Huo took boys who could climb and placed them where rafters met smoke. Feiyan spooled rope in the shadows and tied it to truth: when pulled, this will be this, and not anything else. Shuye slid two small clay bellies beneath the bridge planks and a larger one in the anchor's throat, wicking them with rag that smelled of yesterday's courage.
"It will scream," he said with professional pride. "And then it will be relieved."
By dusk, the ruined city held its breath the way a throat does before a name. Ziyan stood in the arch's shadow, hood thrown back because lying works better when the sky can read your face. The wagons came all at once, because logistics has a sense of humor: oxen blowing, iron-threaded crates, men on the flanks with the weary malice of guards who have learned this road too many times. Prisoners shuffled behind, bound in pairs, heads down to keep their thoughts from being stolen by wind.
She lifted the blue silk. A ribbon, a river, a sentence.
Feiyan's rope went taut; the first wagon jerked as if surprised to be a participant. Shuye's smallest jar coughed flame at the plank's joint: a neat, rude flower. The bridge remembered the river under it and suggested men remember it too. Wei's spear left the dark with the inevitability of a debt come due and found a throat mid-boast. Li Qiang's line lifted their shields and lowered them onto wrists harder than iron.
Ren's men held the gate as if it were a suggestion they had decided to enforce. Huo's boys dropped stones where helmets left pride exposed. Han's riders poured from the temple's mouth like a lesson and cut into the escort with the impatient joy of professionals hired to do what they like.
It turned ugly in the way that makes truth efficient. Torches spun and spilled fire onto canvas; oxen chose to learn flight; a driver leapt and broke his certainty in three places. Feiyan moved the way water does when no one is watching it and left three men reconsidering the sequence that had brought them to this street. Shuye's larger jar bellowed under the bridge, the anchor listening to its own regret and collapsing. The fourth wagon went sideways, legs and wheels arguing without progress.
"Cut the cords," Ziyan ordered. "Take the grain. Unbind the mouths before the air steals them."
Wei heaved a crate as if insulting it and laughed once, barking, when a lock sprung in surprise at honest strength. Ren's soldiers formed a funnel between the square and the east gate, buckets of grain passing, a river redirected with discipline instead of geographers. Li Qiang kept time with his sword: one, two, three, the count of men still able to be dangerous reduced by a small, precise number.
When it was done enough to be called done, the city burned in three places because fire is a quick student. Prisoners sat like new furniture along a wall and learned to breathe without counting stitches. The square filled with sacks stamped with the seal of men who wanted to be thanked for theft. Crows complained that distribution had become messy.
In a chest fallen from the leader's horse they found tidier fire: sealed orders bearing the Regent's sign. The wax had been impressed with confidence. Ziyan cracked it with two fingers and read aloud because secrets do worse harm when they are allowed to be private.
"Acting Emperor of the Unified Realm," she said, and the words did not want to live in the air but she made them.
No one cheered. Soldiers looked at one another the way men do when someone tells a joke in a language they do not speak and they are asked to laugh anyway.
Feiyan spat blood into ash and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. "Then we fight for a country that does not exist," she said.
Ziyan folded the decree once, twice, slid it into her belt as if tucking away a blade that would be needed later. "Then we will exist louder," she said. "Until men must choose which silence to live under."
They did not camp inside the walls because walls lie. They camped outside in the field where the frost held firm and the wind had no corners to play tricks in. Children of the survivors stirred thin porridge with stolen grain and ladled it into soldiers' bowls with the solemnity of new laws. Wei made a joke about how soup always tastes better when it's illegal; men laughed because laughter keeps hands from trembling when cups are thin.
Ren squatted near the road and wrote the city's old name in the dirt with a stick. He looked at it for a long time. Then he drew a single line through it, clean, not angry. Beside it he wrote another: Xinglu. He said it aloud and the frost considered, then accepted it. "The place that walks," he translated, because scholars like to show the work when the work resists.
"Good," Shuye said, sitting on his heels, warming his fingers over the kiln's mouth. "I prefer towns that move. Easier to defend."
Han studied the wagons and the road both. "Zhang will not like this arithmetic," he said. "He will move to stop us from doing multiplication."
"Let him," Li Qiang said. "Numbers still have to pass through steel."
Feiyan eased down beside Ziyan, leg outward, the ache admitted for the length of a bowl. "When you read that title," she said, "did you feel gentler or angrier?"
"Neither," Ziyan said. "I felt cold. Cold is where decisions look like themselves."
The river below reflected fire without favoritism. Smoke tried to bargain with the sky and was refused. On the far bank, a fox watched history and decided mice would still be there tomorrow. Huo checked the pickets and taught one boy how to stand in a way that looked like he would not run even if he did. Ren's men slept with their mouths open because sleep had not practiced dignity in months.
Snow began without ceremony. The first flakes melted on the banner's blue braid and ran downward like ink, water remembering it had carried letters all its life. The second flakes found the edge of the new name in the dirt and softened it without removing it, which is how mercy ought to behave.
Ziyan stood with the jar warm as intention under her palm and watched the cold make the world honest. "If Zhang wants an empire," she said, not loudly, not for anyone but the part of night that collects vows, "let him have ashes. We will keep the roads."
Feiyan's shoulder touched hers, a weight that did not ask to be reciprocated. "Tomorrow," she said, "we teach the guild here to miscount for us. We build a false ledger that tells true things. We send Han to bite the supply columns and Ren to whisper into the prefectures. Wei will find men who like to climb and give them ladders under a different name. Li Qiang will invent a way for three to look like thirty."
"And you?" Ziyan asked.
"I will write you a path through people who wish you were smaller," Feiyan said. "And I will tell you when you have grown too large to pass."
Ziyan smiled without showing teeth. "Do that."
The snow thickened, kind as a quiet that had learned what to hide. Xinglu slept with its new name for a pillow. Crows argued about precedence on the warming wall until one discovered the porridge pot and decided to become domestic. The blue braid lifted and fell with the wind, an unnoticed river in a field of white.
Somewhere south, a seal went into wax with a weight practiced to look effortless. Somewhere north, a boy tied another blue knot to a tent cord because it helped. Between the two, the road stretched, not blessing, not cursing, only agreeing to be used by whoever remembered to walk.