The first Zhou column reached the northern pass with banners lowered in the posture of aid. The road gave under their wheels where no rain had fallen. Engineers argued with the mountain. The mountain sulked and pretended to be sand until someone tried to climb it.
"Strange soil," one said.
"You are reading it wrong," answered another. "You are speaking to it like a road when it is a river."
"Then we will bridge it," the first replied, caught in the joke and not seeing the snare. They set to work with polite efficiency and halted at sundown when the level refused to agree with itself. Their counting-priest drew a circle in charcoal and sat inside it humming. The air tasted of old ink.
In the deep watches, a lantern flared blue and went out. The priest smiled in the dark. "It's listening," he whispered. He did not say what it was.
In the southern capital the Regent received another rider, this one from the hinterlands, not the front. His eyes were red not from smoke but from forgetting to blink.
"My lady," he rasped. "The river at Cold Wicket turned itself inside out and then back again. The wells tell people they were never born. A village woke without names. They asked us what to call themselves."
"What did you tell them?" the Regent asked.
"That we would ask the north," he said, and began to cry without sound.
She dismissed the hall. Alone with the high priest she produced the little dark seal again and weighed it in her palm. "He thinks to buy me two days with this," she said. "He thinks I am a debt that can be paid in silence."
"And are you?" the priest asked.
"No," she said. "But I will take the coin."
She turned the seal over. It pressed cold against her skin. "Send word to our quiet friends in Zhou. If the white dragon 'aids' Ling An, we will offer to carry its saddlebags. I want to see whose hands are inside whose sleeves."
I stand under the eaves of a gate that used to belong to the city and now belongs to the air. Rain lifts; dust falls upward. I close my eyes and test myself.
"I am Wu An." The name fits. "I am the son of—"
The thought ends where the bridge begins.
"He wrote letters," I say instead. "He always wrote letters."
Shen Yue edges closer. "If he wrote this one to the South…"
"Then he is moving Jin," I say. "And if he is moving me, he did it years ago."
"You're not a board," she says sharply.
"No," I say. "I'm the piece that learned to bite the hand."
The thing inside me approves again. I pretend not to hear it.
We go to the northern road and do what we came to do. We loosen stones that believe in load-bearing. We move timbers one inch past the angle where courage ends and faith begins. We leave tools neatly stacked and a good joke carved under a beam where only a tired man will see it: BRIDGE GOES BOTH WAYS.
On our way back in I hear someone call my name from very far away, in a voice that belongs to a summer that has not yet happened. I do not look. There are doors you don't answer unless you've already decided what you are.
Wu Jin woke to find three letters on his table that he had not requested.
One congratulated him on accepting Zhou's aid before he had sent the edict. One thanked him for releasing grain to districts whose names he had only last night circled to starve. One—sealed in plain wax with no mark—contained only a single line in a hand he knew: Wait for the bell.
He stared at it until the lamp died.
He did not know whether the letter had come from the river, from his father, or from the part of himself that had learned to obey footsteps in empty corridors.
He did nothing.
He waited.
Bells did not ring in Ling An that night. The city did something worse: it kept perfect time.
Every footfall matched. Every breath arrived on the same count. For one long minute the streets and the palaces and the barracks and the cells became a drumbeat played by no hand.
I pressed my palm to the stone.
"Not yet," I told it.
The bridge inside me listened. Behind it, something older listened to the bridge.
We were all waiting for the same bell.
And somewhere south of Hei Fort, by a tower with no stairs, a father set his thumb to wax and made the world believe it had chosen this.