They returned at grey-light, the hour when frost pretends it is smoke. Feiyan slid from the saddle without ceremony, breath steady, hair damp with mist. Wei came behind her, horse lathered, face set the way men set it when they've seen too much and agreed to carry it.
"Count," Ziyan said.
Feiyan drank, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and spoke like a ledger. "Three main encampments on the far bank. Engineers from the south—trestles, counterweight cranes, fuse-ropes sealed with resin. Not raiders. Builders. They mean to sit."
Wei spat into the reeds. "And Ye Cheng." His jaw worked. "Gone."
"Borrowed," Ziyan said. The word surprised her by fitting. "Only borrowed."
Feiyan's mouth tilted. "The river disagrees with the term."
Lord Han came up the bank, boots clean though the ground did not permit it. "If they cross here," he said, "they take the inner fields without learning any new words. If they ride downriver, they cut the grain roads and the capital eats ink."
"Then we make them look upstream and forget to look down," Ziyan said.
Wei lifted an eyebrow. "With what? The truth is expensive."
"Then we pay with lies," Ziyan said. "Big ones."
Shuye scratched a map into the frost with a twig. "Smoke here," he said, dotting the ridge. "Kiln-trenches. We have pitch. We have iron scraps that will look like forges if we abuse them correctly."
Han's scout, Huo, tapped the far slope. "Drums from that saddle. Echo will double their number."
"We need fire lines," Feiyan added, already measuring in rope-lengths. "Five rows of torches staggered. From the river it will look like fifty watchfires. And we drag branches—"
"—to raise dust when there is no dust," Wei finished, grin showing teeth that weren't in the mood to laugh. "Phantoms. We will play at being an army."
Han grunted. "Play at it well enough to make men who've learned patience forget it for one night."
Ziyan drew the Emperor's letter from her sleeve and read the twelve characters once more in her head. Then she folded it again and slid it under the jar's cloth, where cedar held the ink as if warmth were trust.
"Impossible," Han said, not to dismiss but to test the word.
"Impossible is lighter when it burns," Shuye said, pleased to be trusted with nonsense that might work.
The plan breathed itself into shape. Huo would take a dozen riders to the northern ridge, drag branch-brooms along the gravel, and nail rags to drum faces to deepen the sound. Han's light cavalry would ghost in the tree strips with lanterns hooded and unhooded by signal—stars lowered to eye-level until the river believed in constellations where none had business shining. Shuye would dig two shallow trenches and feed them with resin and scrap until they roared like proper kilns. Feiyan and Wei would move along the near bank, erasing any messenger who learned too much, knocking the pins from any small certainty that tried to stand on its own.
Li Qiang listened, then said, "You place me where the line is thin."
Ziyan nodded. "Where phantoms become men if needed. And where men become phantoms if not."
The day whitened. Smoke from Xia's camp rose in disciplined threads, the kind that made cooks proud and quartermasters calmer. Ziyan watched the way it climbed without quarrel. It made her want to argue with the sky.
They worked. Han's grooms hacked branches and stripped them of anything dignified. Shuye cursed the ground into taking trenches where it did not want them, then fed them pitch and old iron so the flames would spit like outraged gods. Wei gathered every drum in Yong'an that remembered what it was for and taught boys how to strike as if they meant to wake mountains. Feiyan cut staves to spear-length, then broke them down again—rehearsing where the night would need sudden answers.
By dusk, the ridge wore new shadows. Ziyan tightened the silk at her wrist and tied the jade ring under it. She didn't need the character against her skin to know what it would have said: listen. She listened—to the river practicing indifference, to the wind trying out direction, to the small shifting noises men make when they are about to pretend to be larger than they feel.
"Give me an army," she told the dark.
It obliged.
At Huo's signal, the first drums spoke: slow, old, the beat of a kingdom that still remembered its original pulse. On the ridge, torches flared one by one, then in rows, the lines offset with Feiyan's precise malice, so that Xia's scouts would count poorly and be confident in their mistake. Han's riders dragged their branch-brooms along the gravelly cut, and dust rose where no cart had bothered to do the work—smoke marrying dust in the half-light until the valley grew a second dawn under its own breath.
Shuye's forges caught. The trenches bloomed orange, then white, sparks flying like defective meteors. He fed the flames with scrap that chimed spitefully as it surrendered, and the wind, doing what wind always does in the presence of performance, spread rumor with gusto.