You could say the first fire began with a children's song, but that would flatter the children and let the adults off the hook. The rhyme was simple; the anger wasn't. Still, it helps to start somewhere, and on this day the rope slapped stone in rhythm and small voices rose against the smoke.
"Flame goes up, ash comes down,
Seeker walks through burning town.
Count to three, he disappears,
Count again, he reappears."
Merchants frowned, wondering whether mockery was bad for sales. Zealots stiffened, sniffing blasphemy like wolves catch a scent on wind. Someone shouted for silence. Someone else shouted for more. After that, remembering who started what became a luxury the day could not afford.
Xuemei watched from a rooftop where the tiles had gone blistered and loose, ledger tucked tight beneath her arm. She had come to study the way belief moved: which fragments bought meat, which bought mercy, which bought men who brought knives. She had intended to watch like a surveyor watching a river in flood, making neat notes about currents. Below, the river leapt its banks.
Fights began despite the heat because words are lighter than air and catch more easily. A stall selling "authentic skull fragments" took offense at a boy calling them "potato bones" and swung the first hook; a woman hawking "Seeker's breath, captured" smashed her own vial to demand witnesses; a man reciting a recipe for lamp oil as prophecy was punched for charging too much hope per line. Fire found canvas, then greed, then fear, and it climbed. The hymn in the children's mouths changed pitch without changing words. The rope kept slapping.
She descended because distance is for scholars and she had chosen something else. The stairs groaned. The alley pressed hot breath into her face. Ash stuck to sweat and made a second skin.
Closer, the market roared like surf. Stalls flickered between silhouettes, brass and cloth and jittery hands. Someone had overturned a brazier, and oil crawled as if it were alive. A man fell in it and came up without a face. Blade met cudgel met prayer. Over it all—like bells, like nursery—children sang.
"Flame goes up…"
She found three of the children by the fountain that didn't work anymore, rope twining the cracked bowl. They had a hunger-hollow look and a talent for timing. One girl had drawn a lantern on her wrist in charcoal. Xuemei caught her eye.
"Come," she said.
"You a priest?" the girl asked, not scared so much as curious, as if considering a trade.
"Worse," Xuemei said, and the girl nodded as if that answered everything and took the others by the sleeve. People are good at recognizing what they need, and children, quicker than most.
She led them along the lip of chaos—close enough to be forgotten by those at its center—toward a lane where the wind favored escape. An argument slapped against her shoulder as she passed: two men wrestling over a parchment that said only, in a shaky hand, return. It was not a complete sentence, but then neither was the day.
"Is this the Seeker's work?" one of the boys whispered, wide-eyed, as a gallows of tarp poles collapsed and the people beneath it scrambled out from under slogans.
"It's everyone's work," Xuemei said, and then, because children sometimes require the mirror you won't permit adults, "and so—yes."
The first zealot came at them in a narrow court where light failed and the fire's glow pretended to be it. He had a red sash and the raw-veined eyes you see in men who have refused water because they are fasting and refused doubt because they are certain. The blade in his hand was kitchen steel, not temple, but sharpened enough for doctrine.
"Declare," he demanded, blocking their way. His breath smelled of old cloves. "Ascended or buried. Which version do you hold?"
Xuemei had nothing in her hands but the ledger under her arm and the children behind her, small and hot. She took the half-second the moment allowed and placed her words on it like a coin on a scale.
"The Seeker ascended into the grave and was buried in the sky."
You could hear the hinge creak inside the zealot's skull as the phrase knocked it off true. Contradiction landed like frost on glass. He blinked, and in that soft-walled second the children slipped past his knees and Xuemei followed and then the space was closed and the moment priced and paid for. Somewhere behind them he shouted, but he shouted too late, and not quite the same man as before.
Fragments work best when timed, and timing is a god you worship with the whole of your day.
They reached a street of shade trees that were now only memory and a line of shuttered houses looted clean. Even ruin has its hierarchy: these houses had been emptied politely. The doors had not been broken so much as put aside. Xuemei ushered the children under an awning where the ash fell in slower grains.
"You saved us," one of the boys said, because children are accountants of debt even when they still use stones instead of numbers.
"Not yet," she said, and glanced toward the square where the market was learning what fire meant when it had nothing left to eat but people. "Do you have names?"
They looked at one another. It was not the kind of question they expected. Names are a luxury and a hazard; the market had been trading them since morning.
"Ming," the girl offered first, after deciding Xuemei counted as a confession.
"Little Knife," the shorter boy said, with a grin that suggested the name worked as both warning and hope.
"Third," the last boy said, because his mother had not had the energy for poetry and numbers keep better than promises.
"Keep them," Xuemei said. "If you lose a name, someone else will write you one, and it never fits right."
"Are you a prophet?" Ming asked, as if trying on the word, checking the seams.
"Not a prophet," Xuemei said, and—betraying herself with the easiest lie—"a witness."
"Witness to what?"
"To what words do to people," she said, and drew a quick figure in the ash on the paving stone with her bare finger: a circle with a line through, a symbol the old bookmen used to mark a passage to return to. "Repeat after me."
They did, because adults argue and children echo.
"Truth isn't flame," Xuemei said, voice soft, almost to herself. "It's tinder."
"Tinder," Little Knife whispered, delighted by the shape of the word, making it his.
Far off a voice rose—hoarse, furious—shouting the Seeker's name as if the syllables were a rope thrown to a drowning man. The name snagged on the day and then ripped free.
"Why are they angry?" Third asked.
"Because they were promised answers and given choices," Xuemei said, and let a wry breath out through her nose. "People will kill to avoid choosing."
The alley brightened. A tide of heat shouldered around the corner. Smoke took a step forward like an animal.
"Move," she said, and the children moved.
They crossed a square where a shrine had given up all the gold leaf it had ever worn, and what remained was the wood underneath, honest and dark. A cult with painted faces was smashing jars and laughing because secrets looked better on the ground. A woman in a baker's apron was scooping ash into lanterns. She caught Xuemei's eye and lifted her chin, as if to say, I know you. It is a peculiar thing, to be recognized for what you have not yet become.
Xuemei took them into a shop whose sign had burned but whose smell had not: ink, must, the ghost of binding glue. The shelves had been tumbled, but the back room remained. There, someone had once written their life's work very carefully, and someone else had left in a hurry without bothering to lock the door.
"Sit," Xuemei told the children, and when they sat, obedient as new apprentices, she tore a page from a ledger left half-full on a table. She dipped a pen in a bottle whose neck was black with old drips and wrote a single line in tight characters. She let it dry, tore the line into three slips, and handed them over.
"What does it say?" Ming asked.
"It says, If a man with a blade asks what you believe, say, 'I believe you're right,' and step to the left."
"That's not scripture," Third said, scandal all over his soot-streaked face.
"It's survival," Xuemei said. "Scripture can wait until after."
They read the line again, lips moving silently, making it theirs. She watched them the way she watched the market: noting which words stuck on which tongues, which syllables snagged, which rhythms bent around fear. It was not kindness that kept her there—it was experiment. This is not a generous thing to admit, but the day had no patience for good manners.
Outside, someone rang a bell until the clapper broke. Another kind of bell—bone, thinner—took up the work. Men shouted the same sentence with the stress in different places, and each stress made a new doctrine.
A figure lurched in the doorway, gray with ash, blood on his sleeve. He carried a skull etched with tiny precise characters. The skull grinned because skulls are built that way regardless of context.
"Sanctuary?" he asked, the word scraping. He saw the children, saw Xuemei, and in the second before fear or greed could decide for him, he hesitated. She used that second and took the skull from his hands.
"Sanctuary is full," she said, and turned the bone so the words faced her. The script was the neat obsessive sort written by the kind of person who makes lists of the lists they must someday make. The lines spoke of the Seeker "walking through fire as if through sleep," of "ashes arranged into sentences," of "witnesses necessary for the miracle to agree with itself."
"Is it real?" the man asked, eyes brightening with the last trade he had to make.
"It is bone," Xuemei said, because some truths are safest and shortest. "Go east. The wind's better there."
He went. He left his skull with its story and took his own with him, which is not how the metaphor usually works but made sense at the time. Xuemei weighed the relic in her hands and set it gently on a shelf that had once held proper books. The children stared.
"Is it—" Third began.
"It is also tinder," Xuemei said, and put a finger to her lips.
The ink in the bottle had clotted but not died. She wetted it with a few drops from a cracked kettle in the corner and drew another sigil, smaller than the first, on the inside of her wrist: a square, a dot, a slash. She whispered a sentence she had found after the sanctum fell, something about edges and echoes. The room felt briefly cooler. Ritual, like humor, works best when not explained in public.
They ventured out the back because the front had filled with heat. Behind the shop, the city was trying to become a kiln. The alley opened into a courtyard missing a wall. Zealots in red sashes battled merchants with iron hooks and the occasional word used like a thrown stone. Parchments blew by at knee height. The air brought the taste of pennies.
A different zealot confronted them. He had no blade, only fists and a voice practiced on witnesses. "Who are you to take children from their proper fear?"
"Practice makes prophets," Xuemei said.
"You speak like a liar."
"I speak like a ledger," she said, and because he blinked at the unfamiliar insult, she put a hand on his shoulder and steered him half a step to the right as a door crashed open to his left and a man with a cudgel walked through the space his head had occupied moments before. The zealot reconsidered his theology at speed and found it flexible.
"You see?" she told the children. "Left, if there is a blade. Right, if there is a door. Words first, feet next."
"Will you teach us more?" Ming asked. She looked like a small lantern, black with soot and bright with question.
"I will teach you to listen," Xuemei said. "The rest is logistics."
They made a small procession through large chaos: a woman carrying a ledger like a baby, three children carrying slips of paper as if they were talismans against weather. Rioters have priorities, and none of theirs included a group that looked this unprofitable.
The market's center had become a circle of absence—burned stalls, twisted frames, a blanket of ash that remembered footprints and then forgot them when wind asked. The red-cloth stall where the ledger had rested yesterday lay in char, its keeper an outline. Around the ring, factions preached over one another, trying to outshout flame. Contradictions collided and created heat, then oddly, laughter. Someone began to dance. It wasn't good dancing, but it was sincere.
The chant altered, slurred by smoke, dressed in anger. It still held the bones of play.
"Flame goes up, ash comes down—"
Zealots roared it into a war song. Merchants hurled it like a jeer. Children braided it into other games. Words do not mind being used improperly; they were made for it.
Xuemei paused at the edge of the circle and closed her eyes. In another life, she would have been standing in her shop, evaluating a shipment, deciding which books would pay for which tea. In this life, she counted phrases instead of coin. She tasted the air for a word that would buy them through.
A memory answered: the Seeker in her shop on a wet night, the scar on his chest catching lamplight like a secret. He had asked for a particular manuscript and she had sold him a story instead. The scar had warmed when he laughed, as if it belonged to the lamp. She wondered, ridiculous as it was, whether on some other street he felt the heat of this day and mistook it for destiny.
"Do you think he's alive?" Third asked, and she almost said yes to be kind and almost said no because honesty is a habit and then did neither.
"I think," she said, "that life and death are poor categories for certain names."
This sounded wise enough to pass as prophecy and empty enough to stay safe.
The ring cracked. A roof slid into a room it had once covered, and a column of sparks took a spine. People hissed and held hands to faces. Somewhere, a god with burnt fingers tried the lock of the door between worlds and found it still jammed; smoke came through anyway. Xuemei felt, not for the first time, that the pantheons were not returning so much as remembering they had left something behind and coming back to check whether the window was still open.
They cut down an alley that had not existed last week. War is efficient at city planning. A cart lay on its side. Inside the cart, wrapped carefully in cloth, sat a stack of clean paper. Clean paper at a moment like this is either miracle or trap. Xuemei took three sheets and left three slips of someone else's ink in their place, because accounting is the only law that holds during collapse.
They stopped under a line of laundry that would never be collected—shirts hardened with soot, a dress turned gray. The children drank from a gutter where water still remembered being cloud. Xuemei tore one sheet into squares and wrote on each, in a different hand, a different instruction: Turn left at smoke. Say you're with the Bakers. Ask after Sister Calista but never wait for her. She handed them out like charms.
"What are we?" Little Knife said, proud as a flag.
"Messengers," Xuemei said. "Witnesses. People no one looks at until it is too late."
A knot of men rounded the corner, faces streaked, eyes gone to that bright place where reasons simplify. The tallest of them wore a charm of brass shaped like a lantern. He looked at the slips in their hands, then at Xuemei's ash-marked face. He made a decision that put him in the more interesting half of the world.
"You with the Ash Court?" he asked.
"Not yet," Xuemei said, filing the name.
"You shouldn't be out," he told the children, not unkindly for a man who could no longer remember his own last gentle thought.
"They're learning their letters," Xuemei said.
"In the middle of this?"
"Where else are letters tested?"
He actually laughed, a bark that conceded the point without forgiving it. "Get them home," he said, and passed, taking his brightness with him.
They moved on. Afternoon leaned into evening and the smoke found its own color—bruised, with a taste of iron and something sweet you should not be tasting. Windows had given up their glass. Doors, their hinges. The market made a sound like a throat clearing, and for a moment the whole district seemed embarrassed.
At the edge of all this, in a pocket the fire had missed and likely would not, stood a teahouse with its sign intact: a painted fox carrying a lantern in its mouth. The door hung open. Inside, steam had fled, but cups remained stacked, dusted white. Xuemei led the children in and they sat at a table that had known better elbows. She set the ledger down and opened it where heat had curled the pages but not burned the names. She turned slowly, tracing trades with a fingertip, finding patterns: which factions bought hope, which bought doom, which paid extra for rhyme. She smiled, not kindly and not cruelly, only like someone recognizing a route on a map that had always been there.
"Is that the book?" Ming asked, reverent and frightened and eleven.
"It's a way to see the city," Xuemei said. "Words have streets, too."
"Will it tell us where to go?"
"It will tell us where other people are going," she said, which is often enough.
On the margin of one page, a neat hand had written a single line outside accounts: When mortals edit gods, gods edit mortals in return. She had seen the sentiment before, and still it found a soft place. She put her thumb on the sentence until the oil of her skin blurred a letter. Call that defiance. Call it superstition. Call it balancing a smaller ledger with a larger one.
Evening made its first promise to be night. The chant—thin now, hoarse—still moved through streets with a limp it had earned honestly.
"Flame goes up…"
"Do we sleep?" Third asked, swaying.
"We will sleep when the air learns how," Xuemei said, and knew the hour had come to move the children somewhere the day could not find them for a while. She closed the ledger. The room held its breath. She picked it up again. The room remembered how to breathe.
They stepped into a wind that had gathered itself from alleys to do one useful job. It pushed the worst of the smoke down the west road where the houses were mainly stone. Xuemei took them east because her scraps had told her to, and her scraps had been right more often than luck would like to admit.
Past a wall scrawled with messages—names and dates and accusations and prayers—she paused and wrote a line that was not quite a command and not quite a comfort: There are witnesses. It is sometimes better to promise the existence of eyes than the possibility of mercy. She knew which currencies retained value across disasters.
In a square that had been, earlier, a slaughterhouse of doctrines, people now counted their dead with the fast brutal arithmetic the living use when the numbers will not change the work. A woman held a bone lantern and spoke to nobody: "He said he would come back different." Xuemei understood that "he" would always be both the Seeker and any man with a face the woman had loved. The gods are stubborn about pronouns.
They crossed into a district where the ground sloped toward river and the wind re-learned how to be ordinary. A cart seller with his cart intact offered fruit that tasted more like smoke than fruit. Xuemei bought one with a coin that had survived three governments and handed it to Ming.
"You don't have to—" Ming began.
"I insist," Xuemei said, and took a bite herself to show that insisting was not performance but habit. It was terrible fruit. They ate it anyway. The body believes what the mouth tells it.
Night came as if ashamed of arriving late. The city's usual stars were gone, but new lights appeared in windows and on rooftops—ash lanterns, jars of dust that claimed to glow with truth. On some jars, it did. On others, it pretended gamely. Xuemei watched the way people bowed to that light as if surprise had come to live in glass. She did not bow. She did not stop watching.
They reached a building that had once been a school with an old mural of cranes in flight. The cranes had taken on soot but kept their idea of themselves. Inside, the floors creaked exactly as floors should. Xuemei led the children to a room that smelled like chalk and discipline. The chalk tray still held two nubs. Bless the stubborn.
"Sleep here," she said. "One at the door, one at the window, one with me. Rotate if you like arguments."
"Will you stay?" Little Knife asked, blowing ash off the chalk like sugar from a pastry.
"Until morning," Xuemei said, and meant it. Morning could be bargained with. This night had no patience for negotiation.
They made nests of coats and curtains and the kind of fabric that remembers other uses. Xuemei lay with her back against the ledger and her front against the idea of rest. The children slept because exhaustion builds temples wherever it wishes.
From the window, she watched the city discover its new weather. Fire became ember; ember became story; story became posture. Through holes in roofs, the ash lanterns winked like weak stars seeking union. Somewhere a drum learned a slower beat and laid it under the broken chant.
She replayed the day as if it were a lesson she had to teach tomorrow. The contradiction at the blade. The slips of paper like vaccines. The skull with scripture. The man who laughed and did not kill them. The way the chant had shifted its purpose without changing its words.
Fragments are weapons, she thought, and felt the thought click into place like a well-cut stone. Sharper than steel if you know where the bones are. She touched the pouch beneath her robe where the fragment with the Seeker's name lay warm as if remembering a pocket that was a hand. She did not take it out. Names, like knives, dull in open air.
Outside, smoke braided itself into something that could almost be read—characters tall as houses, sentences that would not hold still. She blinked and they were only smoke again. The gods, perhaps, trying to write with the wrong alphabet. Or perhaps the city, dreaming out loud.
A fox trotted across the schoolyard and sat beneath the mural of cranes, considering whether birds painted on wood could be hunted. It looked up at the window where Xuemei watched and then away, as if embarrassed to have been caught thinking. Tricksters are poor at humility but good at practice.
She closed her eyes and in the dark the ledger's weight measured her against something she did not wish to name. She let the measurement happen anyway. The night carried arguments down the street and then away. Somewhere, very far or very near, a god coughed.
When she slept, she dreamed of ash falling in the shape of letters and children jumping rope on lines made of ink. In the dream she opened her mouth to speak and a market came out, palms up, bargaining. She woke with a smile that was not kind and not cruel and exactly suited to work.
Before dawn, she rose and put a slip of paper in each child's palm, repeating the lines she had made and mending them where fear had frayed them. She traced a sigil on the door lintel in clean water because clean water is an old kind of magic that remembers more than one pantheon and owes favors to none.
Then she took the ledger and went to the window and watched the embers that had survived the night like lessons that had survived a teacher. The chant, when it came again, was softer and not less dangerous.
"Flame goes up, ash comes down…"
Her mouth shaped different words, almost without her permission. "Timing is mercy," she whispered. "Silence is a blade."
Outside, the first feet of morning tested the street and found it wanting but acceptable. The day would not be better; it would be different. That is as much as days can promise.
She had the children. She had the ledger. She had a pocketed name. And she had a theory sharpened by heat and error: fragments cut deeper than steel if you strike on the breath between belief and fear.
It would do. For now, it would have to.
Somewhere beyond rooftops, while the city rehearsed its next argument, ravens chose a parapet and looked down as if they had paid for seats. One tilted its head and made the small sound owls sometimes make when they wish they were ravens instead. The air smelled of ink and cooked stone.
Xuemei stood very still, because stillness is a kind of blade too, and listened to the quiver in the city's voice. It was not yet a word, but it was the moment before a word, which is where all power lives.