The throne room learned how to be empty. Courtiers bowed to curtains. Incense argued with a draft and lost. Screens painted with cranes beheld nothing and pretended not to mind. When Zhang entered, he did not look toward the yellow silk that hid whether the Emperor slept, prayed, or counted breaths. He climbed the steps as if they were a road he had paved, and faced a hall that had rehearsed obedience so long it had forgotten other parts.
"I speak for the realm," he said, in the cadence of someone giving an account to a listener who had not arrived. "Rations will be halved south of the river. Grain will move under armed seal. Householders who tie blue cloth on their doors will be fined, then questioned, then taught to be grateful. Smiths will register their hammers. Priests will bless the bridges we build and keep their mouths from matters they do not understand. We have traitors who enjoy fire. We will teach them water."
A child-scribe near the pillar scratched carefully, tongue peeking, a good student of letters and nothing else. When he reached the word traitor, his brush hesitated, then continued without smudging. Above him, the air moved once, as if remembering that rooms are for breathing.
Zhang finished and did not bow to the curtains. He turned and left, and the silk stirred as if it were tired of its own weight.
Minister Li had not been invited to the hall. He had learned not to expect it. He stood in his office where the candles knew the ends of their own wicks. The late Empress's ring, which tradition swore was to be worn only for rain rites and oaths to mothers, waited on the low table. He slid it onto a finger that had grown thinner with scruple and said to the empty room, "Very well."
The decree he wrote was brief. Old names woke under his brush: generals whose knees hurt too much for court stairs, captains who had sold their armor to pay for wives' funerals, river wardens who remembered the year the barges ran free and the treasurers tried to count water. He called them to the field. Not to the palace. To the field.
"Because mandates do not live in chairs," he muttered, and sealed the scroll with the Empress's ring, the wax taking its face like a memory coming easily for once.
He did not pretend the ring would protect him. The knock he had expected came early, the kind officials use when they mean to sound regretful after. He fed the lamp, held the decree above it until the seal sagged, then lowered the paper to the flame. The characters curled without crying; a page tried to live and then agreed to be ash. He kept one torn strip—the list of names—pressed under the lining of his sleeve beside another page he had not sent: Daughter, wherever the road has made you colder...
The guards entered. He greeted them with a scholar's bow: respect in the precise measure owed to men doing necessary work badly.
"Lord Minister," the captain said, voice careful. "There are questions."
"Of course," Li answered. "That is all we have left: questions."
He went with them and made sure his step did not confess the ache in his knees. In the corridor, someone had dropped a brush; ink stained the floor like a word that refused to be finished.
North of the river, the road tried to become a city and was only partly refused. Tents multiplied where pines parted. A market invented itself: two women with baskets of fried dough, a boy with turnips, a smith with a face that looked married to an anvil. Buckets moved in chains because the well thought it was important. A man with no thumb made harness from scraps like a prayer answering itself.
The blue-silk knot Ziyan had given the city learned a new trade: tied to a stall, it warned thieves to look elsewhere; tied to a door, it meant a sleeping child had a fever and would not be woken by drills; tied at a wrist, it meant a man preferred orders that made sense to orders that were pretty. This was not law. This was practice.