Ash Hall was busy when they entered. Messengers came and went in a flurry of damp cloaks and frayed tempers. The Xia banners had moved again; the front drew nearer. Even stone floors could hear distant drums.
Zhang stood amid it like a man who had decided there was no such thing as weather, only inadequate roofs.
He took Ji Lu's bundle with a nod, flipped through until the word seditious caught his eye like a spark on tinder.
"Road City," he read aloud, the foreign taste of it making his lip curl. "She calls her nest a city now."
"Names make it easier to hunt, Excellency," Ji Lu said. "Or so hunters tell me."
Zhang smiled, thin and real. "Indeed," he said. "We can stop calling them smoke and start calling them fire."
He read the summary quickly, absorbing. Around him, the Ash Hall listened: secretaries, minor lords, the echo of old wood that had once stood over other ashes.
"A bandit confederation," he repeated. "Presumptuous thieves, styling themselves city because they have three walls and more opinions than grain."
He liked the phrase. Ji Lu saw it settle in his mind like a stone into the foundation of a future decree.
"Very well," Zhang said. "We will answer their proclamation. Not with recognition. With naming."
He signalled to a scribe. "Draft for distribution to western prefectures," he dictated. "By order of the Regent: a group of seditious elements based in the traitor-city Yong'an have declared themselves a 'Road City'. They are nothing more than rebels and bandits cloaking theft in talk of 'law.' Any village that hangs their sparrow mark or obeys their 'tablets' declares itself enemy to Qi and ally to Xia, and will be treated as such."
He paused, eyes glittering.
"Add," he said, "that any hall which tears down such marks and delivers the ringleaders to our officers will be forgiven back taxes and given grain for three winters. Give them a price for betrayal. Poor men understand that."
The scribe scribbled, ink spattering.
Ji Lu kept his face smooth. Wang Yu's fingers tightened on his own sleeve, knuckles white.
"Excellency," Ji Lu said carefully, "if we equate them openly with Xia, we risk pushing those who merely argue about blankets into thinking themselves already condemned. Some may decide they might as well earn the name."
Zhang's gaze snapped to him.
"Counsellor," he said softly, "are you concerned for the feelings of thieves?"
"I am concerned," Ji Lu said, throat dry, "about giving scattered tiles the dignity of believing they are already a wall. Your words shape them as much as theirs shape themselves."
Zhang studied him for a moment that felt like an entire winter.
Then he laughed, abruptly.
"Always turning words in your hands like knives," he said. "Very well. We'll save 'ally to Xia' for later. For now, call them 'confused subjects led astray by a woman's arrogance.' That will anger them more than 'bandit', I think."
The scribe scratched furiously, revising.
"Post the decree in every prefectural seat," Zhang went on. "Send copies to captains along the western roads. Tell them: wherever they see a sparrow and a tablet, they are looking at a crack in our floorboards. Men who live in cracked houses fall through."
The Ash Hall murmured agreement.
Under Ji Lu's sleeve, the original proclamation pricked his arm like a splinter.
As they withdrew, Wang Yu leaned close enough that no one else could hear.
"He's going to pay for every clay bird he sees with blood," the clerk whispered. "Your 'Road City' just painted targets over half the west."
Ji Lu swallowed.
"Then we must make sure," he said, "that when his arrows fly, some of them hit shields instead."
He thought of Sun Wei in Haojin, Aunt Cao in Reed Mouth, Cao Mei in Yong'an. Of Ren Kanyu in Bai'an, the Emperor between them and a more impatient kind of fear.
Words were cheap. Edicts cheaper. But which ones people believed—that was where kingdoms lived or died.
He would write again. To Ren. To whoever the Road had set to keep its clay from shattering.
Outside, in the streets of the capital now ruled from an Ash Hall, the first whispers ran: bandit city… woman law… sparrow marks to be watched.
South and west, in halls where those sparrows already hung, the same whispers would come with a different wind: they've named us… they're afraid enough to write… we're not invisible anymore.
The Road City, barely born, stretched into that crack between fear and pride.
It had a name now on every tongue that mattered. What it did with that was no longer only Ziyan's decision.
The Road Under Heaven flowed on, under ashes and palaces alike, waiting to see which of them remembered how to walk.