Haojin smelled of river silt and sawdust when the first pigeon dropped out of the fog.
It hit the warehouse roof, skidded, recovered its dignity, and then set about bullying the other birds off a rafter until Sun Wei's boy waved it down with a handful of cracked millet.
Sun Wei untied the silk, smoothing it against his knee. The characters were unmistakable: Ren's square, precise strokes framing Ziyan's rougher hand where she'd corrected a word and refused to let anyone smooth it away.
He read it twice, lips moving. Shuye read over his shoulder, chin on his fist.
"Road City," Shuye said softly. "She went and named it."
Chen Rui rattled a crate into place just to have something to hit. "About time," she muttered. "Everyone else already had names for us."
Lin Chang wiped her hands on her apron and snatched the silk. Her eyes ran down the lines; her mouth tightened into something halfway between a smile and a curse.
"'Any hall that hangs the sparrow mark…'" she read. "That would be us. 'Our riders answer where they can…'" She snorted. "They'd better learn to swim too, if they plan to come every time some drunk breaks a stool over someone's head."
"It says 'where they can,' not 'always,'" Shuye pointed out. "Words matter."
"Words don't fill bellies," one of the boatmen grumbled from the doorway. "Or fix planks."
"No," Lin Chang said. "But they keep men with ink from deciding your bellies and planks belong elsewhere."
The regulars clustered around. A passing fishwife craned her neck, smelling change. Even Du's soldiers at the far corner of the square watched, casual on the surface, eyes too sharp underneath.
Sun Wei folded the silk carefully.
"It's one thing to have tablets on a pillar," he said. "Another to say out loud that we belong to some… city no one's seen."
Lin Chang's brows rose. "Have you looked around lately?" she asked. "You think Yong'an is the only place this Road lives? You've been weighing fish under that sparrow for a month, Captain. Whether we admit it or not, we're already part of whatever she's building."
"Admitting makes it harder to back away when Du's next order says 'burn,'" Chen Rui said bluntly.
Shuye chewed his lip. "We could hang a copy inside," he suggested. "On the back wall. Anyone who walks under it knows they're in. Anyone who doesn't like it can drink somewhere less honest."
Sun Wei thought of Du Yan, standing in this same doorway with Zhang's order in his pocket and hesitation in his eyes.
"He bent once," Sun Wei said. "He might not get the chance again."
"Then we give him something worth bending around," Lin Chang said. "It's easier to protect a hall that knows what it is than one pretending to be nothing at all."
She took an old cutting board off its hook, wiped it with her sleeve, and slapped it on the table.
"Write it," she ordered Shuye. "Not all of it. Just enough."
Shuye dipped his brush. The tavern grew quieter than any tax day.
On the board, he painted in hurried strokes:
UNDER ROAD CITY LAW: NO SEIZING WITHOUT RECORD. NO BEATING WITHOUT WITNESS. THOSE WHO HANG THE SPARROW ANSWER TO THESE, AND THESE ANSWER BACK.
He added, in smaller characters at the bottom: ANY COMPLAINTS, SEE SUN WEI.
Sun Wei choked. Laughter rippled through the room, nervous but healing.
Lin Chang nailed the board up beside the tablets. The sparrow scratched into the beam above seemed to puff its carved chest.
"Inside the door," she said. "Let Zhang and his kind fret about maps. We'll worry about walls that keep rain out and fists honest."
Outside, a few of Du's men drifted closer, drawn by curiosity. One squinted at the new writing.
"Road City," he read, mouth twisting. "Sounds like a bandit's boast."
"Bandits don't keep ledgers," Lin Chang said. "They don't let you yell at them without losing teeth. You want bandits, go east. We're trying something different."
The soldier snorted and wandered away. But he walked a little more carefully past the threshold, as if the ink might notice his boots.
Sun Wei watched him go and felt, for the first time since he'd fled uniform for sacks, that he was standing somewhere that might hold.
"Road City," he said under his breath. "Fine. Let's see how long we can keep you from being paved over."
He wrote a short reply on the back of Ziyan's silk, cramped but legible:
Haojin hangs your words. Du bent. We cut tablets small; now your law lives under bowls as well as on beams. If this makes us Road City, then we stand. Don't forget we are the first door Zhang will try to kick.
He tied it to a pigeon that knew the way north by now.
The bird took off, leaving a feather drifting through the dusty light.