Snow fell at noon though no cloud owned it.
At Hei Fort the flakes did not melt on stone; they learned the shape of the parapet and kept it. Men watched in silence, as if speaking might confirm some rule had been broken that could still be forgiven if ignored.
The Lord Protector stood on the south tower and looked not at the river but at its edges. His captains had learned this meant he was thinking of roads, and men upon roads, and of the pauses between them where history was written.
A horn sounded once from the marsh. Truce-call: the long note used when kings choose to speak before armies do. The old man did not lift an eyebrow. "Admit them," he said.
The Zhou envoy rode in with two riders and no banners, white and indigo muted by a travel cloak. He dismounted at a distance that was neither hostile nor safe, and bowed as one does to a legend that happens still to be breathing.
"My Emperor sends aid," he said, smiling without warmth. "And questions."
The Lord Protector's mouth moved a fraction. "Aid travels slower than questions. You chose the right order."
They stood together in the thin snow. No guards crowded; no scribes wrote. This was a conversation that would pretend never to have occurred.
"The northern passes," the envoy began. "We are told they crumble under wheels that once held emperors."
"Mountains are proud. They tire of bearing parchment."
"Our engineers complain the road answers wrong."
"Because you have asked it to be a road. It remembers being a river."
"We will bridge it."
"You will try."
The envoy exhaled as if pleased. "Your Majesty of War," he said softly, choosing a title nobody used anymore. "Zhou wishes stability. You wish the same."
The old man did not pretend to agree. He watched a flake settle on the envoy's sleeve and keep its star. "Empires are not won," he said at last. "They are arranged."
"By whom?" The envoy was too careful to sound curious; he made it sound like a proverb to be finished.
"By the only men still willing to count," the Lord Protector said. It might have been a kindness or a threat.
The envoy inclined his head, satisfied to have gathered any line at all. "We will march slowly," he said. "So the world may keep up."
"You will march as if you believed in mercy," the old man corrected. "Send your counting-priests ahead of your engineers. Let them be seen taking notes no one can read."
"For whose sake?"
"For the city's fear," he said. "Fear is a bridge that needs no stone."
They did not shake hands. The envoy left under the same horn-call. When the riders had reached the far bank, the old man spoke to the river without turning his head. "Tell him," he said, meaning the current, meaning the shadow beneath it, meaning a boy who had learned to cut rather than cry. "Tell both of them. Not yet."
The water did not answer. It merely remembered, and carried the message where memory was obeyed.
I do not trust noon anymore. It stays where I can see it.
Beneath the eaves of a gate the snow falls in patterns, pausing over my skin and deciding whether to land. Shen Yue stands with her back to the wall, the hood of her cloak heavy with white.
"We cut Zhou's road," she says, "and it grew back where no road was."
"That is a priest's joke," I say.
"They have many now. They hum when they measure the ground."
I listen. The city is humming too, a long low note like a string plucked beneath stone. It threads through my ribs, where the bridge waits with the patience of water in winter.
We move. In the alleys near the northern quarter, men I once commanded step from shadow and look both relieved and disappointed to see me still walk like a man. They report in hands and eyes: grain moved from storehouses with He Lian seals to community shrines that forgot their gods and learned to feed. Lists of names of officials who sell mercy and call it law. A pattern burned into three thresholds—three strokes, plain as ash.
不变.
"Your father," Shen Yue says.
"Or someone who wants me thinking of him."
"Is there a difference?"
I want to answer yes and cannot make my mouth believe me.
We leave a spool of rope, a barrel that says vinegar and is swords, a single page of a ledger that makes ten others suspect. I am not leading the city into righteousness. I am laying wires where the ground already wants to split.
A child watches us from a doorway with the solemnity of old men. "Are you the man who fell out of the wall?" she asks.
"Yes," I say.
"Do you belong to the king?"
"No."
"Do you belong to the bell?"
The bridge inside me stiffens, as if someone had named it and expected it to bow. I crouch to meet her eyes. "Not yet," I say, and the word tastes like iron.