Reed Mouth's pigeon arrived limping.
It landed on Aunt Cao's roof, missing three tail feathers and most of its patience. The youngest of her grandsons scooped it up and got his thumb bitten for his trouble.
By the time Ren's scout knocked on her door, Aunt Cao had the silk open on her table and was scowling at it over a bowl of millet porridge.
"Too many words," she said. "You scribes write like you're afraid someone might understand you."
The scout, a wiry woman with windburned cheeks, bowed. "The Speaker in Yong'an asked us to read it aloud," she said. "For those who don't… enjoy squinting."
"I enjoy it fine," Aunt Cao said. "It's the thinking after that makes my knees hurt. Go on."
The scout read the proclamation, tripping only once over Road City; the name was still learning how to sit in people's ears.
When she finished, the silences in the room were many and precise.
A man who had lost two fingers to a tax collector's cudgel snorted. "So now some girl in a ruin thinks she speaks for us," he said. "What's the difference between her and the wolf in Bai'an?"
"Has the wolf ever sent you a tile that stopped your nose being broken?" Aunt Cao asked.
He grunted, unwilling to admit it.
A younger woman, face lined with sun rather than years, frowned. "If we hang this 'Road City' name," she said, "won't that make it easier for the wolf or the dragon to call us rebel? Names make it easier to aim."
"We already have the tiles," Aunt Cao pointed out. "We already shout 'witness' when someone swings a stick. You think calling it something else will make Zhang forget our market wall?"
The scout shifted. "The general in Bai'an wants you to know," she said carefully, "that his Emperor has not called the Road City enemy. Not yet. He watches. He measures."
"Does he eat our millet?" Aunt Cao asked.
The scout smiled faintly. "Not unless you send it."
"Then he can watch as much as he likes," the old woman said. She picked up one of the small sparrow-marked tiles from her shelf and tapped it against the silk. "This law came before the name. I'll keep it. If the name brings riders when fire comes, I'll keep that too. If it just brings more words, we can burn them to keep the porridge warm."
She handed the silk back.
"Tell your Speaker," she added, "that Reed Mouth will hang her words next to the tiles. If she fails us, we'll curse her properly. If she doesn't, we'll name our grandsons after her cousins."
The scout laughed, bowed again, and went to the tavern to nail the proclamation under the existing NO BEATING WITHOUT WITNESS tile.
By nightfall, three other villages along the reed-choked shore had copies of their own. In all of them, people argued. In most, they hung the words anyway.
Names were dangerous. So was pretending you didn't already belong to the thing everyone else was describing.
The copy that reached Ash Hall was not carried by a pigeon.
It arrived folded into the lining of a grain report from the western prefectures, smuggled under numbers that had learned how to hide other meanings.
Ji Lu unwrapped it in the archive's back room, with only Wang Yu and a single lamp for company.
Wang Yu read halfway through and swore, the word strangled halfway between admiration and dread.
"They did it," he said. "They went and named themselves."
"Road City," Ji Lu murmured. The ink was rough, the hand hurried, but the bones of the words were clear: law that walked wherever people agreed; halls that answered one another; a refusal to let any throne name their folk rebel without reply.
He felt both lighter and more tired than he had in weeks.
"They've just given Zhang a definition to rail against," Wang Yu said. "He'll be grateful. He prefers enemies with titles; easier to carve into edicts."
Ji Lu folded the silk again, hands careful.
"We can't hide it," he said. "Too many copies will be flapping about already. Some censor's nephew will bring him one like a prize bird."
"So we bring it first," Wang Yu said bleakly. "Better from you than from someone who can't read between its lines."
Ji Lu hesitated. "We bring him a version," he said. "Not the one that remembers every stroke."
Wang Yu's mouth twisted. "You're going to lie in the Ash Hall."
"I am going to summarise," Ji Lu corrected. "Summaries are close cousins of lies, but they still attend family dinners."
He took a fresh sheet and began to write:
To His Excellency the Regent: unscrutinised writings of seditious elements in Yong'an have begun to circulate along the western road. They style themselves 'Road City' and claim to offer "law" to scattered halls and villages, under a sparrow mark already noted in previous reports. They explicitly deny intention to seize thrones; instead they bind common folk with promises of mutual protection against arbitrary seizure and punishment.
He paused.
At present, their influence is strongest in Yong'an, Haojin, and several minor river villages on Xia's side. They are too scattered to be a true rival state. Their name, however, will make it easier to identify and isolate such halls when Your Excellency chooses. Recommend we label them publicly as a "bandit confederation" rather than "city" in imperial proclamations, to deny them the dignity they seek.
He did not add his personal conclusion: that the more Zhang named them bandits, the less the border folk would believe him, having seen the difference between a ledger and a knife.
Wang Yu read over his shoulder and grunted. "Sharp enough," he said. "Blunt enough. He'll like it."
"For now," Ji Lu said.
He rolled the report with other papers: grain tallies, conscription lists, a note about shortages in the eastern garrisons. The Road City proclamation he tucked into his own sleeve, sparrow mark pressed against his skin.