afraid to lie," Sun said. "It is not the right kind of fear."
We entered. Torches stooped. The spirals above the stone door had learned to look like writing if you stared long enough. Shen Yue walked close enough that I could hear the leather at her bracer speak to itself.
In the second chamber, the water leaned again. Not toward the drain. Not toward gravity. Toward me. As if all the rivers between here and the Southern Kingdom had decided to remember my name in their sleep.
I knelt at the edge and watched my reflection try not to be mine. For a heartbeat—no longer—it was not. It was a crown of reeds in a basin of ink. It was an eye that had never learned to blink.
"The South will march with bells," Shen Yue whispered.
"Bells will not reach here," I said. "That is why I came."
The silence under my ribs unfolded, pleased, as if the cistern had greeted a cousin. The men behind us muttered against their orders; prayers are a hand habit men reach for when doors open the wrong way.
"Bind their mouths if they pray," I said without turning.
General Sun did not argue. He is a man who prefers bad orders to bad luck.
We left chalk lines where our boots passed. We left knives where chalk failed. We left nothing that could be fed except our names stamped into damp dust.
On the stairs back up, a runner waited, sweat turning his hair to threads. He held a sealed roll, the seal broken and resealed badly by someone whose fingers shook.
"From the Southern Gate," he panted. "A courier under truce. He brought this and a promise that the South keeps peace until mourning banners come down."
"What banners?" Shen Yue asked.
The runner licked salt from his lip. "For their new holy day," he said. "They celebrate the day a king learned to sleep without bells."
I took the roll. It smelled of my cousin's old room in the Southern palace—the one with the window that never opened because the wall had decided air was a luxury. The script inside was close and clean. No names. Just a time. Just a road.
"They invite us to meet our Emperor," I said.
Shen Yue's eyes did something only women's eyes do when they decide which part of their heart they can afford to save. "Do we go?"
"We make them come," I said. "But we choose where their road finds ours."
I sent Sun to wake the captains. I sent the eunuchs to silence the bells. I sent a message to Wu Jin that tasted like a favor and smelled like debt. I sent nothing to my father. He already knew when winter arrives.
Before I climbed to the outer air, I went once more to Wu Kang's door. He heard me before the guard announced me. That is something brothers learn whether they want to or not.
"You wanted to watch," I said through the wood. "You will."
He did not answer. The wood swelled with damp and the grain wrote a sentence no scholar could translate.
When I reached the courtyard, the lamps along the eaves bowed again, obedient as dogs. Above them the sky had put on its armor of stars, each one a clean wound.
"The South will bring him," I said to the roofs. "And the roofs will decide if they remember how to stand."
The silence under my ribs answered without words, the way tides answer cliffs. It was not joy. It was not hunger. It was the calm before a sea remembers that ships are made of wood.
At dawn, we would send riders. At dusk, we would choose our ground. Between, we would count how many names a god takes to build himself a throne.
Where bells do not reach, knives do. I sharpened mine until it forgot it had ever been dull.