The furnace court stays dim even when the sky pales; soot films the skylight slats, and the cold makes every breath look guilty. Wei Wenyu wakes to that dimness the way other men wake to birdsong, by habit, by obligation, pulling his sleeves over wrists cracked raw from lye and heat. The ash on his fingertips never fully leaves; it gathers again as soon as he touches the brick lip of the furnace, as if the annex is reclaiming him.
When the first clerk pushes in, the annex seems to tighten around him. Benches squared, jars faced forward, ladles aligned as if the room itself remembers inspections. The man’s boots stamp out snow and then stop, careful not to track slush across the threshold. A guard follows, hand on a short cudgel, eyes not on the shelves but on Wei’s hands, as though fingers are where theft begins.
Wei bows from the waist, not low enough to invite a kick, not high enough to be called insolent. The oath in his chest stirs like a hook set under the ribs; he can feel the register’s pull even from here, a thread drawn taut toward the Ledger Hall. Service, it whispers without words. Attend. Account.
He moves to open the cabinet of ingredients. Each jar’s mouth bears a paper strip stamped with a registry-mark: inked circles, the faint impression of a seal edge, dates written in a clerk’s tidy hand. In this place, even dried mugwort has a lineage. He counts them in silence, lips barely moving. His mind ticks through shortages the way the scale will later tick through weights: three measures of ginger left, one pouch of alum, spirit-salt sealed so tightly it might as well be a rumor.
Behind him the clerk clears his throat, and the guard shifts. There is no accusation spoken, only the ritual of suspicion. Wei sets his personal mortar aside (wood worn smooth by his palm) and shows his kit open, silver probes and empty vials like a penitent laying out sins before a judge. The clerk’s gaze slides past the tools to Wei’s face, searching for the soft place where hunger turns into desperation.
Wei keeps his eyes lowered and his breathing steady, using the basic cultivation rhythm taught to exhausted laborers: in, hold, out: slow enough to calm the trembling in his fingers. Outside, somewhere beyond stone and wind, siege drums thud their patient arithmetic. Inside, the annex prepares to count.
A portable scale is set on the worktable and treated like an altar. Its beam is brass, but the sound it makes is animal. Thin and complaining each time the clerk nudges it level. The weights come out in a felt pouch one by one, stamped with tiny numerals and the Prefectural Seal Office’s border-mark, as if metal could be made honest by an impression. A strip of red cord is tied to the beam to show the “approved” notch; anything above it is waste, anything below it is theft.
Spirit-salt goes first. The guard watches the clerk’s fingers as if they might conjure extra grains, while Wei watches the salt itself. Each crystal flashing, too clean a light for this soot-drowned room. It has a taste in the air that makes his alchemical sense prickle, like cold iron on the tongue. Lamp oil follows, poured in a thread so narrow it trembles. In the chill it thickens, reluctant, and the clerk has to tap the flask to keep it moving.
“Two weights. Half.” The words are spoken loudly, ritual-flat, so the tally carries even when the siege drums swallow softer sounds.
Names follow, not faces. The clerk calls them from the ration scroll in a voice emptied of weather and pity, and each worker answers as if replying to a law: present, accounted, bound. The brush moves (scratch, pause, scratch) making a narrow forest of strokes that turns bodies into entries: lamp oil allotted, spirit-salt issued, debt noted, seal required. Even hunger becomes a column with room for a thumbprint.
Wei Wenyu keeps his hands where everyone can see them on the table edge, palms open, fingers stained by ink and furnace-black. The oath-thread in his chest tightens whenever the scribe’s seal pad opens, as if the Ledger Hall itself is inhaling. He repeats the prescribed phrases without ornament. Extra words are excess. Excess draws audits. Audits draw punishments.
Today’s permissions drop onto the table like iron cuffs: a measured pinch for the infirmary, a single ladle for the furnace court, and a hard, stamped refusal for anything labeled experiment or loss. The guard paces the shelves, tapping each jar lid, tap, tap, listening for loosened wax, checking paper strips for torn fibers. The scribe writes without looking up, and the clerk’s eyes linger on every shortfall, already rehearsing whose name it will wear.
When the last weight is returned to its pouch, the annex seems to loosen, though no one dares call it relief. Wei Wenyu lifts the issued vials and packets with a caution reserved for contraband, letting his eyes count what his hands cannot afford to spill. In his mind, shortages become substitutions, substitutions become annotations. Each remedy measured twice, and each justification drafted before the first grind of mortar.
Wei Wenyu hears his own name the way he hears “ladle” or “tongs” spoken in the furnace court: an object requested, an object tallied, an object returned or charged for. The clerk does not lift his head. The sound is flat, practiced, designed to travel the length of the table without catching on anything human. The brush hovers, a dark needle poised over the lacquered page, and in that small pause Wei feels the oath in his chest answer like a bell struck under cloth.
It is never loud. It is a hum in the joints, a pressure behind the teeth. A reminder that his breath belongs to a line of ink, that his hands are pledged to the annex until the registers decide otherwise. When the brush touches down again, the hum settles; when it lifts, it tightens, as if the Ledger Hall beyond the walls is leaning closer to listen for hesitation.
He keeps his thumbprint ready, the pad of it raw from soap and ash. The table is scarred by other prints, other bindings. Some faded, some so dark they look like bruises on the wood. He wonders, not for the first time, whether a name can be worn thin the way paper can, whether enough repetitions might abrade a person down to the last stroke of a character. It is a dangerous thought: the kind that leads to staring, and staring is counted as insolence.
A guard’s gaze flicks to his hands. Wei spreads his fingers slightly, showing there is nothing hidden beneath the nails but ink and a crescent of burn. His kit rests against his shin, mortar and probes packed as neatly as any accounting. He does not reach for it. The air smells of seal paste and old oil, of rationed things. Somewhere in the corridor a cough turns wet, and his compassion rises on instinct: then he swallows it back, because compassion is not a category the ledger recognizes.
The clerk’s brush pauses once more at the end of the line, as if weighing the cost of an extra mark. Wei stands very still, letting the oath pull him taut as a string, and waits to be issued like a tool.
Wei Wenyu has learned what the annex rewards and what it punishes. It rewards quiet steps that do not draw the guard’s head up from his counting. It rewards a gaze that stays on the table’s edge, on the lip of a scale-pan, on anything but another person’s face. It rewards answers shaped like seals. He keeps his voice even when hunger makes it thin. “Yes, Clerk.” “No, Clerk.” “Issued as recorded.” He does not explain unless asked twice, and if asked twice he frames the truth in quantities and categories, not in need. Need sounds like accusation here. Need sounds like theft before it happens.
Even his body is trained to look accounted for. Sleeves rolled to the same crease each day, kit tied the same way, hands opened at a guard’s glance before the guard can demand it. Anything else, an extra word, a flinch at his own name, a pause too long, invites a second look. And a second look, in a place made of paper and fear, becomes its own kind of evidence.
In the furnace court he moves as if the air itself is audited. He lays out powders on clean paper squares, not trusting the soot-black table, and draws his measures with the tip of a knife because a spoon might be accused of “rounding.” Each jar is opened with two fingers and a held breath, then sealed again until the wax gives a small, obedient crack. He returns spilled grains of spirit-salt to a separate dish, marking them as “contaminated” in his head, because waste is a charge and contamination is a sentence. Even the ash he scrapes from the cauldron mouth is gathered into a cloth and tied, not thrown, as though disorder could be lifted by the collar and dragged before a clerk to be named.
When the guards come, he loosens his sash without being told and turns his sleeves out like offerings. Their fingers invade cloth and skin, blunt as ladles, the pat along his ribs measuring him for contraband and weakness alike. He keeps his palms open, empty, steady at chest height. Obedience speaks first; it leaves them fewer questions to sharpen into pain.
He bargains away dignity in small, practiced increments (answering before he is addressed, bowing before hands reach to search him) until predictability becomes the only currency he can safely spend. “Reliable,” they call him, meaning useful enough to keep breathing and invisible enough to accuse when jars come up light. Still, he counts: spirit-salt grains, bandage rolls, the questions he will soon be punished for forming.
The first rule is never said as a rule: only as a certainty that settles into bone: doors belong to seals, not to feet. The fortress is built of stone, timber, and stamped permission; a threshold is not crossed so much as it is recognized. When Wei Wenyu carries a tray from furnace court to infirmary, he does not think of the distance. He thinks of the Ledger Hall agreeing, somewhere in lacquer and ink, that his name may move from one corridor to the next without offending the wards that drink intent like wine.
Pass-tokens are small, stupid things: wooden slips darkened by handling, a dab of vermilion, a counter-signature that means the clerk’s hand has made itself responsible. Yet men with full stomachs will trade their last brass button for one, because hunger can be survived and registry-marking cannot. A soldier can plead frostbite, a messenger can plead urgency; the gate will still ask for the shape of authority, not the shape of need. Hinges do not turn for pity. Even the air seems to hesitate until the token is presented, until the seal-impression catches the ward-light and the invisible script relaxes its grip.
Wei has seen what happens when someone tries to make a door answer to flesh. A stablehand, wild-eyed with missing rations, shoved at the inner gate as if force could be substituted for proper stamping. The ward did not strike like a blade; it simply refused him. His body slid, as if the space itself had been oiled against trespass, and he fell hard enough to split his lip. The clerks wrote “attempted unauthorized passage” with the same careful strokes they used for lamp oil tallies. The punishment arrived later, official and patient.
So Wei walks as if his own soles must not sound too certain. When he receives a token, he holds it with two hands, as if cradling something alive, and he does not let himself imagine the relief of a door that opens because it wants to. Here, wanting is irrelevant. Only the seal is real.
Wei learns, in the weeks when the siege tightens and the corridors shrink with rumor, to keep his gaze where the stone meets his toes. Men huddle by doorjambs and whisper about the cliffside postern: about a runner who can be bribed with a ring, about grease on a latch, about a night when the wards were “sleeping.” The words are bait as much as information. Curiosity leaves a mark on a face the way soot does: not obvious at first, then impossible to deny once a guard decides to look.
Captain Ma does not need to hear a sentence to know it was spoken. He watches mouths instead of meanings. Wei answers any question as if it were an entry in a ledger: “Three catties of dried ginger remaining.” “Two bandage rolls at half-width.” “Spirit-salt at eleven pinches, sealed.” Numbers are safe because they are already written somewhere; opinions have to be invented, and invention is what rebels do.
When someone tries to draw him in, “You’ve seen the pass-tokens, haven’t you?”, he lets silence do the bowing. He keeps his hands busy, counting, measuring, rinsing, until obedience looks like the only thought he owns.
The second rule burns colder than hunger: flame is a privilege rationed in drops and audited like sin. In the corridors beyond the furnace court, even a shared ember is treated as a stolen seal. Lamp oil is issued by the spoon, wicks cut to clerk-approved lengths, lantern panes marked so a soot line can be compared against yesterday’s line. A spark in the wrong place summons more than annoyance: it summons a ledger, a guard, a search of sleeves for flint. Wei has learned to read smoke the way others read faces: the sharp bite of pine means someone dared a cooking fire; the sweet curl of incense means the shrine has been fed. Anything else (hot metal, burnt cloth) draws eyes toward the annex, as if treason has a scent.
Under siege, any improvised charm is treated as a wedge driven into the wall from inside. A talisman without the proper stamp is not called “help” in Tianlu Fortress; it is sabotage by definition, because only rebels require protections the registry did not authorize, and only fools trust the wards to tell intention from consequence. Ink without a seal is a crime waiting to happen.
Movement came in bell-measured blocks, light in spooned allotments, and even safety wore a stamped face. Permission nested inside permission until the fortress felt less like stone than a file drawer with doors. Wei carried his mortar and probes as if they might testify against him, walked when the shift-bell allowed, and learned the first rule of endurance: be legible to the registry.
Wei counted rinse-water the way clerks counted coin: by sound, by weight, by what could be justified on paper if a mouth with a seal asked. The pot’s lip was chipped, so he measured by the wobble in the pour: three careful ladles into the basin, one into the kettle again, never letting the steam rise too thick. Steam was proof of heat, and heat was rationed; too much proof drew attention. He kept the lid half-seated so the boil would come quickly and not waste itself in a long, roaring breath.
When the water broke, he watched for the thin shimmer that meant the furnace court’s qi had shifted. Metal-tang in the air, a prickle behind his teeth. Contamination was not always a smell. Sometimes it was a small wrongness, the way the surface refused to settle, the way a cooling pot seemed to hold a resentment. He held his silver probe over the steam until the tip warmed, then dipped it and waited for the faintest discoloration. Clean enough to touch wounds, he told himself. Clean enough to write.
He let the pot cool on a brick that had once been stamped with a talisman-mark, now so worn it looked like any other brick if you didn’t know where to squint. Cooling was time, and time had to be made to look like duty. While it cooled, he rewound bandage strips, folding them so the blood-brown edges hid inside, and set aside the ones too stiff to pretend.
He boiled the same water again, not for cleanliness but for the word the registry liked: cleansed. Two boils could be defended as prudence, not theft.
Then came the label. He tore a strip from the corner of an old requisition notice, smoothed it flat with the back of his ink-stained fingers, and wrote in his tight hand: “Rinse-water, double-boiled, infirmary use.” The characters were neat enough to suggest permission. He tied it to the jar with twine so frayed it felt like a confession.
An unlabeled jar was a question. Questions cost more than water.
Wei Wenyu waited until the furnace court quieted between bell-blocks, when even Captain Ma’s silence felt elsewhere, then took the cauldron-scraper and worried at the soot line. The black came off in curls and flakes, light as old paper, and he guided it into his mortar with the care of someone handling contraband. Under the pestle it changed. Grit to powder, powder to a dull bloom that stained the stone and settled into every crease of his fingers. It wasn’t medicine. It was weight.
The true coagulants were nearly gone: a thumb of alum, a stingy pinch of ground reed, spirit-salt measured in grains like prayer beads. He stretched them with soot until the mixture looked right in the dish, until it would cling to a wound instead of blowing away in the wind that knifed through the annex doors.
Ash clung to his sleeves, to the back of his throat. He learned faces. The older spear-men, eyes hollow with hunger, swallowed anything if it stopped the bleeding. The clerk’s nephew with soft hands gagged and asked what he’d been “given.” Adulteration was a word with teeth; it could pull him into the Ledger Hall by the collar.
So Wei kept his mouth shut, and his measures exact, and his doses just shy of a taste that would invite questions.
Bandage cloth went through the basin in strict turns, wash, rinse, wring, then hung over a line strung between two soot-dark beams where heat rose but did not flame. When it dried it stiffened at the old blood, the edge dark as a reprimand. Wei worked those edges under with his thumbs until the stain disappeared into the fold, buried inside a square that could pass as pale from a distance. He pressed each bundle flat with the heel of his hand, aligning corners as if alignment were a virtue the Ledger Hall could recognize.
Twine followed, looped twice, cinched with the infirmary’s standard knot. The knot mattered. Conformity was its own seal; clerks glanced, soldiers grabbed, and no one paused long enough to wonder what had been cleaned and what had merely been made to look clean.
Hunger and furnace-heat made the world cant, as if the table had become a slope. Wei planted his palms on the scarred plank and drew his breath down in the annex’s stabilizing pattern (slow, counted, submissive) until the flicker at the edge of his sight steadied into lines again. Only when his pulse stopped trampling his ribs did he unstopper a vial. One spill was a crime no seal could pardon.
At night, by the furnace court’s last dull glow, Wei bends over the ledger and makes scarcity speak the language of compliance. His brush lays down substitutions in strokes too measured for desperation: “mugwort in place of bitterleaf,” “stone-salt shaved to mimic spirit-salt,” “half-measure, twice administered.” He dates, aligns, signs then pauses, listening for boots, as if neatness could sanctify theft.
Morning oath-recitations were always the same: voices rasping in unison, a clerk’s bell tapped three times, then the lacquered registers opened like wounds that refused to close. Cold had stiffened the inkstones; men warmed their fingers on their own breath before daring to touch brush or seal.
Wei stood at the side table with the annex tallies folded under his sleeve, eyes lowered the way a serf’s should be lowered, listening for what the words did not say. When the attendant brought down the day’s seal-stamp, the sound was crisp. Too crisp, as if the hand wanted the room to hear how official it could be. The imprint bloomed red on the page: clean characters, full border, no smear.
Only the angle was wrong.
Not wrong enough to be challenged. Not wrong enough to draw a reprimand from Captain Jin’s overseers. But the Prefectural Seal Office taught wrists as much as it taught scripture; habitual pressure left its own signature. This bite leaned a hair counterclockwise, as if the stamp were being held by someone who had watched the motion more than performed it.
Wei’s gaze flicked, careful as a thief’s but practiced as a clerk’s: the attendant’s sleeve hem, damp from breath; the seal’s carved base, recently wiped; the tiny crescent where cinnabar paste had pooled at the edge. He could have asked to see the stamp for “verification.” He could have spoken the rule and forced a display of authorization.
He did neither.
He let the fog of other men’s breathing hide the stillness of his attention. He repeated the oath with the others, voice quiet, and when the page turned he traced the impression with his eyes once more, fixing it in memory beside the date line and the attendant’s name.
A wrong-angled seal was a small thing. Until it wasn’t. In Tianlu Fortress, small things were how betrayal moved: not by breaking gates, but by leaning a fraction off the approved line and trusting hunger to make everyone else look away.
In the annex storeroom the air was colder than the furnace court, a cold that smelled of old paper and dried roots. Wei set the register on an upturned crate, thumbed the page flat, and began to make the world match the ink.
He reweighed what the columns swore remained. A jar of coagulating powder, marked at four jin, should have tugged his shoulder; it lifted like a lie. The cloth sack of mugwort had its mouth stitched shut, but the knot was wrong: a hurried loop where the annex hands used a double hitch that held even when rats worried at it. When he slid the sack aside, the shelf board beneath showed pale scrape-marks through soot, as if something heavy had been dragged out and pushed back with no time to wipe the evidence.
He did not write “missing.” He tightened totals by the smallest possible strokes, shaving fractions the way hunger shaved men: ink thin enough to blame on trembling, not accusation.
Still, his tongue caught a thin metallic aftertaste when he leaned over an “empty” crock. Spirit-salt left its signature in the mouth and behind the eyes. It should not have been there at all.
Later, when the furnace court’s work slowed to the dull labor of cleaning, Wei took up the straw broom and moved the ash the way he moved figures in a ledger, careful, equal, leaving no gaps for suspicion to hook into. Under the soot lay prints. Not the wide, blunt crescents of guards’ nailed soles, but narrower marks with softer edges, the tread shallow as if the wearer had been trying not to commit their weight to the ground. The spacing hesitated, a half-step stutter where a sanctioned runner would stride as if the corridor belonged to him.
The trail thinned near a stretch of wall where the smoke-stain was layered wrong. Wei’s throat tightened. He scattered fresh ash back over everything, smoothing it flat with the broom’s belly, laying a quiet trap that accused no one until it could not be ignored.
By mid-day, talk in the corridors thickened the way stew did when the pot was left unattended. Cooks muttered that the small postern “coughed” open in the deep hours, a sick sound under stone. Stablehands swore they’d heard a whistle, three notes, answered by the cliff wind like a reply. Lamp oil, they said, was vanishing like water through a cracked cup. Wei listened with his gaze lowered, weighing which tongues sounded practiced and which shook with fear.
Near dusk, with tincture jars clinking soft in their straw cradle, Wei threads the western passage and lets the back of his knuckles brush the talisman-bricks as if by accident. No answering warmth. No low, obedient hum. His trained senses catch it instead. Mortar seams that taste stale, like water left standing in a fouled basin. He keeps walking. In this fortress, to pause is to confess, yet the emptiness drafts behind his ribs.
The furnace court took its tithe first, as it always did, before the Ledger Hall’s bells, before the day’s decrees could be read aloud and made official. Wei Wenyu stood at the mouth of the brick hearth with the ladle’s handle wrapped in rag, and still the heat found him. It rose through metal and cloth and skin, a slow climb that did not hurry, because it did not need to. It had all the hours.
His fingertips stung where old blisters had split and sealed themselves again into harder, less honest flesh. The creases of his knuckles held soot like ink in paper fibers; even when he scrubbed at night with cold water and ash, it only moved, it did not leave. He had learned to work with his fingers half numb, learned how long he could ignore the prickle before it became a tremor that might spill a measure and invite a clerk’s raised brow.
“Two ladles more,” the annex steward said without looking up from the tally board, voice flat with routine. The steward’s brush made a soft scratch, as if the characters were being carved into Wei’s skin instead of wood.
Wei nodded. Speech was a kind of expense.
He tipped the ladle into a waiting basin where crushed herb and powdered chalk waited like a patient mouth. The vapor that rose was bitter, medicine-smell strong enough to sting his eyes. For a heartbeat he thought of wounded men on straw mats, mouths slack, blood darkening the seams of their wrappings. He thought of how quickly powder could turn slick panic into something that held.
Pain was a measure, too. He counted it the way he counted spirit-salt: not by how much was poured, but by what remained when the work was done. If his hands could still close around the mortar’s pestle at dusk, if he could still feel the thin silver probes between thumb and forefinger, then the day had not taken everything.
Beyond the furnace court, the fortress held its breath in stone corridors and sealed doors. Here, the heat made an honest noise. It hissed and popped and sighed into the vents. Too loud to be mistaken for a whisper, too constant to be argued with. Wei kept his gaze careful and quiet, and gave the fire what it demanded, because it was safer than giving it anything else.
Hunger in Tianlu was not an alarm bell; it was the quiet architecture of the days, a hollow steadiness that made the world ring around it. It sharpened the smallest scents until they felt like summons: the sour edge of boiled turnip in the cookhouse, the faint sweetness of lamp oil on a guard’s glove, the mineral bite of spirit-salt when a stopper was lifted too carelessly. Wei learned to keep his face blank, because want showed itself fastest in the eyes.
In the ration room the clerk did not weigh: there was no time, and the scales invited arguments. He cracked the grain jar and listened, counting by sound as the kernels struck clay: dry, thin, too few. The rattle slid into Wei’s attention like a hook. His thoughts chased it before permission, measuring how many mouths that noise could quiet, how many fevered men would not wake shaking if the porridge were thicker.
He caught himself. He set his tongue against the back of his teeth and drew a breath the way the manual taught. A second breath. A third. The craving loosened, not gone, merely folded into something usable. Then he lowered his gaze and waited for the stamp.
Sleep comes in clipped portions, measured like grain and granted with the same suspicion. He lies down still hearing the day’s tallies, the brush-scratch, the clink of stoppers, only for corridor voices to rise and shear the dark into sections. Men rehearse loyalty as if it were a spell that can be forgotten: names recited in rank order, seal-titles invoked, punishments listed with the calm certainty of inventory. The words are meant to steady the fortress, but they do something smaller and crueler to him. They train his muscles to jolt awake before thought, breath already tight, heart already composing an apology. By the time silence returns, his palms are open on the blanket as if proving they hold nothing. Even rest begins to feel like an unfiled requisition.
Over time, choice narrowed into corridors with stamped doors. To help someone meant a requisition slip and a witness; to voice worry meant inviting an audit that would find his own hands guilty of wanting. Even haste looked like concealment. He learned to set compassion behind his teeth, held like a seed or a poison: kept close, never shown unless the ink could be made to read as duty.
He had learned the regime’s truest craft was not punishment but routing: every human impulse shunted into proper channels until only endurance required no countersign. So when the annex corridor suddenly thickened with commotion (boots hammering, an officer’s clipped orders, the stone-grind of something dragged) his body answered before his name was called. He laid out silver probes, counted powders, uncorked spirit-salt, and steadied his breath for whatever debt would be carried in on a stretcher.
Boots and shouted orders burst into the furnace court as if the cold itself had learned to speak. A door torn from its hinges came in sideways, skidding over the stone; the men carrying it stumbled, and the slab bit into a drift of soot. Where it scraped, ash turned to paste in wet crescents that gleamed darkly before the wind from the arrow-slits dried them again.
Wei’s body answered before his thoughts could assemble. His hands went to his small kit. Mortar nudged aside with the heel of his palm, silver probes laid out by habit, lamp-wick pinched low until the flame thinned to a stingy blue tongue. He cleared a space as carefully as he would clear a column in a ledger, making room for what must be recorded: breath, blood, and whatever else hid in both.
“Set him, gently, you ox,” someone snapped. A guard’s gauntlet left a print in the ash when he steadied the door-slab; another man hissed a prayer under his breath, not to any god Wei recognized but to the fortress itself, to its walls and seals, as if stone could be persuaded to hold.
Wei did not look up to find which officer had authority here. He kept his eyes on the scout’s boots first: mud and pine needles, not valley clay; a crust of pale grit that sparkled wrong under the furnace light. The smell that rose with it was iron-thin, like old coins, and underneath it a sourness that made the back of his throat tighten.
“Got clipped by an arrow,” a messenger said, too loudly, as if volume could make the story true. “He came back shivering. Wouldn’t stop.”
Shivering could be cold, could be shock. Wei’s fingers, ink-stained and burned at the knuckles, hovered over the man’s sleeve and did not touch until he had counted the breathing. Two quick pulls, a pause, another. He loosened the collar with one careful tug and angled the lamp so the light fell along the veins of the throat.
The court’s noises blurred at the edges. Wei steadied his own breath in the simple cultivation pattern taught to exhausted clerks: inhale, gather; exhale, release. Then he let his trained perception open, like a seal lifted from a jar, and waited for the body to tell him what had climbed inside it.
The scout’s face lay turned toward the furnace light, gray beneath soot as if the skin had forgotten its own blood. His mouth worked without sound around broken teeth; each attempt at speech clicked wetly, then failed. Hands hovered over him. One man insisting, “Arrow,” as though naming it could make it simple, another muttering, “Cold’s got him,” and crossing two fingers in the old warding habit. Yet the expected reek of fresh loss was wrong: the blood that seeped from the bandage smelled thin and distant, more like rinsed metal than living heat.
Wei did not start where others always started. Not with the torn cloth, not with the angle of the shaft. He leaned in until his careful gaze was nearly nose-to-skin, close enough to feel the shiver coming off the man like breath from a cracked jar. He listened with more than ears: letting the trained part of him that could taste taint in water and grain settle behind his tongue and along his fingertips. Beneath pain, beneath fear, something finer moved, threading itself through the channels with a patience that did not belong to weather.
The wrongness met him the way iron met winter water: quiet at first, then biting, a metallic chill that did not belong to blood. It ran the scout’s veins in strands so fine Wei almost mistook them for the ordinary trembling of shock, until the pattern revealed itself: not a bloom but a script, repeated with deliberate spacing, as if some careful hand had stitched cold into the man’s channels. Fever announced itself with heat and stink, rot with sweetness and collapse. This held its shape. It tasted sour behind Wei’s tongue, a thin corrosion that made his teeth ache when he breathed too close. Under the lamplight the marbling was faint, but his trained sense caught the intent in it. The patient, searching pressure of hostile qi probing for a seam to widen.
Wei drew one measured breath in the stabilizing pattern the annex masters permitted even oath-bound hands to learn. Inhale to gather what little warmth remained, exhale to pin it in place. His own qi stopped skating at the edges of fatigue. Ink-stained fingers hovered over the punctures without touching, following the taint’s tug the way a lodestone finds iron. Guilt narrowed into a tool: attention without mercy.
Without waiting for a nod he could not afford, Wei slid a needle-fine silver probe into the nearest vein, careful as a scribe’s stroke. A dark bead welled up, reluctant. He tipped a single grain of spirit-salt onto it. The grain did not hiss or flare; it quivered. An eager, cold twitch, like something recognizing a door. His stomach tightened. Not chance. Not weather. A guided intrusion.
The attending clerk did not look at the scout’s face. His attention stayed on surfaces that could be made to agree with one another: the tag’s coarse paper, the register slip, the red thread that would bind them to the day’s tally. His brush moved with the steadiness of a man preserving his fingers in the cold: no flourish, no tremor, the ink laid down in obedient strokes.
“Valley-blight,” he said as he wrote it, tone level as an oath-recital. As if naming were diagnosis. As if the source must always be downhill, always beyond the wall, always someone else’s jurisdiction.
Wei watched the characters dry to a dull sheen. The word sat on the tag like a seal in miniature, a tidy arrow pointing outward. A clerk’s convenience, a captain’s comfort. Once that label entered the day’s ledger, it would become a small truth with teeth: requisitions would be denied as “external misfortune,” complaints would be filed under “siege attrition,” and the seal office could keep its stamps clean of any suggestion that the fortress itself had failed. No cracked talisman-bricks. No inward leak. No negligence that might climb the chain of countersigns and bite.
The clerk’s sleeve brushed the scout’s sleeve without touching skin, careful not to be contaminated by anything that wasn’t already sanctioned. He blew once, softly, to set the ink. “Mark it so,” he murmured, to no one in particular: perhaps to the room, perhaps to the listening walls.
Wei felt the sour wrongness tug again, patient as a needle finding cloth. He could have spoken. He could have said the word was wrong, that the taint in the blood did not taste like windborne miasma. But the clerk’s brush had already made its decision legible, and legible things had weight here. They could crush a serf as surely as stone.
The tag was threaded. The name, attached. The wound had been turned into an outside problem before it had even been cleaned.
Wei did not contradict the clerk’s label. Contradiction was a luxury that required a name of one’s own on the register, a seal to stand behind the words. Instead he let obedience become a wedge.
“Record-board, if you please,” he said softly, as if asking for a basin. “And the hour of the injury. Second watch, or nearer third? Which unit carried him back. They sounded like the annex doing what it was told. The clerk’s brush paused, then continued, and a runner fetched the board: a lacquered plank with yesterday’s stains and today’s blank squares waiting to be filled.
While they busied themselves with legible things, Wei slid his mortar and the two spirit-salt vials to the side, clearing a patch of table. He unwrapped the scout’s wrist with care, not gentle enough to waste time, but not so rough as to wake panic in a man already half-drowned in cold. Under the ash-smudged skin, the veins showed that threaded discoloration: fine as hair, too deliberate to be weather.
He bent closer, letting trained perception taste the air above the pulse-point, and felt the tug again: not outward, toward the valley, but sideways, westward, like a compass needle refusing a lie.
Wei steadied the scout’s hand between two fingers, feeling the chill seep into his own burned skin, and coaxed a single bead of blood up with the silver probe. It should have steamed with ordinary fever when he offered it spirit-salt. Instead the grain tightened, drawing the bead inward as if the liquid had grown a mouth. A thin hiss rose. The air above the wound turned sharp; his trained senses caught a filament of wrongness threading through the pulse, too fine for rot, too deliberate for cold. It wasn’t heat being quenched. It was something recognizing him, testing the boundary of his remedy. Wei’s stomach clenched. The salt wanted to burn impurity; this impurity wanted to drink.
His alchemical perception followed the thread the way a lodestone found iron, silent, unquestioning, and impossible to flatter. It would not sink with the valley wind or drift with siege smoke. It pulled sideways, then subtly upward, as if the fortress had grown a hidden current. Westward. Into stone stamped with authority. The tug was small, but steady enough to make his teeth ache.
Wei kept his expression as scrubbed as the clerk’s desk, and delivered the verdict in the same polished idiom the hall preferred: “Contamination source inconsistent with valley exposure. Directional pull indicates internal seepage.” He heard how it sounded: like a petition, not an alarm. The clerk’s brush hung for one thin breath, then dropped again. “Valley-blight,” he wrote, heavier, as if a darker stroke could correct a compass.
Wei found the annex assistant where the furnace court narrowed into a service passage, half-sheltered from the wind that prowled the parapets. The brickwork there was warm to the touch, breathing out last night’s firing, and the air carried the familiar tang of bitter ash and boiled vine. A brazier sat unlit under a posted oil decree. Even the lantern-hooks were bare.
The man stood alone beside a wash basin, sleeves rolled to the forearm. What struck Wei first was not his posture, upright, economical, as always, but his hands. Clean as if they belonged to a clerk, not someone who had taught Wei how to grind horn and charcoal until the mortar sang. No soot in the creases. No burn-itch at the knuckles. The water in the basin was clear, unclouded by grey.
Wei stopped at the proper distance, head bowed the fraction that said I remember my station. He took the scout’s wooden tag from his sleeve, the string still stiff with dried blood, and held it out with both hands as if it were an offering for the shrine. Beneath it he laid his own note. Characters tight and even, the language of the Ledger Hall borrowed because plain speech never survived a corridor.
“Scout from last night’s skirmish,” Wei said, voice kept level. He did not look at the man’s hands. He did not look toward the door. “Symptoms are… inconsistent with ordinary chill-fever. The marbling spreads against the meridian flow. Spirit-salt reacts as if the impurity is active.”
He let the words fall in the order a superior would expect: patient, sign, remedy, anomaly. He made his posture dutiful enough to be invisible. Only the tag, the neat note, and the stubborn fact of what he had sensed insisted on being seen.
For a moment the assistant did not reach for either item. His gaze traveled past Wei’s shoulder to the passage mouth, then returned, measuring. When he finally took the tag, he did it by the string, as though touching the wood directly would invite it to cling.
Wei kept his hands folded, fingers tucked to hide their burns, waiting as if this were merely a requisition for vinegar. While the furnace heat pressed at his back like a question he was not permitted to ask aloud.
The older man read Wei’s note the way a clerk read accusations: silently, without the mercy of a muttered syllable to soften what the ink had made real. His eyes did not linger on the symptoms or the suggested counter-agent. They kept returning to the top margin where the registry-mark sat (prefectural stamp impression, date, annex docket) as if that small sign of legitimacy were also a knife laid flat on the page. He turned the scout’s tag over once, thumb and forefinger pinching only the string, and the dried blood flaked in a slow, indifferent drift.
“You used spirit-salt?” he asked, but the question was already answered by Wei’s careful phrasing. The true question came after, lowered into the space between them like something he did not want the corridor to overhear.
“Who else has seen the marbling?”
Wei felt the oath in his ribs, the old pressure that made truth a physical duty. “No one,” he said. “Not beyond the infirmary screens. I kept the lamp low.”
The man did not exhale in relief. If anything, his shoulders tightened a fraction, as though solitude made the finding heavier, not easier. His gaze flicked once (door, passage, empty hook where a lantern should have been) then back to the mark, back to the blade.
The assistant’s hand moved toward the small seal-box on the shelf. He did not open it. His fingers halted a hair’s breadth above the clasp, hovering as if the metal might bite. When he spoke, his voice gentled by habit, it carried the same careful warmth he used on frightened novices and bleeding porters: a kindness so practiced it could pass for mercy.
“Wards are the wall office’s province,” he murmured, as though naming the boundary would make it real. “Anything that touches them goes upward. Anything upward requires a request. Any request must be stamped and countersigned.” His smile returned in the shape the hall approved of. “There is no lawful path that isn’t paper.”
Wei’s alchemical sense snagged on something that did not belong: a hair-thin smear of foreign qi clinging to the assistant’s cuff, sour as old rust worked into damp cloth. His gaze lifted despite himself. The assistant’s smile held, then tightened at the corners, and he shifted, half a step, polite as a host, angling his body to narrow the doorway while his ear stayed tuned to the corridor’s emptiness.
With the same calm he used when correcting an apprentice’s shaking hand, the assistant eased Wei’s report beneath a bricked stack of requisitions, aligning the corners, smoothing the page as if it were a wound dressing. He set a bronze paperweight on top, light, deliberate, irrevocable, and murmured, almost kindly, that it was “above our station.” In that gentleness Wei could not tell: protection, coercion, or the fortress’s only permitted way to live.
Wei stood where the Ledger Hall corridor narrowed, the lacquered pillars close enough to make every step feel like a correction. His report had been folded to regulation size, three precise creases, edges aligned, because the paper itself was a kind of oath. He held it with both hands as if warmth might seep through and animate the words into urgency.
The clerks received it the way a throat receives a bone: not to swallow cleanly, but to work it down through practiced discomfort. A thin-faced recorder accepted the sheet without lifting his eyes. He read only the header, not the body, and in the pause Wei heard the siege drums below, distant as another life.
A red-string tray slid into being from a side table, then another, each tray tagged with a title that sounded like aid and felt like distance. “Inquiry Intake.” “Supplemental Attachments.” “Seal-Office Routing.” The tags were written in the same careful hand that annotated ration tallies and punishments, neat enough to be mercy. He watched his warning move from his hands onto the first tray, becoming no longer a thing he could protect but an item that could be misplaced without anyone having to name it as refusal.
The corridor smelled of ink and old sandalwood, with a sharper note: spirit-salt residue ground into the floor by soft boots. Wei’s trained perception kept catching on the wrongness he had sensed in the infirmary: that sour thread at the edge of clean qi, as if rust had learned to breathe. It clung here too, faintly, to the seam of a sleeve, to the corner of a ledger-board. Not enough to make anyone cough. Enough to make a shrine candle gutter.
Behind the clerks, a notice board listed required seals for emergency petitions. Each seal had a parent seal. Each parent seal had a keeper. His stomach tightened with an old, obedient fear: the kind that rose when he imagined his oath line in the register, waiting like a collar. He could not tear this system open. He could only try to wedge truth into it and pray it did not spit him out.
The first clerk did not dispute Wei’s words; he shaved them down until they fit a drawer. “Hostile qi seepage,” Wei said, and the clerk’s brush made it into “Request for Verification of Ward Integrity,” each character squared and obedient. The sheet was turned, aligned to the desk’s edge, and a second form was slid beneath it like a pallet under a burden. A column on the left demanded a watchtower designation. Another demanded the corresponding talisman-brick batch, stamped season and kiln. Another required the registry page where that batch had been recorded, the page number written in a hand that could be checked, then checked again.
Wei watched the translation happen and felt something in him go quiet: his urgency reduced to headings. When he hesitated, the clerk tapped the appropriate field with the back of his nail, patient as a tutor. “Without the seal impression,” he murmured, not unkindly, “it cannot move.”
Wei knew where that seal slept: behind an interior door with iron studs and a guard detail that ate meat broth while the infirmary boiled water twice to make it safe. Even the air around that threshold felt warmer, insulated by privilege as much as by wards.
Another hand, ink-stained, steady, slid the next sheet into place, the Inspection Petition, its margins ruled like a cage. The clerk’s finger paused at a pale square reserved for a superior’s countersignature, the absence as loud as a bell that would not be rung. Wei lifted his gaze, searching for someone to look back with urgency or shame, but met only a practiced composure: the expression of a man whose rice depended on keeping disaster legible.
The corridor held its own weather. Ink, old incense, lacquer warmed by bodies moving past too closely. Beneath it, Wei’s alchemical sense kept tasting that hair-thin sourness, rust on breath, threading through the air like a reminder that the scout’s marbled veins were not an isolated wound.
He swallowed, and the wrongness felt, horribly, like something that could be stamped, dated, and set aside.
A spirit-salt allocation form was laid atop the stack as though it were a kindness, its ruled columns already bearing the bruises of prior refusals: Available Stores, Authorized Release, Recipient Unit. Wei could recite the true numbers from memory, how the jars had thinned, how the spring had weakened, and he knew authorization traveled at the pace of old slights. The system never said no; it demanded another seal until necessity looked like insolence.
By the time the packet is stitched with string and pressed flat, the only thing that dries quickly is the red-ink warning curled at the bottom: penalties for false alarm, for unauthorized approach to the wall, for laying a finger on warded brick without a witness and a seal. The fortress does not flinch at rot. It tightens. Its paper jaws close with administrative neatness, until urgency is rendered legible. And the nearest motion becomes the shadow of punishment.
Sent with the tinctures to the parapet line, Wei kept his head bowed and his hands busy, the posture of a serf who knew better than to look like he was looking. The tray strap bit into his shoulder through thin cloth; the jars clinked softly with each measured step. He made himself small in the stream of bodies: scouts limping back from the night, a pair of clerks with their sleeves tied up against soot, a runner whispering into his own cuff as if the fabric could carry messages faster than breath.
The nearer he came to the western face, the more his mouth betrayed him. A taste of pennies and old nails spread across his tongue, familiar as a warning from a bad well. It was not hunger’s metallic phantom. It sat sharper, threaded with something sour that caught behind the molars and made his saliva feel thin. He tried a stabilizing breath the annex had drilled into him, inhale to the navel, hold, exhale through the teeth, but the air itself seemed to carry grit that did not belong to stone dust or ash.
His fingers tightened around the tray’s lip. He forced them to loosen. A serf’s hands were supposed to shake only from cold, not from recognition.
At the parapet, men were posted shoulder to shoulder behind a rim of frost-glazed crenels, their breath steaming in short bursts. One took the nearest jar without looking up, barking a thanks that was more habit than gratitude. Wei nodded, eyes lowered, and shifted down the line as if his only concern were who had already been dosed and who still needed the bitter febrifuge.
But his trained sense kept tugging, subtle as a needle under skin, drawing him toward the wall stones themselves. Not outward to the valley, where siege engines thumped like distant drums, but inward along the mortar seams, toward the stamped clay set into the masonry. The wrongness did not press like an attack. It breathed like an unattended wound, quiet, patient, and somehow permitted.
A guard’s boot scraped on the flagstones beside him. Wei angled his body, presenting the tray, presenting compliance. Inside, the taste of rust sharpened, and he understood with a cold clarity that whatever was threading the wounded scout’s veins had found its path here, through what was supposed to be sealed.
The talisman-bricks came into view in the narrow stretch where the parapet narrowed. Wedged between spear-racks slick with rime and banners gone stiff as boards, their embroidery dulled by soot. Each brick held an official impression: characters pressed deep into clay, the Prefectural Seal Office’s authority made masonry. They were meant to be final. A thing the world had to obey.
Wei did not need to touch them. Nearness was enough. The stamped grooves had a faint sheen that wasn’t frost, and when the wind shifted he tasted it again. Metal and sourness, like blood left too long in a basin. To an untrained eye the faces were intact, merely weathered. To him, the impressions were webbed with fractures finer than hair, crossing the seal strokes as if something had worried at them from the inside.
His gaze skated past them, careful, deferential, as though he were only counting jars and men. Yet his perception followed the cracks. From each thin faultline, a thread of hostile qi exhaled and withdrew, patient as a pulse. The ward did not scream. It leaked, quietly, bureaucratically, like a ledger page left unpatched because no one wanted to sign the repair.
The wrongness did not surge from the valley side like a blade seeking a gap. It traveled the other way, obedient to the fortress’s own seams, slipping inward along mortar lines that had been counted, stamped, approved. In Wei’s senses it moved like hair-fine cold laid under skin, then warmed (settling, acclimating) into the stone as though the wall had been drawing it in with every night’s wind. Days, at least. Long enough to become familiar.
He felt, with a sick steadiness, that this was no bold assault and no clever sabotage with a clear culprit. It was what happened when repairs required three signatures and a witness, when everyone waited for the proper form while the crack quietly widened. Neglect, dressed in procedure; omission, armored in seal-impressions.
A guard snapped at him to keep moving, as if stillness itself were suspicious. Wei bowed, murmured assent, and let his feet obey; the corridor of authority allowed only forward steps, and every pause had a named penalty. He told himself to remember only what a dutiful annex hand was permitted to know. Still the rust-sour thread clung to his teeth, turning each swallow into testimony he could not file.
By the time he cleared the western stair and the wind thinned to mere cold, the taste of rust still lingered behind his molars. He understood with a dull clarity that he could not unknow what he had sensed: the fortress’s rot had been made orderly, filed into absence by forms left unissued. The realization settled like an oath, unwitnessed, unstamped, and therefore his alone to bear.
In the furnace court’s dim, Wei spread his personal ledger as if it were the only thing he knew how to hold together. The book lay open across his knees, its columns ruled with a clerk’s precision: mugwort, gone; dried ginger, two knots; spirit-salt: three vials, one already rationed to the ancestral terrace by decree. His ink-stained finger hovered over the numbers, then drifted to the margin where he kept substitutions in a tighter, smaller hand, as though shrinking the script could stretch the stores.
Beyond the lattice door, footsteps passed, paused, passed again. The annex was never truly quiet; even when no one spoke, the place breathed with the slow labor of heat. Embers settling, iron cooling, a kettle ticking itself toward cold. Old ash clung to the flagstones. Boiled roots left a faint sweetness under the bitter, like medicine trying to remember it was once a plant. Wei kept his gaze on the page and counted the steps by ear anyway, the way Captain Ma’s scouts counted arrows in a quiver. One set was heavy, deliberate; a guard’s. Another was quick, soft; a clerk late to some tally, perhaps, or a runner with no seal of his own.
The stamps were elsewhere tonight. The lacquered blocks, the red paste, the witnessing eyes that turned every act into a record: gone to the inner keep, to the Ledger Hall’s lamplight and its hungry appetite for proper marks. Here, in soot and dim, there would be only his hands and whatever his oath decided to call “service.”
He turned a page with care to make the sound of paper louder than his breathing. Under the ledger’s fold he slid out his small kit, arranging mortar and probe as if preparing a routine poultice. A dutiful serf-alchemist, nothing more. Yet his attention kept snagging on the memory of stone that tasted of rust and cold.
No one would witness what he was about to make.
And that, he realized, was both the danger and the mercy.
Wei uncorked the spirit-salt vial and held it close, not to hoard its scent but to keep the sound of the stopper from carrying. Regulation demanded a weighed pinch, witnessed and entered under the annex seal, the sort of measure that could be defended in the Ledger Hall with a straight face and a stamped margin. He had neither scale nor witness tonight. Only the ledger’s blank space and his oath’s narrow definitions.
With a small knife he scraped the salt from the inner lip of the vial, careful not to let the crystals tumble free. A shaving came away, thin as a nail-paring, clinging to the blade with a reluctant grit. Too little to count as theft in any honest inventory, too much to explain if someone decided to count dishonesty instead.
He set the shaving on the mortar’s rim and watched it glitter once in the furnace-light. The spring was weakening; everyone pretended not to taste it. Stores would be “balanced” by clerks long after the last true grain was gone, and the wards would be declared sound until the moment they failed. He measured by instinct, by what his trained perception said might bite back at the sour thread he’d sensed: small enough to hide, enough to matter.
From the packet he kept buried beneath spare rags, Wei pinched out a twist of dried mugwort. Crumbled leaves and brittle stem, sharp with the memory of summer fields he had no right to miss. He cupped it over a single ember under a shard of broken bowl, shielding the glow from the lattice cracks. Smoke pooled, thin and medicinal, then the herb surrendered with a quiet sigh, curling inward until it fell apart into pale ash.
He waited until the scent turned from green to clean. Then he drew a stabilizing breath the way the old instructor had drilled into annex boys who fainted at the sight of blood: slow draw through the nose, hold just long enough to feel the chest tighten, slower release. Not to gather strength (he had none to spare) but to steady his trained perception, to keep it from recoiling from that sour, threaded wrongness still lodged behind his teeth.
He ground spirit-salt and mugwort ash together until the last hard sparkle died under the pestle and the bowl held only a dull, obedient smear. A silver probe dipped to the rinse-crock brought back one trembling drop; it hissed faintly as it met the powder. The paste bit his burned fingertips like a test of identity. Wei did not flinch. He drew it into an even line on a torn bandage strip, thin, spare, meant to seat in a crack and not sing.
He rolled the treated strip into a cord tight enough to pass for a mended hem and worked it into the sleeve seam with a needle he kept for stitches and splinters. Then he opened the ledger again. Ink, not salt, was what the fortress trusted. He wrote substitutions, mugwort for wormwood, ash for chalk, in a calm, clerkly hand. A guard’s shadow slid over the threshold; Wei’s eyes dropped on cue. The hidden patch warmed at his wrist like a swallowed breath.
Wei threaded the cistern corridor with a sealed gourd of tincture hugged to his ribs, moving as if he were only another errand-body in ash-stained sleeves. Damp cold gathered in the seams of the stone and clung to his eyelashes. The spring’s thin breath ran somewhere behind the wall, a sound like someone sucking on a cracked tooth. He kept his own breathing shallow, the way the cultivation manuals taught the exhausted, draw in, settle, do not let the pulse climb, because a quickened body invited questions.
His fingers, ink-stained even after scrubbing, found the gourd’s waxed seal by habit. The clerk-stamp impressed there was clean and recent; he had watched it pressed, watched the red paste set, watched the guard’s bored gaze slide away. Paperwork was a kind of armor in Tianlu Fortress. It also strangled.
He passed under a low arch where soot had been scrubbed off in rectangles around old talisman notices, leaving the rest of the stone black as a cauldron’s belly. Incense, rationed to the shrine and the Ledger Hall, had drifted down into the cistern passages anyway, thin as apology. Mixed with wet stone, it made the back of his throat taste of rust.
A patrol boot scraped ahead. Wei dipped his chin and slowed, letting others be the shape of movement. His oath sat in him like a knot tied too tight, serve, deliver, account, yet lately it had started to tug in odd directions, as if the registers themselves were being pulled by unseen hands.
A water-hauler shuffled out of a side passage, shoulders rounded, hair tucked under a grime-dark cap. The man’s buckets were half-full; no one carried full buckets now unless they wanted eyes on them. He paused as if adjusting his grip. The corridor’s draft fluttered Wei’s sleeve: and the hauler’s callused fingers brushed it, light as a moth landing.
Something dry and thin slid into Wei’s palm. He did not look down. He curled his fingers around it, letting the gourd’s weight justify the clench, and kept walking as if nothing had happened. The hauler did not raise his head. They passed each other like strangers sharing only the same cold.
Ahead, two junior clerks stood half-turned toward one another in the narrow pinch where the corridor bent, their tablets hugged close as if paper could warm them. Their voices were low, but not soft. “Pass-tokens,” one said, and then corrected himself with a cough, “passes: recounted. After midnight.”
“Counterseal unchanged,” the other answered. “Yet the packet returns light. Again.”
They spoke in account-speech, the dry tongue of audits and requisitions, and yet the cadence carried an insistence that didn’t belong to routine. A detail offered, withdrawn, offered again, as if testing whether the corridor itself would repeat it to someone else.
“The postern latch,” the first clerk went on, “took fresh grease twice this week. That’s… maintenance.”
“Maintenance doesn’t leave heel-smears,” came the reply, too quick. “Nor does it make a tally wrong no matter whose abacus touches it.”
A pause: just long enough to imply fear without naming it.
“Recount tomorrow,” the first said, as if stating a weather report. “Same result.”
Wei kept his pace measured, neither hurrying like a guilty man nor lingering like a curious one. His eyes stayed on the stone ahead, on the damp seams and the faded paste where old notices had once clung. But the clerks’ language hooked beneath his ribs all the same. It was the Ledger Hall’s own idiom, maintenance, recount, countersign, words that could be filed away as dull necessity if a superior overheard. Yet the careful corrections, the repeated return to the same items, carried the shape of a warning. Not a mistake, but a habit; not a slip, but a hand working in the dark. Wei felt his alchemical perception prickle, not at poison or rot, but at the taint of practiced concealment.
At a pillar furred with cold damp, condensation beaded and slid like thin sweat down the stone. A bent-backed water-hauler shuffled in close. Close enough that Wei caught the stink of river-mud ground into old hemp, the sour edge of unwashed cloth. The man paused as if to settle his buckets. Sleeve grazed sleeve, light enough to pass for accident, deliberate enough to sting.
Something dry and folded found his palm in the brush of sleeves. Wei closed his fingers once, slow, as if steadying a slipping jar, and let the thing ride the inside of his wrist. Under his cuff it disappeared into the shadow of his robe. He did not look after the hauler. He kept walking, blank-faced, obedient, another burden added without acknowledgment.
In the furnace court’s lee, where the wind could not quite reach and the heat never fully left the stones, Wei slid the scrap from his cuff as if drawing out nothing more dangerous than a receipt. He set it beside the mortar, flattening the fold with the side of his ink-stained thumb. The paper had been handled too much, soft at the creases, edges polished by anxious fingers, and it carried the faint mineral bite of cistern damp.
He kept his shoulders angled toward the furnace mouth, a dutiful posture that made his hands a private alcove. Across the court, clerks with soot-smudged sleeves measured ash into barrels and spoke too loudly about inventory to make anyone listening think of anything else. A guard leaned on his spear near the doorframe, face slack with cold and hunger, eyes tracking the room the way a counting-bead tracks a ledger: without affection.
Wei let his breath out through his nose and listened to it. In. Out. The basic cultivation rhythm the annex taught serfs so they would not faint into the fire. It steadied his pulse enough that the paper stopped trembling.
The characters on the scrap were ordinary, even petty. Lamp oil short. Ration figures amended. Buckets cracked. The sort of complaint that could be posted on a pillar and ignored. But the spacing was wrong: too even, too intentional. Certain words returned with a frequency that felt less like frustration and more like a drumbeat someone had learned to hide in their tongue.
He read it once as a clerk would, meaning only what it said. Then he read it again, under his breath, not as text but as cadence: the old guard drill used to pass signals under inspection, the one even fortress boys learned before they were allowed a spear. Emphasis where emphasis did not belong. A pause like a counted step. A repeated phrase that was not repetition at all, but a marker.
His mouth went dry.
Beneath the harmless ration numbers, the question surfaced clean as a blade drawn from a sleeve: Do the wards fail on the west?
On its face, the scrap was nothing but the fortress’s daily misery put into ink: numbers that didn’t add, a muttered grievance about lamp oil, the familiar complaint that buckets cracked faster than they could be patched. The kind of thing a clerk could wave away with a stamp and a sigh.
Wei’s trained eye snagged on what shouldn’t have mattered. The spacing was too regular for a hurried hand, the repeats too deliberate to be mere frustration. Certain plain words returned like the same footfall on stone. The lines sat oddly balanced, as if each phrase had been weighed.
He wet his thumb without thinking and dragged it lightly along the crease, feeling where the paper had been folded and refolded. His lips moved once, silently, then again with the breath barely leaving his teeth. Not reading as a clerk read, but as a guard boy once had, counting beats in the drill-yard until cadence became meaning.
Stress the wrong syllable. Hold the pause. Let the “ordinary” word fall heavy.
The harmless complaints began to rearrange themselves, step by measured step, into signal.
The pattern finished assembling itself in his mind with a cold, exact click, like a seal pressed into soft wax. Not a threat. Not a demand dressed up as mercy. A single interrogative, sharpened by restraint: Are the west-wall wards failing?
Whoever wrote it did so with the calm of someone filing a report, not pleading at a gate. The question assumed there was an ear within the walls trained to hear cadence under complaint, a hand near the talisman-bricks, a pair of eyes allowed to look closely without being struck for loitering. It assumed, too, that the asker had already counted cracks and listened for seepage from the outside: and now only needed confirmation from the inside to make the numbers agree.
Wei’s first thought was not rebellion but procedure. A code like that was meant to survive audits and strip-searches; using it without authorization was an offense with its own stamped category and punishment. Who would dare spend such a tool on a question? And why send it toward him. An oath-bound annex serf, useful only for tinctures and tallies, too watched to be recruited, too minor to matter?
The corridor talk he’d dismissed as hunger-mad gossip (latch grease rubbed fresh at odd hours, pass-tokens that vanished and reappeared with the wrong countersign) shifted in his mind as the cadence had, aligning into intent. Not hands dipping from a barrel, but a route kept open on purpose. Someone beneath the walls wasn’t stealing at random; they were probing for a matching hand inside.
Wei weighed the scrap the way he weighed dried root and ground bark: by habit, by suspicion, by the small differences that decided whether something healed or killed.
The paper was thin, meant to vanish quickly, but not so thin it tore when folded. Its fibers caught on the pad of his thumb with a faint roughness, mulberry or hemp, common to clerk inventories. He tilted it toward the corridor’s weak lamplight and watched for the greasy gleam of treated stock, the kind used for official summonses that survived rain and sweat. There was no sheen. That almost reassured him, until he remembered reassurance was a luxury.
He brought it close without seeming to. The ink had dried hard, not glossy. Spirit-ink always left a bite. Salt-metal on the tongue of the nose, a dry sting behind the eyes that lingered even after you looked away. He’d smelled it on talisman-bricks as a boy, learned to separate it from soot and pine resin, trained his alchemical perception until contamination and blessing became two sides of the same taste.
This ink tasted of neither. Ordinary carbon, ground too fine, cut with cheap glue. Something any runner could buy in a market beyond the pass. Something that would pass through careless fingers without comment.
Ordinary enough to be dangerous.
A planted lure would have been easier. Official paper carried its own crimes; spirit-ink flared under ward-light and betrayed itself; seal-impressions left ridges a clerk could trace blind. A trap had rules, categories, a punishment already written and waiting. This did not. This could be denied by everyone who touched it, including him. That meant the burden of proof would fall on whoever ended up with it in their sleeve.
Wei’s stomach tightened, a hungry twist that felt too much like fear. He flexed his ink-stained fingers once, twice, as if waking them from stiffness. The scrap lay light as ash in his palm, and yet it seemed to pull at his oath the way a lodestone pulled at a needle, quiet, patient, inexorable.
Footsteps echoed somewhere beyond the bend, and he let his breath out through his teeth, slow and soundless, as if expelling fumes.
Wei let the corridor swallow his expression. When the footsteps drew level, leather on stone, a clerk’s quick, dutiful pace, he shifted his shoulders like a man thinking only of rations and tinctures, and kept his eyes lowered until the sound thinned and went on.
Only then did he move.
In the furnace court the air was warmer, thicker with ash and boiled herbs. The brazier’s coals pulsed a dull red under a crust of gray, as steady as a heartbeat. Wei stood close enough to feel the heat push against his ribs through his thin robe. He pinched the scrap between thumb and forefinger and folded it again, and again, patient as ledger-work, until it was a narrow sliver no wider than a nail.
For a moment he hesitated. Less from mercy than from habit, as if waiting for a seal to be applied. Then he fed the paper to the coals.
It caught at the edge, blackening without flame. The ink lines puckered, trying to hold their shape. He held on with bare fingers until the fibers softened and the last curl of writing lifted, shrank, and vanished into the red.
The coals licked through the paper into his skin. A sharp, clean pain rose, then a swelling heat that domed into a blister on the pad of his thumb. Wei did not flinch. He kept the sliver pinched until the last stubborn fibers collapsed, until even the thought of a corner became cinder and sank. Let it mark him, he thought, let it be something the body holds and the records cannot. No ash to sift from the brazier’s lip. No gray smear a clerk could lift on a wetted fingertip and lay against a lantern to coax out a ghost of strokes. No stray line to be compared to his own careful hand. If there had been a crime, he would carry only pain. And pain was not evidence.
He told himself the question belonged to no one only to the fortress that still claimed his oath. Verification was service. So when an errand order sent him up with tinctures and bandage-wax, he let the guards’ impatience pull ahead. At the westward turn he slowed, palm hovering near stone, and let his trained sense sip at the mortar like a cautious tongue at strange water.
He made a ledger of stone without ink. A fracture was not just damage but a datum: the angle of the split, the loosened grit under his nail, the way a seam yielded too easily and breathed a thread of chill against his palm. He counted as if counting doses (quietly, dutifully) so the act could pass for obedience while his mind filed each weakness as proof.
The western watchtower stank of cold iron and old incense, a taste that sat on the back of Wei Wenyu’s tongue the way spoiled well-water did: dull at first, then insistently sour the longer you tried to ignore it. The men posted there had tried to cover the smell with ritual; a stub of incense smoldered in a chipped dish near the stair, its smoke thin and resentful in the draft. It did not cleanse so much as make the air feel argued-over.
Wei kept his eyes lowered as he knelt by the supply crate and set out his little order of mercy: stoppered bottles wrapped in cloth, a tin of bandage-wax, packets of powder labeled in his small, exact hand. “For frost-cracks and arrow-scrapes,” he murmured, because speaking the purpose of a remedy sometimes steadied the hands that received it. The sentry nearest him made a sound that was meant to be thanks and came out like a swallow.
He did not let his face change. Duty had trained him well. But his trained perception would not be commanded to look away. It counted the watchtower the way a clerk counted coins: each exhale through the arrow-slit carried a grit too fine for sand, too sharp for soot. Hostile qi: no dramatic howl, no visible stain. Just enough to rasp the edges of thought, to make a man wake angry for no reason, to make a small inconvenience feel like insult.
A gust slid in, and with it a metallic tang that reminded him of blood on a knife left too long in water. He watched the sentries without seeming to. The older one rubbed at his temple as if trying to press a headache back into his skull. Another had scratch-marks along his forearm where he’d worried at his own skin through wool. Even their jokes, traded low to keep from drawing an officer’s attention, had a brittle impatience to them, as if laughter cost extra here.
Wei set the last tincture down and, under cover of tightening a cloth wrap, let his breathing settle into the simplest stabilizing rhythm he knew. In, count, hold; out, count, release. The air did not soften. It only grew more legible, like writing revealed by smoke.
He let his fingertips drift to the wall as though to brace against the tower’s constant, needling wind. Stone should have been mute. Here it replied. Under the skin, the mortar gave off a fine, metallic wrongness: cold not in the way of winter, but in the way of a blade laid across the tongue. The talisman-clay had been mixed with stamped filings and ritual ash; he could feel where those careful inclusions had once made a firm, obedient boundary. Now the sensation ran in threads through the seam, as if the seal-impressions baked into the bricks had begun to misremember themselves.
His hand stilled over a hairline fracture. In his mind, he saw the stamped characters as they ought to be: crisp strokes, a clerk’s certainty made into earth and fire. What he felt was the same line after too many hands, too many days, rubbed, blurred, plausible but no longer binding. Not weathering. Not neglect alone. A mandate wearing thin, an accounting mark smudged until the world could pretend it wasn’t there.
He withdrew his fingers slowly, as if the wall might notice being measured.
It settled into pattern the way a diagnosis did, once you had the smell of it. The hollow shine in the sentries’ eyes was not bravery worn thin, only sleep stolen in pinches; the petty explosions in the mess line, the argument over who’d taken an extra ladle, the accusation that turned a joke into a shove, were not proof of bad hearts so much as bad air. Even the way their hands kept drifting to knife hilts when no order had been given had the same logic as fevered scratching: an urge with no object, seeking one. The seepage did not strike like a curse that drops men where they stand. It softened the seam between thought and impulse until men supplied the violence themselves, and then called it choice.
Wei’s thoughts ran the same route a ledger did, from mark to outcome. If the wardline thinned here, it thinned wherever these same seal-stamps had been pressed into clay and fired with obedient ash. The officers would deny it. Admission meant their mandate failed under their own signatures. The clerks would bury it, because there was no column for the wall is becoming untrue. Beyond the gate, rebels would test it, practical as carpenters: a cheaper breach than ladders.
Beneath the wind’s howl he felt a third insistence in the fracture, not cold or grit but attention: spirits crowding close as clerks did at audit, silent, patient, deciding whether the names lacquered in the Ledger Hall still carried authority enough to make stone obey. The siege was a ledger dispute made flesh: hunger and arrows only the ink. Outside and within, hands kept searching for the tear, and the wall, shamed, thinning, began to respond.
Wei kept his face as still as the stamped clay along the parapet, letting the wind worry at his hair and the watch-call above him take the shape of impatience for anyone who bothered to listen. He had a jar of thin brown tincture in a sling at his hip, pepperweed and pine resin, meant for cracked lips and cold lungs, and a clerk’s chit tucked where his sash crossed his ribs. An errand made a man invisible in Tianlu: useful hands were granted the small mercy of not being questioned too closely.
The westward stretch met him with its familiar stink of fired earth and old incense, and something underneath, like iron left too long in water. He did not stop. He did not lean in the way a curious man would. He walked as if counting steps between arrow-slits for no reason at all, as if the wall were only a wall.
His eyes, however, did what they always did. They made columns.
First the obvious: one talisman-brick, corner-chipped, the stamped characters blurred where moisture had chewed at the glaze. Beneath it, a hairline fracture ran against the grain of the clay like a defiant stroke through a registry mark. He noted the width by habit, no thicker than a rice-husk at the top, widening to a fingernail at the base, and the depth by the way the cold gathered there, pooling wrong. Age-cracks were dry and honest. This one carried a faint bruised discoloration, gray-green at the seam, as though something had breathed on the brick from the other side and left its damp signature.
He let his gaze slide past a sentry who was pretending not to watch him. The young man’s breath came fast, the same as fever without heat. Wei did not pity him aloud; pity was a kind of accusation here.
When the gust rose, rattling the talisman-tags hung from the eaves, Wei turned his shoulder to it and let the noise swallow the smallest of motions. His fingers, ink-stained and furnace-burned, brushed the crack as if steadying himself. A quick touch, nothing more: yet the hairs on his wrist lifted, answering a thin pressure that was not wind. The wall did not merely leak cold. It listened back.
From his sleeve he drew what any annex hand might, no sealed packet, no spirit-salt, no charm paper, only a curled shard of dried mugwort, pinched from the hidden bundle he rationed as if it were grain. He held it low against his palm so the sentry above would see only a man worrying his fingers in the cold.
The leaf was old, edges browned and tight as a clenched mouth. He rolled it between scorched thumb and forefinger, not from superstition but from habit: testing the stubborn bitter oil that still clung to its veins, listening with his skin for the small shift that meant contamination. Mugwort did not lie. It warmed when righteous qi ran clean; it went dull and papery when something hungry brushed near.
Here, it did neither. It cooled: an abrupt, thin wrongness that slid along his knuckles like ink in water. The hairs at the back of his hand rose. The wall’s fissure drew at the leaf as a cracked seal draws at wax, inviting and impatient.
Wei breathed once through his nose, a cultivation breath meant for steadiness, and let his face remain blank while his fingers memorized the cold.
He chose the fissure that mattered: not the widest, not the one a mason would patch first, but the seam where the Prefectural stamp still clung in half a character, its stroke broken like a name scratched through and re-entered. A full shed stamp would be obvious damage; this was a wound pretending to be a flaw of firing.
When the wind hissed along the parapet, he lifted his hand as if to brush away ash blown up from the furnace court. His knuckles scraped clay. His thumb slid the mugwort leaf forward. He set it in with the vein aligned to the crack’s pull, angled so its bitter edge pointed inward, then pressed just enough that it would catch and not flutter free.
Not an offering. Not a repair. A marker placed where only someone trained to read walls would think to look.
The leaf was more than a scrap of weed; it was a language that survived searches. Mugwort meant cleansing in the annex, meant fever kept from spreading cot to cot, meant scent muddied so dogs and spirits lost the trail. Set here, it admitted taint without naming it, and answered the unseen question with trained precision: this was not a soldier’s ghost-story, but a seal failing.
He withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers along the seam of his robe, slow and ordinary, as if only warming stiff joints. Nothing remained on his skin, no grit, no ink, no telltale salt, only the faint bitterness that always clung to annex work. If a guard asked, he had the proper phrase ready, flat as a stamped form: inspection for contamination. The gesture’s true meaning stayed lodged in the crack, waiting for disciplined eyes.
He let the corridor’s draft take him as if it were a summons, as if the wind itself had been stamped and filed and therefore could not be questioned. He did not turn. Turning was for men who expected to see a face behind them, or for those who could afford to look like they expected one. Wei kept his gaze on the flagstones and the thin line of lantern light that trembled ahead, and he arranged his breathing into the slow, stabilizing pattern the annex masters taught for long furnace hours: in, hold, out. So the qi in his chest would not surge into panic and betray him.
But his hand remembered.
The pad of his thumb still held the ghost of that leaf’s ribbed spine, the brief resistance as it slid into the seam, the moment the wall accepted it. He could not unmake the sensation. It sat in him like the weight of a seal pressed into wet ink, small, ordinary, and final. A ledger mark was not loud when it was made; it became loud later, when someone pointed and read it aloud.
The corridor narrowed near the cistern turn. Condensation beaded on the stone, and the air smelled faintly of old lime and rationed water. His alchemist’s perception, trained to notice what others dismissed, caught the wrongness threaded through the damp: not outright corruption, not yet, but a thin metallic prickle, as if a talisman had been scuffed and was bleeding its intent into the masonry. The western wall’s failure was not a story anymore. It was a taste.
His shoulders tightened under his robe. He adjusted his sleeve with the slow, unremarkable care of a serf who knew he was watched, and listened for footsteps behind him. Only the wind answered, worrying at arrow-slits like a patient interrogator.
Each step carried him deeper into the fortress, deeper into obedience, yet the wall now held a word that had come from him. He had written without ink. He had replied without sending. And his body, traitorous in its honesty, kept counting the distance back to that seam as if distance could be recalculated and the mark erased by arithmetic alone.
To keep the oath from biting down, he built a narrative the way he built a tincture, measured, plausible, and meant to keep a body from rejecting what it needed. Mugwort repelled rot-qi; the annex manuals said so in tidy columns, and he had copied the line twice in his own hand. Mugwort marked seepage; a leaf caught in mortar swelled when damp turned wrong, its veins darkening like bruises. Mugwort was a surveyor’s habit; old inspectors, the ones who came with seal-cases and polite threats, tucked sprigs into cracks before they summoned masons, as if the plant could testify where mouths lied.
He repeated the sequence under his breath with each step, aligning it with the cadence of his breathing: in (repels; hold) marks; out. Habit. Service. Maintenance. Prevention.
The words had to be clean enough to pass a clerk’s ear, and ordinary enough that his own spirit accepted them. He was not warning rebels, he told himself; he was noting contamination. He was not making a sign; he was leaving an indicator for later repair. He tightened his grip on that phrasing until it felt like a stamped token in his ribs: something official, something carried.
Yet the careful phrasing he’d fitted over the act (maintenance, prevention, inspection) could not close what his senses had opened. In his mind another ledger unrolled, unbound by seals: hairline cracks spidering through talisman-brick, damp shining like oil where it should have dried clean, and that faint sour-metal taste of qi turned against its stamp. He had counted shortages in grain and salt until numbers felt like bones; this was worse, because it meant the fortress itself was becoming a bad vessel.
He did not speak it. Spoken truths became charges, then sentences. But he admitted it in the quiet place behind his teeth: the seals were failing already, and the deadliest corruption was the insistence, inked, signed, recited, that they were not.
He thought of the question on the scrap he had burned. No threats, no pleading, only a line set down like a clerk requesting a countersign. That cleanliness had struck him harder than any knife. Extortion wore its greed openly; inquiry carried restraint, and restraint implied discipline. He had answered that, not out of faith in rebels, but because truth-seeking was rarer than loyalty that only knew how to recite.
By the time he returns to the alchemical annex, the old talent of disappearing into soot and duty will not come back on command. The west wall’s weakness could be turned into anything (plague blamed on the wrong hands, panic harnessed into obedience, a purge made to look like righteousness) and he would have lent it his silence. He lays out his mortar, probes, vials, ledger slips, counting twice, packing as if for an inspection he means to summon.
Wei stepped out with the corridor’s draft worrying at the soot on his cuffs. The shift-change press moved like a single animal: guards loosening their grips, clerks hugging tablets to their chests, the night men blinking at lanternlight as if it were accusation. He let them see him before he made a place for himself: kettle hooked over one wrist, mortar bundled in cloth, a packet of paper squares for labels tucked into his sleeve.
He chose the widest span where the passage pinched between an armory door and a registry alcove. No one could claim later they had not passed him; no one could pretend not to have heard. He set the bundle down with both hands, steady as if laying a petition on a magistrate’s desk. His fingers were ink-stained, his nails cracked from furnace work, but the movement had the care of formal ritual.
Murmurs threaded through the traffic. “Annex serf.” “Ledger Hall’s oathman.” “He’s the one who, ”
Wei kept his gaze lowered, not in submission: simply to keep his breathing even. He listened past the words to what mattered: the wet rasp of a cough, the dragging step, the faint sweet rot of breath that meant fever had settled in the throat. He could feel the corridor’s qi like a draft under a door: thin, exhausted, carrying the stale bitterness of overboiled grain.
A young spearman tried to slip by with his jaw clenched. Wei’s nose caught sourness and metal. “Hold,” he said, not loud, not soft: just placed in the stream of bodies. The spearman stopped despite himself.
Wei untied the cloth from the mortar. The kettle’s lid clinked once. He did not reach for the public stores; he reached for his own kit, the small things he could answer for. When his hand found the spirit-salt vial, he paused long enough for any watching clerk to count the motion. Then he turned the vial so the wax seal faced outward, as if showing a stamp before breaking it.
Without waiting for a nod from any officer, Wei hooked two fingers under the rim of an abandoned shield leaning by the armory door and turned it over. The inside, scuffed and soot-dulled, made a shallow basin; he set it down flat and used it as a table all the same. The corridor traffic eddied around him, annoyed at first: then curious.
He drew out the last spirit-salt vial from his kit and held it up at chest height, where lanternlight caught the wax plug and the faint crystalline sediment. A clerk in gray glanced over; Wei met the look only long enough to make the gesture plain. Service, not theft. Recordable, not hidden.
His thumb worried the seal until it gave with a sting of cold. He did not pour. He did not even tip. He only touched the mouth of the vial to the tip of his needle-fine silver probe, letting a single bead wet the metal. The salt hissed softly as if offended at being spent so sparingly.
Then, deliberate as presenting a stamped pass-token, he lifted the wetted probe under the lantern and turned it once, so anyone watching could see the shine and the empty mouth of the vial between his fingers.
The first man to sag against the wall drew Wei as if by gravity. Wei’s palm found the hollow of the throat, feeling the swallow catch; two fingers slid to the wrist where the pulse fluttered like a trapped moth. Only then did the silver probe come out, needle-thin, its tip kissed with spirit-salt. “Tongue,” Wei said, and the soldier obeyed with the obedience of the half-fainted.
The probe touched. Wei watched the film on the tongue, the dulling at the edges, then leaned close enough to take the man’s breath into his own lungs. Sweet-stale, carrying a faint sour rot that didn’t belong to hunger alone. He took the cup of water someone shoved forward, lifted it, sniffed once, and let his gaze flick to the cistern-mark burned into the rim.
“Bad water,” he said clearly, for the guards’ ears and the scribes’ pens, so the man heard his own verdict spoken into the corridor.
He did not let himself breathe between men. The verdicts came even, almost clerkly: “Thin blood.” “Wind-cold.” “Stomach-fire from spoiled grain.” Each name came with a gesture any bystander could verify. Cup lifted to smell the cistern’s iron tang, finger tapped on the gruel ladle’s greasy rim, palm turned toward the arrow-slits where the draft cut like a knife. He made his craft auditable.
Between bodies he worked the mortar like a scribe works ink. Dried mugwort went in first, then the last scrap of root shaved fine with a knife edge. He measured by fingertip, by smell, by the way the powder clung to his burned skin. Each substitution he wrote on a narrow strip and pinned under the shield’s rim: dose, omission, reason. An open trail, as if inviting accusation while men folded to the stones.
No one announced anything. The annex had no bell, no drum, no clerk with a board to nail decrees to. Yet the threshold thickened with bodies the way frost thickens on a window: silent at first, then sudden, undeniable.
Wei did not look up to count them; counting people was a luxury the Ledger Hall indulged in, not the furnace court. He kept his attention on the bowl in his hands and the steam that rose from it in thin, uncertain threads. Still, he felt the shift in the air. The corridor’s usual shuffle (boots seeking warmth, shoulders brushing in impatience) settled into a careful stillness, like a room remembering it was watched.
Men who could have been lying down chose instead to stand. They placed themselves with their backs to Wei’s workbench, facing out toward the barracks passage as if the draft itself might surge in and snuff the small order he was building. Shoulder met shoulder. A forearm lifted when someone tried to press forward; not a shove, not yet, just a firm bar of bone and cloth. A younger archer with cheeks hollowed by hunger held his arms wide to guide the flow without speaking, eyes flicking from faces to the ground the way a sentry watches for tripwires.
Someone set a chipped bowl near the doorpost. An offering without ritual. It clinked once and went quiet. A strip of dried onion, two beans, a pinch of coarse salt like grit from a pocket. No names. No boasting. Wei saw none of it directly, but his trained sense caught the faint prickle of intent around it: not charity exactly, but repayment, as if survival demanded bookkeeping the officers had neglected.
A kettle disappeared from beside his elbow. For a heartbeat his fingers tightened, reflexively possessive of heat and water. Then he saw, in the corner of his vision, a pair of hands already carrying it to the brazier, careful not to spill. The man did not ask permission. He did not meet Wei’s eyes. He simply took the burden as if it were his turn in a rotation.
Wei swallowed the urge to protest. Service could be repaid by service; even a serf could recognize that arithmetic. He wrote one more line in his narrow script, received: beans, onion skin, salt dust, and let the ink dry while the doorway held.
An older spearman, one of the men who’d been on the wall since the first week, knuckles split and scabbed from hauling stones, stepped into the mouth of the annex and raised a crooked finger. Not a command, not a speech. Just a hook of motion toward the left, then a flat palm toward the right, as if dividing grain by hand.
The men nearest him understood at once. They shifted without argument, boots scraping, shoulders angling into place. Two lines formed in the narrow passage: one for the ones who swayed and blinked too slow, who needed Wei’s bowl and his fingers at their wrists; another for the ones who could still stand straight enough to be useful. The second line’s faces were not less hollow, only more stubborn.
No clerk announced the order. No seal made it lawful. Still, it held. When impatience rose, it met a forearm and a quiet shake of the head. A pair of hands took up water-buckets as if they were carrying a litter. Another man positioned himself behind the worst cases, ready to catch them before they cracked their skulls on stone.
Crude order, but order. And for a moment, that was medicine too.
A chipped rice bowl appeared as if it had always belonged there, set with care on an overturned crate the way an offering tray might be set before an altar. Only this altar was soot and stone. No coins rang; money had meaning only when there was food to buy. Instead the bowl held the small, sharp-edged wealth of the barracks: a twist of dried scallion ends, green faded to straw; a pinch of salt scraped from a private ration, gritty with sleeve lint; a strip of clean cloth torn from someone’s own cuff and folded into layers as if it were fine gauze. Each item smelled faintly of the body it came from, sweat, smoke, old blood. Wei’s alchemical sense tasted intent in it: not pity, but ledger-balance.
When Wei braced the kettle to pour, heat bit through the cloth wraps on his fingers. A soldier slid in close, close enough that Wei caught the sour-sweet reek of thin gruel on his breath, and took the handle without a word: just a steady transfer of weight, as careful as shifting a patient. Behind him another man offered a ladle scoured nearly to tin-bright, held in both hands like a stamped petition, eyes lowered in shame and resolve.
Work turned into a relay, breath to breath. At Wei’s murmured counts, a man with blistered palms stirred the pot slow enough not to scorch what little root-scrap remained. Another knelt, two fingers on a shaking throat, marking swallows like watch-bells. Bowls traveled out and back in steady hands, rinsed with a smear of hot water, returned before they cooled. No one spoke of payment; service answered service, quick, wordless, before authority could name it.
By gray light the annex doorframe darkened with a body that did not belong to the relay. The ration auditor stepped over the threshold as if it were a line on a map. His padded coat was clean at the cuffs, his hair oiled flat despite the siege, and the slate under his arm sat at an angle that made it look like a shield he meant to hide behind. Frost clung to his boots; he had come from the inner ward, where the wind did not carry ash.
Wei straightened from the kettle without fully unfolding his back. The morning’s simmer had only just found a steady breath. He could taste the broth’s thinness on the air. Roots shaved too fine, a trace of mugwort he had sworn he would not waste, bitterness stretched into usefulness.
The auditor did not greet him. He opened his mouth and began to recite.
“By the Fourth Decree of Winter Rationing, all medicinal issue shall be sealed at point of distribution. By the Registry Addendum on Substitution, ” His voice held the practiced flatness of someone reading names for punishment. His eyes moved, quick and measuring, over the pots, the stacked bowls, the scoured ladle. Not concern; inventory.
Wei’s fingers tingled with old burns as he folded his hands together to keep from reaching for anything. “This is infirmary broth,” he said, careful. “For collapse and fever. I have kept a ledger.”
“A ledger without a seal is a story,” the auditor replied, tapping the slate with his knuckles. “Who authorized unsealed distribution?”
The word unsealed landed like contraband. Behind Wei, a man shifting a bowl froze mid-step. In the pot, bubbles broke the surface with small, patient pops; Wei’s trained sense noted a faint sourness in the water: spiritual strain, not rot, but enough that leaving it untreated would invite the kind of sickness that wrote itself into registries.
“No one,” Wei said, because the truth was safer than a name. “There was no time to request a stamp before men began to fall.”
The auditor’s gaze narrowed as if time itself were not an acceptable excuse. He slid the slate free, stylus poised. “Then we begin with the facts,” he murmured, and the furnace court seemed to tighten around that one line, waiting to see whether ink or breath would be allowed to count.
Two clerks came in behind the auditor as if summoned by his recitation. One old enough that his sleeves smelled of mildew and ink, the other young, cheeks still round with inner-ward rations. Between them they carried a tray of ink-sticks, a brush-case, and a neat stack of blank issue-chits that looked, in this soot-black court, like funeral paper.
“We will require a line for each measure,” the older clerk said, already wetting an ink-stick against his stone. “Root-scrap by weight. Broth by ladle. Recipient name, unit, ailment, witness.”
The younger one lifted his brush as though it were a needle. “If it isn’t written into the register and countersigned, it cannot be counted. If it cannot be counted, it cannot be justified.”
Their voices were not loud, yet they placed their words carefully so they would travel past the kettle, past Wei’s shoulder, to the men waiting with bowls. Disorder. Theft. Punishment: each term laid down like a tile.
Wei watched hands tighten around wooden rims. He could feel the queue’s heat shift, fear souring the air more surely than the thin broth. His own ledger suddenly felt too small to defend him.
A guard captain followed on the auditor’s heels, bringing the smell of cold iron and oiled leather into the furnace court. He didn’t bother with decrees; his presence was the decree. “Gate,” he said, and two soldiers swung the furnace gate until the hinges groaned and the gap narrowed to a slit of light. “For safety. No crowding, no quarrels.” He posted a sentry at the threshold with a spear held crosswise like a bar.
Then he lifted his chin toward the clerks’ blank chits. “No bowl leaves this court without the proper stamp. You want broth, you earn ink.” His eyes flicked over the shaking hands in line, as if wax and vermilion could brace a man’s legs when they gave way.
The sick line faltered, then bunched, shoulders pressing as if warmth could be borrowed by force. Breath and thin broth steam mixed into a damp, sour heat. The two helpers froze with bowls half-lifted, bandage cloth unrolled and trembling. Their eyes kept sliding to Wei’s hands, waiting for permission: ink, or mercy.
The crisis was being combed into neat piles, stamped and un-stamped, issued and unissued, until even kindness had a category and a penalty. Orders tightened like cord around a jar mouth. Wei felt their eyes turn him from a man into a discrepancy: ash on paper, an unfiled line item. He could be allowed to help, they implied, but only where help could be numbered and boxed.
Wei wiped his palms on his apron and looked past the bowls, past the spears, to the table where the clerks had set their chits like offerings that did not feed anyone. A red stamp sat there too. In the furnace court it was more precious than dried bark.
“Give me that,” he said, not loud. His voice still carried because the room had learned to listen for any promise that sounded like order. When the nearest clerk hesitated, fingers tightening as if the stamp were a talisman that might bite, Wei held out his ink-stained hand and added, quieter, “If you want proper, then let it be proper all the way through.”
The clerk’s eyes darted toward the captain. The captain did not nod, did not forbid. He merely watched, weighing. In the gap of that silence, Wei took the stamp as he would take a jar of powdered aconite: with care, with respect for what it could do.
He found an upturned crate, its slats warped from damp, and set a broad sheet atop it. The paper was better than he deserved: ledger paper, fiber-thick, meant to last. He smoothed it with the flat of his hand as if it were a patient’s chest.
With a brush he had cleaned too many times, he dipped into soot mixed with a thread of thin glue-water. The ink came out gray-black, smelling faintly of smoke and starch. He ruled the sheet into columns with a steady wrist: Ingredient. Source. Measure. Recipient. Hour.
Men behind him shifted, seeing lines appear and not yet understanding what lines could do. To Wei the grid was a kind of medicine. It held the room still. It made room for truth.
He wrote the first entry before anyone could argue it away, then lifted the stamp. The vermilion pad left a wet, bright kiss on the paper. An official wound, an official seal. The mark bled into the fibers and did not vanish when the cold wind sneaked through the slit of the gate.
For each batch he made, Wei forced the work to have a voice. He did not hide behind the clatter of bowls or the furnace’s hiss. He held up each measure where all could see, the clean edge of a spoon, the shiver of powder in the air, and named what it truly was.
“Spirit-salt,” he said, and shaved it down until it was scarcely more than glittering dust, the kind of expense that made clerks swallow and soldiers lean forward. “Not for swallowing. For washing the mouth and the pulse points. One turn of the cloth only.”
Then, without shame and without apology, he lifted the scrap roots from the sack of sweepings. “This instead of ginseng. Bitter, but it will pull heat down. If it fails, you will not have been cheated: you will have been told.”
When the cistern water came up chalky, he poured through ash-filtered cloth and let the gray drip prove itself. Each time he spoke, he wrote. Each time he wrote, he pressed the vermilion stamp beside the line while the ink was still wet, sealing the substitution into something that could be audited as mercy, not theft.
He carried the sheet to the only place no one could pretend not to see: the corridor mouth where the infirmary line bent past the ration board. A nail already lived there from some older proclamation; he used it, slipping the paper under its head and smoothing the corners until the grid sat square at shoulder height. Men waiting with bowls and bandaged hands craned forward, then fell silent as they found their own names, inked, measured, stamped, among the columns. Each line made the same blunt confession: the stores were not merely low, they were being accounted into nothing. “Issued: ash-root, in place of ginseng.” “Issued: half measure.” The red seals marched down the page like bruise-marks. Every pair of eyes became an audit.
A quartermaster’s aide leaned in, breath sharp with vinegar. “Unapproved handling,” he hissed, eyes on Wei’s hands as if fingers alone could steal. Wei did not flinch. He only tipped his chin toward the posted grid, where vermilion seals still shone wet beside each substitution. Then he set his brush down, handle first, offering it like a cup. “Countersign, then,” he said softly. “Or write that the storehouse is full.”
By late afternoon the broad sheet had grown dense, a discipline of black strokes and red seals, names, measures, substitutions, stacked like a muster roll that could not be argued with. The shouting in line thinned to mutters, then to questions asked in practical tones: who could boil water without wasting lamp oil, who had a clean pot, who could comb the sweepings for scrap roots. Ink had made obedience out of hunger.
Dawn did not arrive with birdsong in Tianlu Fortress; it came with the blunt percussion of a body hitting planks and the long scrape of a bowl skittering out of numb hands. At first it was only one man. Knees striking, breath hitching as if his ribs had forgotten how to lift. Then another folded over his thin gruel, forehead pressed to the rim, shoulders shaking without strength enough for sobbing. The line for rations turned into a staggered procession of kneeling backs, palms splayed on filthy boards like supplicants before an altar that would not answer.
Wei Wenyu heard it from the annex yard before he saw it: the shouts that tried to become orders, the way voices thinned into panic when the body did not get up. He had ash on his sleeves from tending the furnace through the last watch, and his fingers still smelled of spirit-salt and iron. The ledger board under his arm felt heavier than wood. Heavy as his oath, heavy as the attention he had not asked for.
He reached the corridor mouth and the barracks breath hit him: sour grain, old sweat, the sharp tang of vinegar they used to scrub blood. Under it, his trained perception caught something else: stagnant water qi, thin as a bruise, clinging to the air around the ration tubs. Not a plague’s rot. Not yet. Something more ordinary and more dangerous: exhaustion turning inward, bodies burning themselves for lack of fuel.
An officer stood half-in, half-out of the doorway, boots planted on the cleanest strip of stone as if weakness were a contagion that climbed leather. His hand hovered near his belt seal but did not lift it. He watched the men collapse and waited for someone else to make the scene legible.
The rankers did not look to him. Their eyes slid past his lacquered authority and fixed instead on Wei. On the ash-smudged serf with the board and the wet red stamps. A few mouths opened, closed. A murmur ran through the kneeling line, not a demand, not a prayer, but the simple transfer of expectation: You saw it written. You can make it hold.
Wei met their look with refusal first, because refusal was a kind of fence and he had spent his life building fences out of words. “I am attached to the furnace court,” he said, each syllable measured as if it could be stamped and filed. “My oath is to contamination. I am not licensed to diagnose. I cannot countermand a corporal’s order.”
He kept his gaze lowered to the ledger board, to ink and columns, to anything that was not a ring of hollow faces. If he did not meet their eyes, perhaps the expectation would slide off him and find its proper owner. He waited for the officer to speak, to lift a seal, to make the moment official.
No seal rose. Only the room’s need did, swelling until it filled the doorway.
His phrases struck the air and sank without ripples. A man on his knees lifted a pot, clean, scrubbed nearly to raw metal, and pushed it into Wei’s hands with the blunt certainty of someone offering a tool to the only person left who might know how to use it. Others murmured, not pleading now but counting: water, ash, roots, boil. Wei’s throat tightened. Duty, he thought, was never asked politely.
Wei moved down the row as if counting rations, not lives. Three men, quick succession: eyelids fluttering, lips pale, sweat cooling into a sour film. He drew out his needle-fine silver probe and touched tongue, wrist, the hollow under a jaw. The metal drank their heat and gave it back to him as taste, copper, iron, the faint wrongness of water that had sat too long in stone. He closed his eyes and took one measured cultivation breath, letting his alchemical perception sift the air: no sharp spike of toxin, no thread of contagion. Only the same thin pattern everywhere, like a badly copied talisman, hunger, sleeplessness, chilled marrow pretending to be fever. Relief did not come; panic was its own sickness. If it spread, it would not matter that the water was merely stale. What they needed was something repeatable. An order with edges.
Wei steadied the ledger board on an upturned bucket, wiped soot from his thumb, and wrote in blocky characters large enough to be read by the man nearest his shoulder. He spoke as the brush moved, voice pitched like a clerk reciting entries. Boil water. Clean pots only. Move the fevered behind the torn screen; take their names. Scrape cistern lime into cloth. Ash and scrap roots to the annex last, if the water is made right.
The list he’d given them, water, pots, names, lime, then roots, became a rail to hold when their knees wanted to fold. Men moved because movement was better than bargaining over bowls. Two sprinted for kettles; one hauled a limp comrade with a jaw-clenched patience. Another blanched at the cistern steps, swallowed hard, and went down anyway. Wei’s mouth stayed a thin, dutiful line, yet his soot-stained hand kept indicating, correcting, making every task plain. Until the room, without a seal or shout, began to take its cues from him before it took them from officers.
By the third day the barracks had stopped arguing over what to call it. There were no spots, no blackened gums, no righteous proof that would let a man say plague and feel clean fear instead of shame. It was only bodies failing under thin gruel and thinner sleep: too ordinary to earn a proper name. So they gave it a handle anyway, the way a drowning man will grab reed-mats and broken spears.
Wei’s sleeves did for the handle. Soot lived in the weave no matter how often he rinsed them. The ash made him easy to point at without pointing: that one, the annex serf, the one who smells water like a dog. Men began to watch him between tasks, not openly (never the stare that challenges an officer) but the sidelong, counting look they used on braziers in winter, measuring whether there would be heat enough to last through night watch.
He moved as if he did not notice. He kept his head dipped, his ledger board tucked close, his brush always a finger’s breadth from the inkstone. But even when he was silent, the room followed the rhythm of his work: probe out, touch, pause; cup raised, tested, set aside; names taken in a line that made the sick feel briefly accounted for.
A cook’s helper, cheeks hollow as ladles, came with a pot that smelled faintly of rancid oil. Wei’s fingers hovered at the rim, not refusal, not consent, just that small hesitation of trained sense. The helper swallowed, eyes flitting to the nearest guard, then back to Wei. Without being told, he carried the pot out and scrubbed it with snow until his hands bled. No one mocked him. No one wanted to be the man who argued with a pause like that.
In the corner, two soldiers whispered the new title like a charm to keep their legs from giving out. It spread, soft and persistent, from bedroll to bedroll: Ash-Hands, Ash-Hands. Not praise, not pity, need, made audible. And with each repetition, the sickness became something they could face, because it had an opposite now: one thin serf-alchemist writing orders large enough for starving men to obey.
The name did not arrive as a decree. It assembled itself in the small commerce of the barracks (half a joke, half a prayer) passed between bowls as thin as washwater and the kind of curses men used to keep their teeth from chattering. “Ash-Hands Wei,” someone muttered when he saw the soot ground into Wei’s cuffs, and someone else took it up because it fit in the mouth and made the annex feel less like a pit.
They watched him work the way hungry men watched steam. He would lean over an upturned bucket, silver probe poised, and then go utterly still: not performing, not hesitating from fear, simply listening with that trained, unblinking attention as if the water could be made to confess its illness. When his ink-stained fingers hovered at a cup’s rim, the room would tighten. A man might already have swallowed; his throat would jump; his eyes would flick to the guards.
But if Wei paused, even for a breath, the cup was poured out. No argument. No wounded pride. Only relief, sharp as vinegar, that someone could say no without being punished for it.
The story picked up ornaments the way smoke clung to cloth. By nightfall men were saying he could smell poison through a bucket’s staves, could hear rot in water the way a veteran heard a loosened bowstring. In the clerks’ queue someone swore he’d watched Wei’s eyes flick once across a seal-stamp and know. Honest registry mark, or a trap meant to drag a name into punishment. Others praised his ledger: lines so straight they made an officer’s “miscount” look like theft. Wei kept his mouth shut and his brush moving, because argument was a luxury and praise was a hook. Still the tale traveled, traded for warmth. Not all of it was true. Enough of it had to be, for hands to stop shaking.
Need hardened into reflex. When a man’s knees went watery in the ration line, voices reached for Wei’s name before they reached for a medic’s whistle; his ash-smudged sleeves became the signal that help might still be measured and written. When the gruel thinned to warm water, eyes fixed on his mortar as if stone could grind fullness from emptiness. Even those who never spoke shifted aside, opening him a narrow corridor like rank.
The attention didn’t stay in the barracks. It climbed, thickening as it went. Clerks who’d once stamped without looking began to reread his neat substitutions, lips moving as if the lines could accuse them. An officer would hover at the annex door and ask, too casually, why men were standing straighter on half rations: why obedience seemed to organize itself without a shouted order. In that new interest he heard counting: not jars, not grains, but names tethered to his oath, and how hard they’d be to erase quietly.
At first light the inner ward gates ceased to be a boundary and became a statement. The bar slid home with a sound like a coffin lid. Someone looped red cord around the bronze latch and tied it in a tidy, official knot, the color of living blood used to promise that no blood would be spilled. Frost clung to the fibers, turning the cord stiff as wire.
Runners fanned through the fortress with Commander Jin’s decree held high like an offering and read low like a threat. Their footfalls stitched a harsh rhythm into the corridors: stop, recite, move. “Purity sweep.” “By registry order.” “All souls accounted.” The words were familiar enough to feel harmless until Wei tasted the spirit-ink behind them, a metallic bite that rode the air the way smoke did, settling on the tongue.
Watch-captains received new tally-slips: fresh paper, clean margins, the kind issued when old numbers are no longer trusted. They began counting heads as if counting grain in a lean year: not to know who was present, but to know what could be taken. Men were lined by rank, then by trade. Names were checked against lacquered lists, faces against memory. A soldier with chapped lips murmured his own name before it was called, as if rehearsing might keep it from being stolen.
Wei stood back in the choke of a side passage, hands hidden in his sleeves to keep them from shaking. The oath-mark at his wrist prickled in sympathy with every seal-stamp he heard, a small pain that reminded him he belonged to ink and paper as much as to flesh. When a clerk’s gaze snagged on him (thin, ash-smudged, fingers stained the wrong kind of black) Wei lowered his eyes and made himself an object: annex property, listed, accounted.
Somewhere deeper inside, the bronze of the gate latch cooled under the cord’s red promise. The fortress exhaled once, collectively, and then held its breath, waiting to see what the registry would call impure.
Patrols doubled, then doubled again, pairs became fours, fours became eights, until the corridor outside the alchemical annex took on the steady churn of a mill wheel. Boots cycled past his door so often that Wei stopped listening for the next set and began measuring time by the scrape of soles on stone. He found himself grinding dried bark to powder in the narrow pauses between steps, holding his breath when a watchman’s lantern threw a bar of light through the paper window, exhaling only when the shadows slid on.
The new rotations did not move like ordinary men on duty. They moved like a decree learning to walk: exact intervals, identical turns of the head, hands always near the pass-token pouch. Once, a guard halted to sniff at the annex smoke as if it were contraband, and Wei’s oath-mark prickled: an unreasonable warning against an unreasonable world.
Inside, the furnace court was all low heat and careful quiet. Wei kept his ledger open beside the mortar, ink already drying on a line that counted what he no longer had. Each time footsteps paused, his fingers went still, silver probe poised above a vial, as though even a clink might be taken down and stamped.
They take them by rank as if rank were a rope, officers first, then squads, then the tradesmen who smell of glue and smoke, driving each line to the stone tables beneath the hanging lamps. “Sleeves,” a clerk snaps, and cloth is shoved up to bare wrists: registry-marks, oath-scars, the dark impress of old punishments that never quite fade. Pass-tokens are presented like tongues for inspection. Seal-stamps come down in a practiced fury, iron faces biting paper and wood; the table answers with a hard, ringing report that ricochets off lacquered pillars and into bone. After the third strike Wei watches men begin to move before they’re told obedience trained by sound when hunger has emptied thought.
The chant gathers itself and then does not stop (names paired with stations, stations with oaths, oaths with listed merits) spoken in a cadence that tugs even dry throats into obedience. Clerks drag spirit-ink across fresh slips until the strokes look wet enough to breathe; in the cold it gives off a faint, sour steam. Each man is made to echo the binding phrases, word-perfect, or start again.
When the clerks recite merits, the words are stripped of gratitude and turned to counting. Useful. Unclear. Pending irregularities. Each label lands like a bean tossed into a bowl, small, final, heard by everyone. Jin does not speak over the pauses; he cultivates them, letting the emptiness swell until men shift and swallow. Wei feels it too: the registry is a hand at the throat, waiting for a stutter.
The junior clerk stiffens when the runner’s voice reaches his station. Wei knows his name; he has seen it neat on ration slips, seen it signed at the bottom of lamp-wick requests with a careful hand that never tried to make itself grand. Here, in the Ledger Hall, the name is not his alone. It is a hook.
The call lands. The hall’s cadence opens a space for the proper cloth of address and the clerk’s mouth works without sound. Lips part, teeth show, then close again as if he has bitten a word in half. For a moment he looks not defiant but stranded, as though the phrase has fallen between thought and tongue and is sinking.
Wei feels the shift ripple outward: a few shoulders tighten; a clerk’s brush pauses above spirit-ink. The hanging lamps seem to hiss as the oil draws, and the cold makes every breath visible, thin as paper.
“Station,” the reciter prompts, voice flat.
The clerk swallows. “This one, ” His eyes flick, too quickly, toward the lacquered shelves, toward the screen where punishments are taken out of sight to preserve “order.” He tries again, and the missing title comes out a beat late, like a seal pressed when the wax has already begun to set. Wrong not by meaning, but by timing.
Wei’s fingers curl inside his sleeves until his nails bite skin. In the annex they had whispered over scorched kettles, traded small mercies without naming them as such. Here mercy has no registry-mark and so does not exist.
The junior clerk forces the oath phrase through, each syllable dragging. The words should have clicked into the hall’s rhythm; instead they scrape.
In the pause after, Wei hears the faintest sound: brush hairs touching paper, a clerk writing something down before it is spoken aloud. The ink’s sour steam reaches Wei’s nose, and with it a prickle along his trained senses: not poison, not plague, but the clean, cruel bite of binding being readied.
The hall waits, perfectly still, for the error to be acknowledged.
Jin does not raise his voice. He does not need to. He lets the silence pool in the Ledger Hall until it has weight, until men feel it pressing at their ears harder than the chanting ever did. Then, with a small tilt of his chin, an economy of motion that makes it seem like the registry itself has issued the order, the shock-troops break from the line.
They move without haste, practiced, their boots finding the same worn stones as if they have walked this route for years. One takes the junior clerk by the collar, another by the hair. Fingers knot close to the scalp; the clerk’s head jerks back, mouth opening on a sound that is swallowed by the hall’s air. His knees strike, and the impact echoes once, clean and public, before the soldiers force his face down toward the cold floor as though to make him read his own failure written in stone.
Wei’s senses catch a sharp, sterile tang: spirit-ink and seal-wax, but also the metallic edge of a binding being tightened. The clerk’s eyes search, unfocused, for any place the law cannot see. There is none.
He scrabbles once, reflexive as a drowning man, at the nearest lacquered shelf. The polished wood gives him nothing but his own smeared print. A guard’s fist bunches his sleeve and jerks him sideways; cloth catches on a carved corner with a soft tearing sound. Something slips free. Paper, thin and overhandled, skates into the open air and flutters down as if it can’t decide whether to land.
Wei sees the bundle before his mind gives it meaning: lamp-wick coupons folded into quarters, edges darkened by soot, and a torn requisition stub with the annex’s stamp half struck. Legitimate. Carefully saved. Now only proof of obedience with no place to spend it.
No one stoops to pick it up. Wei’s feet stay planted, but his chest tightens as though the fall has happened inside him.
From behind the lacquered shelves, the mortar’s rasp begins: ink stick on stone, slow as if someone is savoring the grind. The scent of spirit-ink blooms sharp and cold. Then the brush speaks: wet bristles worrying the registry paper, stroke after stroke laid down with a clerk’s patience and a judge’s weight. No shout comes. Only a breath, smothered mid-draw, as though the hall itself has decided to stop his lungs.
When they finally spill from the Ledger Hall, the furnace court should feel cramped with bodies and soot; instead it yawns around Wei like a missing tooth. The junior clerk’s stool stays tucked in, squared with care. His writing-brush lies where it fell in the corridor grit, bristles splayed. The next ration ledger comes down with tidy copied strokes. His name still inked, his hands erased.
Dusk sets itself on the western curtain wall like a bruise. The stone there has always held the cold differently, as if the mountain remembers every blow it has taken and refuses to forget. Tonight a pale sheen crawls along the talisman-bricks, not the steady, seated radiance of sanctioned work but something that searches. Light threads into mortar seams the way a needle worries an old hem: patient, precise, almost gentle if you don’t look too hard.
On the parapets, men who have been shaking for days straighten as if a hand has gone under their chins. Helm rims tilt, eyes narrow. Someone spits over the crenel and laughs, sharp with relief. A sergeant claps an archer’s shoulder, and for a moment the line of bows looks like confidence instead of hunger. Below, far down where the valley darkens, rebel drums stutter: one beat too slow, then a hurried correction. Lanterns along their pickets shift, as if the whole ring of them is leaning back from a cliff edge.
From a distance it reads cleanly: ward reinforcement, the kind the Prefectural Seal Office would be proud to claim. The shimmer kisses the stamped brick-faces and makes the seal-marks stand out, every bureaucratic curl and bar suddenly luminous, as though the wall itself has been freshly registered. Even the officers on the inner walkway pause to watch, hands tucked into sleeves, their breath fogging in neat bursts. A clerk murmurs a formula of praise, already shaping the report he’ll file, “timely,” “proper,” “effective.”
Then the light gathers at a section that should not draw attention, a stretch of stone that has been patched too often and never quite matches. The sheen lingers there, thickens, and slides onward, inviting the eye to follow. It looks like inevitability, official, stamped, unquestionable, creeping across the battlement one brick at a time. It looks, to anyone who wants to believe, like the fortress has finally remembered how to protect itself.
Wei hauled the slag-buckets past the furnace court drain, boots skidding on ice-slick ash. Before the wall’s pale sheen even found his eyes, it found his mouth: a sour metallic prickle along his teeth, the wrong taste of spirit-salt. Burned too hot, driven too fast, as if someone had hurried a ritual the way a clerk hurries a copy. His tongue went numb at the edges. He swallowed and felt the bitterness settle behind his sternum.
He stopped long enough for the bucket-chain to clink once, a sound too loud in the wind. The glow on the western bricks wasn’t seated, wasn’t nested into seal-marks the way sanctioned wards sit down like ink drying. It hunched, trembled, then pushed out in a breath, one pulse, then another, out of cadence with the fortress’s old, patient rhythm. It reminded him of a fevered chest, forcing air through pain.
Wei angled his face toward the arrow-slit draft. On it rode a thread of hostile qi, fine as hair and deliberate as handwriting, drawn straight through the cracks he’d cataloged and no one had paid to mend. His fingers tightened on the bucket handle until the metal bit. Somewhere in the annex, he had written numbers; out there, someone was writing deaths.
The shimmer buckles. Not with a crack, but with a courteous give, like a ledger page taking an unwanted fold at the margin and deciding to pretend it was always meant. The bright seal-curls along the bricks dim in one stitched stretch, the threat draining away until what remains is an almost-honest shadow, a place the eye can rest. From the valley, men in patched armor read it as permission. They surge, shields shouldering together, breath flashing white, a raw cheer lifting as if noise itself could make stone yield. The pulse answers them. It ripples outward in a slow, obliging wave, not striking but withdrawing, coaxing boots into a narrow throat of approach the wall’s angles have always made into a funnel. From where Wei stands, it feels like watching ink guide a hand toward the wrong line.
The supposed warding turns into a handhold for slaughter. The ripple narrows their advance into the wall’s hungry geometry, under arrow-slits and slanted murder-windows. Within the corridor behind the bricks, lanterns wink alive one after another, ordered, official. The first volley comes on schedule: three beats, a clerk’s pause, three beats again. Snow erupts in black shafts and sudden red. Then a second, then a third, until bodies spill where the light had beckoned.
The rebels broke like a rope frayed through. Each man hauling another by belt or wrist, leaving the rest scattered in the snow as if the valley had learned to write with bodies. Behind the wall, officers praised “proper ward-craft” and “steadfast loyalty,” already weighing commendations and seal-notes. Runners bore the tale inward on fast feet. Wei, ash-sleeved, tasted the same sour spirit-salt and knew this was accounting, not defense.
“Wei Wenyu,” a clerk called, voice pitched to carry. A beat later, as if sweetness made it less cruel: “Ash-Hands Wei.”
The nickname skated across the Ledger Hall on murmurs that were not quite laughter, not quite praise. Approval arranged into sound. Wei stepped where he was guided, not where he chose. Hands at his elbows, guards, or attendants, or simply the fortress made into men, steered him into the center as though placing a seal-stamp on a page. He felt every eye in the room do what eyes did best here: count, compare, record.
He made himself small without moving, a habit learned young. His fingers, ink-stained even after scrubbing, curled against his sleeves to hide the burn-scars. Dutiful service was being displayed like a banner, and he was the pole.
He registered the room the way he registered heat and grain and water: by geometry, by flow, by where a thing would fail first. The lacquered registers rose along the walls in tiered bays, their black surfaces catching lamplight like pooled oil. They were not altars, not officially, but they had the same gravity: even the air seemed to hesitate near them, as if names could fall out and break.
At the far end sat the seal-table, slightly elevated, positioned so whoever held the Prefectural stamp could watch every face without turning his head. Its angles were deliberate: no one could speak without being seen; no one could kneel without offering the back of the neck. On either side, narrow braziers burned low, their incense thin from rationing, smoke threading up toward the beams where old talismans drooped like spent leaves.
The floor was polished stone, scrubbed to a bureaucratic shine. Under the sheen, darker stains remained: old iron-brown that cleaning had only pressed deeper, like a notation corrected without erasing the meaning. Wei’s careful gaze caught them anyway. He had spent enough nights over ledgers to know: what is recorded does not vanish. It only changes hands.
When the clerk’s hand touched his shoulder, guiding, congratulatory, possessive, Wei swallowed and tasted ash. In this hall, obedience was not a virtue. It was a proof.
The command to kneel arrives without heat or anger, spoken as if it were weather. Wei’s body answers before his mind can shape a question. His knees strike the floor-stone with a dull, final sound, and cold floods up through patella and marrow, stealing his breath in careful increments. He lowers his gaze to the seam between tiles, to a hairline crack filled with old wax: anything but the seal-table. He has learned what the Hall considers defiance: not shouting, not flight, but a lifted chin, a pause that can be cited later with page and date.
A scribe steps forward and unrolls the oath-slip with the measured patience of an accountant opening a ledger. The paper gives a dry whisper; the sound is too loud in the hush that follows. Around him, the recitation begins (first a few voices, then a braided chorus) phrases of service and mandate repeated until they lose meaning and become mechanism. The chant presses on his ears like hands. In that pressure, private thought feels improper, like a smudge on an official page, and he fights the instinct to apologize for existing outside the words.
The ink is wrong for any clerk’s ledger: too dark, too clean, holding itself together as if it resents dilution. Even before it nears him, Wei’s trained senses pick up its edge: a cold, astringent sharpness that raises fine bumps along his wrists. The scribe does not look at him when he dips the brush; he watches the seal-table, as if waiting for approval from wood and metal rather than men.
When the brush touches the pad of Wei’s thumb, the pain is not heat but frost, a sudden bite that slides inward along the binding threaded through his recorded name. His pulse skips, then pounds, each beat answering the characters as they are pressed into paper and into him. Metal floods the back of his throat. He understands, quietly, horribly, that the hurt is the point.
His hand tremored once (barely a quiver) but the nearest clerk answered it with a tap of the rod on his shoulder. The touch was mild enough to pass as correction, firm enough to remind his bones who owned his posture. Wei drew breath to ask, softly, about seal verification, about the authorization stamp. The rod hovered. The clerk’s eyes slid aside, practiced in not acknowledging that a tool could speak.
Commander Jin’s gaze caught him mid-breath, before the question could gather shape. It was not a glare; it was a filing, the look of a man who had learned to make quiet feel like an entry already inked. Under it, Wei’s tongue went numb with prudence. He swallowed, pressed his marked thumb down, and let the chorus carry him, feeling the oath cinch tighter: service here was never honored, only harnessed.
The annex had gone quiet in the way a body goes quiet when it cannot afford to waste heat. Coals in the furnace mouth lay under a skin of gray ash; the last batch of tincture cooled in stoppered bowls, its bitter steam long since surrendered to the rafters. Wei rinsed his mortar with a rationed splash from a clay jug, watching the thin water bead and vanish into soot-black stone.
A knock came. Before Wei could set the mortar down, the latch complained and silk whispered against the doorframe, the sound out of place among burlap sacks and iron tools. A clerk’s voice murmured, too low to be called an announcement. Wei only caught the honorific.
Han Heshan stepped in as if the annex were an office and not a furnace court pressed into triage. Road dust dulled the sheen of his sleeves, but he wore them as though dust were a temporary inconvenience, not a season. His smile arrived first, then his hands, empty, open, displaying no threat, then the lacquered slip he produced from inside his robe as delicately as a petition offered to a magistrate.
“Alchemist Wei,” he said, and the title itself was a small kindness, edged with calculation. “Forgive the hour. Commander Jin regrets the disturbance to a man of duty.” The phrases came out in the cadence of decrees: the kind that made men bow before they understood why.
He held the requisition between two fingers. The lacquer reflected the lantern as a thin blade of light, and the stamped characters, FOR WARD REINFORCEMENT, sat heavy and official, as if the paper alone could keep the western wall from cracking. Wei’s gaze flicked, uninvited, to the shelf where spirit-salt vials stood behind empty jars, each one accounted for twice in the ledgers and a third time in his memory.
Han’s eyes followed the motion and returned to Wei’s face with practiced geniality. “The night is colder than the officers admit,” he added, softly, as if sharing concern rather than extracting compliance. “We must be seen to do everything properly.”
Wei accepted the lacquered slip between thumb and forefinger, his nails rimmed with soot, his skin carrying the faint metallic tang of spirit-salt no amount of washing quite removed. He did not let his face change. He angled the paper into the lantern’s narrow light, where the seal-impression could not hide in shadow.
The Prefectural border line, meant to be thin as a hair, arrogant in its precision, ran too heavy along the northern edge, as if the carver’s hand had pressed down in annoyance. The inner box leaned a fraction, not enough for a hurried clerk to notice, enough for Wei’s trained eye to feel it like a stone under the tongue. The pressure was wrong in the lower right: uneven, a soft fade where the real seal always bit cleanly through lacquer and into fiber. A forgery, or something made to resemble one closely enough to pass beneath Commander Jin’s exhausted gaze.
The thought of refusal drew the oath in his chest tight as a cord pulled wet. Paper defined service here. Ink named it, and his soul answered.
Wei turned the slip over and held it closer, as if warmth could coax truth from lacquer. The counter-sign space was bare. In its place ran a brisk little flourish of ink, an official’s name shaped convincingly enough to satisfy anyone who believed ink was authority. The date was correct, too: written in the clipped hand used in the Ledger Hall, the same hand that had called men to their knees hours earlier.
He tasted the trap like ash. If he spoke of forgery, he would be a serf-alchemist accusing a noble’s son with nothing but an alchemist’s eye. If he refused, the oath would define it as neglect of service, and by dawn he could be registry-marked, his name altered into a warning.
Han Heshan stood with his hands tucked into his sleeves, posture loose, gaze fixed politely on the lantern flame rather than on Wei’s fingers. Yet Wei felt every shift of attention, as precise as a scale weight. “The western wall suffers an unfortunate strain,” Han said, tone mild, as if discussing weather. “A prompt delivery will be entered as merit.” The words slid into place like silk cords, tightening around a single knot.
Wei set the weights with care, hands steadying after a single telltale tremor. He drew one slow cultivation breath, sinking the shake into his dantian until his pulse obeyed. The oath demanded service; so he served in fractions. He poured out dull salts and inert ash-powders, enough to look convincing in lamplight, and sealed the true spirit-salt away like stolen air. Inside his sleeve, his private tally took the lie down in ink.
At dawn the infirmary shutters shuddered on their hinges, as if the fortress itself had flinched in its sleep. The wind that spilled in carried the smell of iron filings and wet stone, and something else beneath it: an acrid, sweet note that did not belong to blood or winter. Wei Wenyu’s fingers were already numb from rinsing bowls in half-frozen water; he flexed them once, quietly, before the first stretcher cleared the threshold.
The men were from the western wall. Their boots were still crusted with mortar dust, and their lashes wore a thin glitter of frost. Arrow-cuts and shard-slices had turned wrong in transit. The flesh around each injury had dulled to a bruised gray, as though cold had bitten down and refused to unclench. In one man’s shoulder the skin looked almost waxen, pulled tight, veins faint as ink lines under paper.
Wei leaned close until his breath fogged the air above the bandages. He brought out his needle-fine silver probe and hovered it at the edge of a torn seam. His alchemical perception opened like a practiced eye behind the eye: not sight, not smell, but the way a ledger tells you what is missing by its imbalance. What he felt made his throat tighten.
Hostile qi, threaded through blood as fine as hair, ran in branching filaments. It did not surge like poison; it insinuated, the way cracks travel through porcelain glaze, silent, patient, inevitable once begun. The probe’s tip tingled with a faint vibration that climbed into his knuckle bones.
A boy no older than sixteen gasped and tried to sit. “Master, ” he began, and the word broke into a cough. His lips were blue, but not from cold alone.
Wei pressed him down with a palm that was gentler than his voice. “Don’t speak. Save breath for the body.” He said it like instruction, like mercy, like penance all at once.
Outside, the fortress drums continued their slow accounting of hours. Inside, Wei counted bodies, and felt how many measures of clean powder remained.
Wei moved before his mind could furnish names for what he was seeing. Habit took his wrists and guided them: dried mugwort pinched into a smoldering twist, its bitter smoke caught and pressed into a strip of cloth; vinegar heated until it stung his eyes, then wiped along the wound edges in neat, economical strokes. He counted his breaths in the stabilizing rhythm the annex taught serfs who worked too long at furnaces until the shaking in his fingers sank into his belly and stayed there.
The gray in the flesh did not blanch. It listened.
When he laid the smoke-warmed compress down, the tissue puckered as if it disliked being touched, pulling away from itself in tight little ridges. When he pared dead meat with a clean knife, the rim darkened again the moment air reached it, a thin bruise spreading like ink dropped in water. Not poison. Not winterbite. Something threaded through the blood that answered attention the way a ward answers a seal.
Wei’s silver probe hummed faintly when he drew near. He swallowed, tasting ash, and worked faster: because fear was a luxury, and the next stretcher was already scraping over the threshold.
The last packet of clean coagulating powder lay on Wei Wenyu’s palm as if it had been stamped and sentenced. He could feel the fine grit through the paper, each grain a counted ration, each ration a name. On the nearest pallet a young spearman clenched his jaw around a cry, both hands white-knuckled at his own thigh where blood kept finding the same unhealing seam. Beside him two older men lay angled on their sides, breath bubbling wetly with every exhale, punctures in the ribs that sucked at the air as though the cold had learned to drink.
Wei tipped the powder into his mortar out of reflex, already dividing. Then stopped. Half-measures here were only cleaner deaths. He listened to the thin, wrong vibration in their wounds, and to the oath in his bones insisting there was no virtue in pretending at abundance.
He chose, with the same numb precision he used to portion rice, one body to keep entered among the living. The coagulating powder fell and took: fizzing once, then hardening into a pale crust that gripped the spearman’s torn vein and refused it further argument. The boy’s gaze snagged on Wei’s, bright, grateful, unbearably trusting. Wei turned to rinse his fingers. Behind him, the older men’s breaths thinned, hitched, and then stopped, their gray margins settling into a quiet that was not peace.
When the flow of stretchers finally thinned to a limp trickle and the infirmary’s chorus broke into scattered, solitary groans, Wei let himself steal one breath. He slid his private tally from his sleeve with fingers that stank of ash and blood, and wrote beneath last night’s neat lies: strokes cramped until they were almost not writing at all: Withheld. He hid it again and bent over the next wound, because the fortress would praise this as endurance, and because he had learned the cost no longer lived in seals, but in skin.
Wei Wenyu let himself sink to the infirmary boards, spine pressed to the cabinet of stoppered jars. Once, if he leaned close, he could tell fever-root from bitterleaf by scent alone. Now the wax seals gave off only a dull, old smell. The room’s cold had teeth. It worked under his ribs with each borrowed breath, slipped between his shoulder blades, and gnawed until his cultivation exercises felt like lies he told his own body. He kept his hands folded in his lap to hide the tremor. Ink stained the lines of his fingers so deeply the black seemed part of him, as if he had been written into the fortress and could be erased just as easily.
A soldier on the nearest pallet muttered through cracked lips, not words: only the sound a man made when pain had exhausted language. Another tried to swallow and failed. The basin by the door held water that looked clean until Wei’s trained perception brushed it and found the faint, wrong slickness in it, the kind that crept in when spiritual wards thinned and a spring began to falter. He did not say so aloud. Contamination named too early became panic; panic became Jin’s punishments; punishments became corpses with tidy registry marks.
From somewhere behind the wall, the cistern line ticked and settled. The sound was dry and patient, like abacus beads refusing to add up no matter how carefully the clerk pushed them. Tick. Pause. Tick. As if the fortress itself were doing its accounts and finding the column short.
Wei shut his eyes and listened for other noises. The soft drag of boots in the corridor, a whisper of silk, the cautious pace of someone who knew where the guards’ attention lapsed. He heard only the moans and the pipes and his own pulse, too loud in his ears.
He thought of Captain Ma’s questions, delivered as calmly as a hunter naming wind and spoor. Lamp oil. Pass-tokens. A postern opened at odd hours. The neatness of Wei’s ledgers, as if care itself were evidence. Wei could not afford to be sloppy; he also could not afford to look innocent.
He drew one slow breath, tried to settle it into his lower abdomen the way the breathing method demanded, and found the air tasted wrong: stale incense, furnace ash, and something thinly metallic that did not belong among the sick. Outside the walls, far below, siege drums answered in measured thuds. Hunger with a heartbeat. Counting down.
He reached for the bandage basket by reflex, fingers already measuring what he could spare, and found it light as a lie. A few splinters of cloth lay in the bottom like shed skin, and one strip so narrow it would cut more than bind. For a moment he simply held it, thumb rubbing the edge until it went limp, as if the simple act of looking might conjure more.
The cabinet beside him held a decommissioned bolt of registry cloth, the kind once reserved for wrapping ledgers against damp and vermin. He worried at its stiffened edge with two fingers, careful and quiet, and tore along the grain in steady lengths. He kept his gaze on the tear itself, on the straightness, on the count, refusing to look at the stamped columns that had once made vows and punishments official.
The inked characters broke under his nails, smeared black into the creases of his skin, then frayed into soft lint. It clung to his fingertips and to the dried brown on the floorboards, as if the writing wanted to overwrite blood with something more orderly.
On the nearest pallet the young spearman jerked as if struck from inside, then groped toward Wei with a hand that radiated heat through the air. Sweat glazed his knuckles; fever had stripped the skin of its honest color, leaving it wax-bright and too tight. His fingers found Wei’s sleeve and clamped with a desperate strength that belonged to drowning men. Cloth dragged. Wei steadied him with one palm and, gently as he could, pried himself free.
When the grip broke, it left a mark on Wei’s wrist: a gray smear, gritty as furnace ash ground into oil. His trained perception brushed it and recoiled. There was wrongness in the dampness. Not poison, not sickness, but something that clung like a ledger blot, a stain that wanted a column and a seal.
Wei wet a rag and scrubbed at the smear until the skin smarted, then froze: the grit wasn’t lifting, it was blooming, pushed into his own pores like ink worked into paper. He glanced back at the cabinet: jars lined in obedient rows, labels declaring coagulant, febrifuge, spirit-salt. Each seal promised fullness; each vessel, when he lifted it, betrayed its hollowness. In his head he tallied salvage by habit, and the sums fell away to the pipes’ dry, repeating click.
Across the room the clerk’s lantern is a dead hull, its wick pinched down to nothing for the sake of a few more nights. Shadow pools where the worst of them have been pushed, and their breaths arrive muffled, as if the dark has added distance. Wei makes his hands obey, tear, fold, knot, because if he pauses, he will hear every lack at once: water, cloth, steady heat, untainted ink. The gray on his wrist cools, tightens, and his attention keeps returning to it, listening as if the stain might confess its name. And the footsteps that carried it in.
Captain Ma’s questions came back to Wei in pieces, the way cold returned when a brazier died. First a prickling at the edges, then the full weight of it settling in the bones. Lamp oil counted twice and still short. The infirmary lanterns dimmed to sullen embers, yet someone’s postern hinge had been freshly greased; Ma had said it like a fact of weather, not an accusation, and waited to see which way Wei’s eyes would drift.
Ink, too. A requisition slip passed through the annex that morning, the characters correct in stroke order and obedience, yet the ink beaded on the paper as if the fibers had been dressed with something waxy. Official ink should bite; it should sink and hold like a name in a register. This one sat on the surface, too glossy, too proud of itself. Wei had pretended not to notice because noticing was dangerous, and because he had no authority to challenge a stamp.
And then the ledgers too crisp. Ma’s gaze had lingered on the clean margins, the straight columns, as if neatness were a kind of theft. Wei had wanted to say: ash ruins everything else; let me at least keep the numbers legible. But in Tianlu Fortress, a serf did not justify himself. He only complied, and prayed compliance was mistaken for innocence.
In the night quiet, the questions tapped against each other like patrol boots along stone. Wei lay with his burned fingers curled against his chest and tried to arrange answers the way he arranged powders: measured, stable, unreactive. Yet the gray grit on his wrist tightened when he breathed, and his trained perception kept worrying at it, finding in it the faint pull of a seal that did not belong to any office he knew.
Ma would return. Ma would ask again, calmly, as if asking after the weather. And somewhere between the oil that vanished and the ink that refused the page, there was a hand guiding the fortress toward an accounting that would demand a culprit.
He tested his memory the way he tested a powder for purity: by weight and by refusal to lie. In his mind he laid each week of the siege out like a ledger page and pressed events into columns: the day the cistern water first tasted of stone; the night a messenger-runner came limping to the annex with a pass-token still warm from another hand; the morning a requisition appeared with a seal that looked right until you remembered how the Prefectural stamp should bite.
He could tell, too, by the feel of authority. A seal impressed in haste always left a burr of paper at the edge, fibers torn because the clerk’s wrist was already reaching for the next order. Seals pressed with leisure were smooth, almost indulgent, as if the ink had time to preen. He remembered which officers signed with anger, which with fatigue, which with the bored precision of men who assumed the fortress would outlast any shortage.
Ma saw his neat margins and straight columns and named them suspicious. Wei knew the truth was smaller and meaner: order was the only possession a serf could keep without it being confiscated. If the numbers were clean, it was because filth had already taken everything else.
A reply kept trying to settle on his tongue like ash: I know nothing. Four words, light enough to carry, dull enough not to cut. He could fold himself into them the way he folded torn cloth (small, compliant, unremarkable) and let Captain Ma’s patience finish the story around him. In that story, Wei would be neither liar nor accuser, only a blank space a clerk could fill with someone else’s name. The pressure would move on, searching for a louder target, a man with rank to bruise and loosen coin from, someone not pinned to a register by oath and consequence. It was a tempting kind of safety: to be overlooked. To be used up quietly and, for a little while, spared.
He could see it with a nausea-sharp precision: a sheet slid across a scarred table, the correct seal-block set beside it like a witness already bribed. The inkstone would be damp, the brush hairs aligned, the clerk’s smile polite. All he would have to do was bend his name into place, and his silence would harden into record: an entry filed under “resolved,” “disciplined,” “contained.”
His fingers hover over the torn registry cloth, a sliver of stillness that feels like theft while men moan behind the screen. The strips are too narrow, too few; even his thrift has edges that cut. If he stops counting, stops listening for the mismatched ink and the steps that do not belong, the fortress will christen its own rot as “order.” Then whatever seeps in on ration lines and midnight passes will go unweighed, unnamed, unopposed.
In the furnace court he squares his shoulders to the cold and begins the stabilizing breath, the one meant for exhaustion: slow draw to the lower belly, brief hold, slower release. He counts each cycle the way he counts doses, careful, miserly, as if air itself has been put under ration seal.
The court is a shallow bowl of stone, blackened by months of boiling roots and refining spirit-salt. Soot has crept into every seam; even the moonlight looks dirty where it falls through the high slats. The furnace mouth is sealed for the night, but it still leaks a faint warmth that smells of old ash and bitter dregs. Somewhere beyond the wall, the siege drums thud, regular as a clerk’s tally, and his ribs want to answer them.
One. The breath drags in hard at the back of his throat, a sting that makes his eyes water. He lets it settle below the navel the way the method insists, as if he is storing heat against starvation.
Two. Hold. The brief stillness reveals everything he has been trying not to hear: the scratch of mice in the rafters, the distant cough of a sentry, the thin, humiliating growl of his own belly. In the Ledger Hall they speak of discipline like it is a virtue that fills a room. Here it feels like an absence.
Three. Release. The air leaves reluctantly, and with it some of the tremor in his hands. His fingers, raw from the furnace tongs and ink-stained from ledger work, uncurl as if they have forgotten what it is to be empty.
Four. He draws again, slower, forcing the breath to obey him. He thinks of Captain Ma’s questions. Missing lamp oil. Neat columns. The corridor at midnight. Each detail a trap made of ordinary things. Wei tries to make his thoughts just as ordinary: rations, bandage cloth, the order of jars on a shelf.
Five. Hold. He listens for the rhythm of his own pulse and finds, beneath it, something that is not his: a faint pressure in the air, like dampness before a storm. He does not open his eyes. He cannot afford to look like a man who notices.
The first breaths do what they always do: steal the tremor from his wrists and tuck it somewhere harmless. On the next inhale, the air turns strange. Not the clean bite of winter, not furnace soot, but a thin, mean metal that coats his tongue. Like pressing a coin between the teeth. It leaves a faint prickling along his gums, as if the mouth itself has become a test strip.
Wei’s eyes stay half-lidded. He doesn’t need to look to measure it. The training the Ledger Hall paid for with his youth answers on its own: a diluted thread of hostile qi, persistent as a leak, riding the draft that slips through stone seams and slat gaps. It is not strong enough to drop a man dead, not yet. That is how such things enter. Proper talisman-bricks should have combed this out, their stamped seals catching what doesn’t belong the way a sieve catches grit. If this taste reaches the furnace court, it has already passed the wall. It has already found a crack someone has failed to record: or chosen not to.
He sends the breath through the crude route he was taught for nights when the body won’t obey: sinking it to the dantian, guiding it along the inner seams of flesh, letting it rise again behind the spine. He follows it the way he once traced talisman characters on damp paper. The air’s taint does not disperse. It clings at the margins, turning into symptoms he can’t argue away: a dull ache blooming behind his eyes, a tightening at the sternum as if an unseen hand is testing his ribs for weakness. Even his tongue, trained to read bitterness and salt, registers a sour-metal note that doesn’t belong to ash. Hunger makes a man imagine feasts, not contamination. This is something passing a seal that should have held.
The western wall rose in his mind as if he stood before it: talisman-bricks crazed with hairline splits, seal-stamps broken at the edges, mortar turned to pale grit by freeze and long, unrecorded neglect. A leak like that meant more than siege danger. It meant hands had been there: midnight hands. Yet until he could lift a fragment, a rubbing, a residue for the clerks to weigh, his knowing was only blame.
If he shaped the suspicion into a name, it would land on rank, and the Ledger Hall would answer with its clean hunger for punishment. His oath-binding would tighten all the same: service twisted into “disorder,” intent irrelevant beneath stamped definitions. He lets the metallic air slide down his throat, forces an exhale that doesn’t shake, and turns to safer arithmetic: evidence. A mark. A residue. Something you can rub onto paper, hold to lamplight, and make undeniable.
Wei waited for the cistern room to exhale.
The guards who watched the hatch did not relax so much as trade their stiffness for another man’s; still, there was a moment in the exchange when shoulders turned and boots scuffed toward the brazier, when the ladle-chain was left to its own soft clink. Wei used that moment the way he used the last pinch of powdered ginger in a fever draught. Without waste, without haste that invited questions.
He kept his back bent like a penitent clerk and carried no lantern. The cistern’s mouth gave off enough pale light of its own, reflected from water that should have been darker. He tasted the air first, only a shallow draw, letting the sour-metal note settle on the back of his tongue. The spring that fed this basin was supposed to smell of stone and cold; tonight it smelled like a seal being warmed too long, the resin beginning to burn.
From inside his sleeve he slid out the needle-fine silver probe: one of the few tools he owned that no one had requisitioned. The metal was already cold, but the damp made it feel alive against his cracked knuckles. He steadied his wrist against the rim, careful not to let the probe scrape and sing. Sound carried here; men half-asleep could wake to it and decide they had seen something.
He lowered the tip into the seep where the spring should have been strongest, the thin thread of incoming water tracing a faint line through stillness. His breath went into the crude pattern the annex taught serfs when they were expected to keep working through dizziness: sink, hold, guide, release. He counted the beats in his belly instead of in his head. On the third cycle he let his alchemical perception open: not a spell, nothing grand, just the trained attention that could tell clean from fouled grain before mold showed.
The seep did not welcome the silver. It resisted, as if the water were thicker than water ought to be, as if it carried a fine grit that wasn’t silt. His fingers wanted to flinch; he made them stay. If Captain Ma walked in now, he would see only a dutiful annex-hand checking levels, nothing more.
The probe came up shining, and in the sheen he saw the first hint beginning to gather.
Along the probe’s edge a color gathers where no color should dare to stay. It is not the bright green of rot or the black sheen of old blood, but a dull, purpling bruise. Thin as an ink wash laid too lightly on paper, then breathed on until it spreads. Clean spring water ought to flee from silver, leaving it bright and honest. This clings. It crawls a finger’s width along the metal as if it recognizes the shape of a tool and chooses it for purchase.
Wei holds the probe in the cistern’s pale reflection and shifts it by a hair, watching how the stain catches and then refuses the light. His tongue tastes that same resin-burnt note again, sharper now that his attention has given it a name it can’t speak aloud.
Not enough. If he brought this to the Ledger Hall, a clerk would ask for a seal, for a sample in a stoppered vial, for a witness who could sign. Yet his trained senses, so often dismissed as annex superstition until a fever breaks, tell him this is not exhaustion inventing phantoms. Wrongness leaves tracks. Someone has fed it.
Wei wiped the probe along the inside of his sleeve where soot already lived, not to hide the discoloration, there was no hiding it from his own eyes, but to fix its bruise-purple in memory the way he fixed shortages and substitutions. The cloth snagged on a burn-scar; his fingers stung and steadied him.
He let the probe’s cold point lead him into the service corridor, moving without lantern, counting his steps by the rhythm of his breath. The air changed in thin layers. Here, stone-sweet. There, the resin-bitter tang again, faint as a clerk’s ink until you leaned close.
He paused at each door seam. Drafts curled under them like cautious hands. A strip of warding paper lifted and trembled though the corridor lay still, its stamped characters shivering as if something had just brushed past. Wei held his breath and listened with his skin.
At the postern hinge he finds it at last: not fresh grease but a dried smear of seal-clay jammed into the narrow shadow where metal meets wood. He slides the probe’s tip under it, lifts it free in one careful pinch, and turns it in the meager lantern-spill. A partial impression surfaces, an arc, a hooked flourish, wrong for Ma’s field-stamp, wrong for Jin’s registry seal.
The impression is careless in the way true offices never allow themselves to be: edges mashed, the curve of authority guessed at and pressed too hard. Close enough to pass in a dim corridor, close enough to buy a moment from a hurried sentry. Wei tears a strip from an old registry bolt, wraps the clay as if swaddling a wound, and slides it beneath his ledger cover. The first solid proof sits against the paper’s spine, small, dry, and waiting to be matched.
Wei waited for the corridor bell the way he waited for water to boil: by counting breaths and listening for the smallest change in sound. When the note finally rang out, thin and tired, it dragged a reshuffling of feet behind it: keys clinking, a sentry’s yawn cut short by discipline, the soft slap of a ledger board being set down.
He moved on the lull between one set of footsteps and the next.
The Ledger Hall’s outer office was not the sanctum itself, but it was close enough that the air changed. Incense thickened until it felt like cloth in the throat, layered over old lacquer and cold stone. Paper screens trembled in the draft of passing bodies, and every table held some version of the same burden. Names inked into permanence, seals pressed like verdicts.
Inside his own ledger cover, the wrapped scrap lay flattened, its hardness a quiet accusation. He held the book with the practiced posture of a clerk’s assistant: both hands, elbows tucked, eyes lowered. If it looked as though it had always belonged under that cover, no one would think to ask how it got there.
He chose the doorway nearest the incense brazier where smoke pooled and rolled along the ceiling beams. The sentry posted there blinked too often, eyes reddened and wet. In that blur of watered vision, a face became “someone from the annex,” and a seal-mark became “probably proper.”
Wei bowed (deep enough to be unthreatening, not so deep it read as guilt) and spoke softly so the man had to lean in.
“I request,” he said, and made his tongue shape the words exactly as the Registry Manuals demanded, “a witness to a seal concern.”
The phrase did its work. The sentry’s hand hesitated on his spear haft, and his gaze slid toward the desks, unwilling. An obligation, once invoked, was a hook in the ribs.
A clerk looked up, annoyance ready on his face: then saw the ledger and the set of Wei’s mouth, and reached for a small brass time-stamp without being told. “State the artifact,” he murmured, voice muffled by smoke, already half in the cadence of procedure.
The junior clerk he finds is narrow-shouldered and ink-splattered, hair tied back with a fraying cord, sleeves rolled to keep them from dragging through other men’s names. He looks up as if expecting a blow, then catches the ledger under Wei’s arm and gathers himself the way clerks do when the law might be listening. A stamped tablet sits by his elbow like a small god.
Wei keeps his eyes lowered. He does not say a noble’s name; he does not even say forgery. He unwraps the strip of registry cloth and sets the clay scrap on the table’s corner, away from the wet ink. With two fingers he turns it, slow, letting the lamplight rake across the impression.
“Here,” Wei murmurs, and his nail traces the outer ring without touching it. “The pressure is uneven. An official seal bites clean. This one bruises.” He points again, to a hooked flourish that leans a hair too far. “And the angle. The ring should sit true. There’s a wobble at the third stroke.”
The clerk’s throat bobs. He leans in despite himself, fear yielding to the comfort of categories. “Recovered where?” he whispers, already reaching for his time-stamp.
Together they bent over a scrap of clean paper, shoulders nearly touching in the narrow pool of lamplight. Wei dictated in the language that kept men alive in Tianlu: bloodless, exact, stripped of names. Unstamped impression fragment; suspected mis-strike; recovered within inner corridor. The junior clerk wrote it down with a hand that trembled only when the water-clock ticked loud in the silence. He chose the safe title (“Irregularity Artifact”) and set the hour mark as if pinning a moth before it could flutter away.
Wei watched him tie the clay scrap to a thin backing sheet with red thread, knotting it tight, then pressing the cheapest office seal over the knot. Not strong enough to ward a ghost, but valid enough that anyone breaking it would leave evidence in fibers and wax.
Wei asked for the countersign with the same tone he used for rations: necessary, finite, already decided. He watched the junior clerk copy a single line into the day’s index. Ink pressed into the fortress’s spine where audits would have to turn pages and touch it. The clerk paused once, eyes flicking to the inner doors where noble laughter thinned the air, then signed. Seal law was a colder terror, and now the entry held them both.
With the registry line secured, Wei went to Captain Ma as he would to a storeroom: steady voice, no ornament. “Irregularity Artifact, inner corridor. Hour mark: third watch. Witness: Clerk Liang. Index: Day-Seven, side column.” He offered the copied reference, not the clay. Let the ink accuse. Ma read, face blank; then his gaze lifted, no longer fixed on Wei’s stained hands, but on the corridor’s hollow length, counting the footsteps that should have been there.
Wei went back to the infirmary as if returning to a duty that would not notice whether his spine bowed or straightened. The brazier had been banked low to save oil; what light remained came from the narrow mouth of the rinsing basin, where water slid in reluctant threads from a pipe furred with frost. He set his kit down, rolled his sleeves, and put his hands under the trickle.
The cold bit first. Then the sting arrived. He kept his fingers splayed, letting the water find the cracks. Soot bled away in gray ribbons. Spirit-salt, ground too coarse in haste, clung to the lines of his palms and the edges of his nails until he rubbed with the pad of his thumb, slow and methodical. The residue sparked faintly as it dissolved, a pale shimmer swallowed by the basin’s dark.
He watched the runoff more than his hands. The stream was thinner than yesterday, and thinner than the day before that: proof without a seal, but proof all the same. When the flow faltered into beads, he shifted his wrists and captured what he could, rinsing with economy, refusing the instinct to hurry. Waste was a kind of sin here. Waste was also evidence, if you knew how to count it.
He dried his fingers on his own sleeve and turned to the shelf of supplies. There were three bandage rolls left that still smelled of boiled hemp. Two more were half-used, their ends frayed where men had torn at them with bloody teeth. Wei lifted each roll, weighed it in his palm, and set it down again in a new arrangement, largest to smallest, intact to compromised, like a ledger made solid.
He took out his charcoal nub and marked the wooden edge of the shelf: tallies, clean strokes, spaced evenly. Not names. Not pleas. Just quantities that would match, or fail to match, when another hand came to count. Behind him, a soldier moaned in sleep, and another muttered a prayer to an ancestor who might not be listening. Wei kept his gaze on the marks until his breathing steadied, until the infirmary’s scarcity became something he could measure and therefore fight.
He stopped asking for more cloth as if the words themselves had become a wasteful luxury. When the last clean roll on the shelf was gone, he went to the refuse basket by the clerk’s table and lifted out what others had already decided was useless: a bolt of registry cloth, stiff with old ink and thumb-smears, stained too deeply to be re-stitched into any archive. The weave was still honest. The fibers would hold.
He laid it on the work board and took the small knife he used for shaving dried root. He did not hack. He measured by finger-width, then by the faint grid the cloth itself remembered from being wrapped around a ledger spine. Strip after strip came away in exact, repeatable lengths. He stacked them in neat piles and tied each pile with a single overhand knot in the same place, making standardized lots: ten to a bundle, no arguing, no “about.”
When a runner came for bandages, Wei handed over a bundle and, without raising his voice, made him count aloud. The count became a record even without ink. The quartermaster, later, would find fewer shadows to hide in.
Between groans and fevered muttering, Wei worked as if he were back at the cistern, testing what everyone else assumed was merely cloth. He slid a needle-fine silver probe along each strip’s cut edge, then breathed once, slow, to steady his own qi before he let his trained perception answer. Most fibers lay dull and honest. Some caught, just for a heartbeat, with a greasy chill that wasn’t blood and wasn’t soot, a faint wrongness that clung the way taint clung to water drawn too near a cracked ward.
He didn’t throw those strips away. Waste was a luxury. He set them in a separate stack for the men already paling toward death, and touched each with a single dot of ash near the knot. Not a warning. A mark. So later, when a wound soured or held, the outcome could be counted.
When the runner arrived with a breathless “routine requisition,” Wei simply nodded and pulled a scrap of registry paper from the clerk’s stack. He wrote in the correct, obedient phrasing, cited the same index reference Captain Ma had mentioned, and listed the amounts with careful emptiness where excuses might go. Then he left the seal line bare on purpose. Let the clerk stamp it: trace. Let him refuse: trace. The chain tightened without breaking.
Night thinned toward dawn without ever quite becoming light. Wei kept his head down and his ink-stained fingers moving: tear, tie, note. A name, a wound’s character, the cloth lot by knot and ash-dot, a time mark taken from the watch drum’s intervals. Shouting could be denied; these entries could not. Below, the siege drums persisted, and each strip he set aside felt like a lever seated in the fortress’s gears, waiting.
The lanterns in the valley answer one last time, three low flickers, one long, and the signal doesn’t just speak to rebels; it presses on every seal-stamp inside the fortress, as if the air itself has been countersigned. Wei Wenyu feels it in the back of his throat before he understands it with his mind: a dryness like ground cinnabar, a faint bitterness that means spirit-ink has been disturbed somewhere it shouldn’t.
In the alchemical annex the furnace has been banked to a sullen glow, its mouth shut by decree to save fuel. Even so, the ash in the corners trembles. It lifts in thin, uncertain streams along the walls, searching for a draft, searching for a line to follow. Wei’s fingers (raw from lye and heat) hover over his ledger as if the columns might tell him what the officers won’t. His careful handwriting looks suddenly childish against the weight of the night.
Boots pass in the corridor beyond the annex door: hurried, then checked, then hurried again. A clerk’s voice recites a pass-code too quickly, and another voice answers with the flat impatience of a guard who has been told to listen for rebellion in every syllable. The fortress has rules for everything but it has no proper form for this feeling, this sense of a mandate being tested like a rotten beam.
Wei takes his small kit from under the workbench. The mortar thuds softly when he sets it down. He uncorks one of the spirit-salt vials and tips a few pale crystals into his palm. They sting as they melt against his skin, cold that becomes heat, heat that becomes a prickling awareness. Beneath the ordinary stink of sweat and smoke, he catches it again: a thin, hostile thread, like iron left too long in rainwater.
Somewhere on the western wall a talisman-brick has finally given up pretending it is whole.
He puts the vial away with a care that feels like prayer, and steps into the passage, head bowed as if he is only going to fetch more bandages. Because in this place, being small and dutiful is the closest thing to armor a serf is allowed.
Below the cliff-shelf, the siege engines do not finish their labor. They halt as if a command has been swallowed. Capstans arrested, counterweights hanging, thick ropes losing their taut song and sagging into slack loops without the mercy of release. The silence that follows is not peace; it is exposure.
Inside the walls, men hear what they have been training themselves not to hear. A belly gives a sharp, embarrassing complaint. Someone’s teeth click once, twice, in the cold. From an alcove comes the dry murmur of a prayer recited not for victory but for an orderly death, words shaped to fit between regulations like contraband.
The fortress itself speaks in small pains. Frost works the mortar joints with a slow, patient creak, and the sound is so intimate it seems to come from within one’s own ribs. Somewhere in the dark, a ration bucket is set down too hard, and the hollow ring travels along stone like a rumor.
Wei Wenyu feels the quiet settle over the corridors the way ash settles on water, thin, deliberate, refusing to disperse.
Along the western curtain the gate-bolts answer in a broken rhythm, iron rasping on stone as different hands obey different fears. One slides free with practiced care; another is wrenched back so hard it shrieks, and a third sticks half-drawn, trembling as boots kick at it. The sound runs down the parapet like spilled coins. Above it, the ward-threads, thin, buried lines of seal-work and old prayers, begin to wake under strain. They do not ignite cleanly. They gather themselves grudgingly, a low vibration in the bricks, like a scribe forced from sleep to stamp petitions by torchlight. Wei feels it through the soles of his shoes: a humming that wobbles, catches, resumes: attention without rest, power without certainty.
At the western weak point the talisman-bricks take the strain like old men bracing a gate. Hairline cracks web the stamped characters; each seal-mark trembles as hostile seepage noses through, sour as rust in a cistern. The ward-line answers in a sick rhythm (flare, falter, flare) brightening and dimming like a lamp fed on rationed oil, each pulse thinner than the last.
The fortress answers the hush with motion, belated and panicked. Boots begin to drum through the throat of its corridors; keyrings clatter, then scrape as locks are found by touch. Men shout for stamped passes and proper countersigns as if the seals themselves could hold a door. Wei hears it and thinks, bleakly, that the running comes first: paper always arrives afterward, panting.
Captain Ma drove the scouts into place with the economy of a hunter laying snares. There was no speech to rally them. Only the blunt reshaping of bodies into a line where a line ought to be. He caught shoulders, shoved hips, hooked a boot with his own to square a man to the crenel. The wallwalk was slick with frost and ash; even standing still hurt. Fingers, bare where gloves had split, clung to bowstaves that felt like iron pulled from a river.
Wei kept to the lee of a merlon, half in shadow, half in the thin spill of wardlight. From here he could see Ma’s face when the lanterns below winked, three, then one, then a pause, signals meant for men who still believed light could be trusted. Ma didn’t. His eyes tracked the slope instead of the patterns, reading the drifted snow for the true story: where feet had churned it, where shields had shaved it smooth.
He pointed with the butt of an arrow, not at the lantern-feints, but at the crack in the talisman-brickwork where the seal-stamps webbed with hairline fractures. His voice carried without strain.
“No loosing for ghosts,” he said. “No loosing for light.”
A scout swallowed, jaw working. “Captain, if they, ”
“If they climb, you’ll see hands. If they breathe, you’ll hear it.” Ma’s gaze slid down the line, counting, bows, quivers, the tremor in a wrist that meant someone was already cold through. “Hold. Count your shafts like grain. First bodies at the break. Not the second. Not the tenth. First.”
Wei felt the order land like a stamped decree. It wasn’t mercy; it was arithmetic. Arrows were a ration now, measured against the number of throats that would reach the parapet.
Below, something thudded. Wood on stone, then the wet cough of a grappling hook catching. The ward-hum in the bricks stuttered again, sour heat licking at Wei’s senses. Ma raised his hand. Every bow bent, quiet as a collective breath held too long.
In the inner galleries the fortress reverted to its oldest instinct: paperwork as shield. Clerks poured out of the Ledger Hall side-doors with their sleeves stuffed with slips, the lacquered passes still tacky where a seal had been pressed too hard. Runner-boys, children with frost-stiff knees, darted between them, clutching token-boards like talismans and chanting the names of offices the way peasants recited saints.
They slammed shoulder-first into one another at every turn. Bundles split; cords snapped; bamboo tags skittered across flagstones and vanished under boots. Someone cursed and still bent to gather them, as if a missing counterseal might invite the same punishment as an open gate.
“Countersign!” a scribe barked, thrusting a pass up under a lantern’s weak glow. “Registrar’s red, not quartermaster’s, look, look, ”
“I’m not authorized,” another answered, eyes wide, palms out. “You want me marked? You want my name struck?”
Behind them the alarm-drums beat faster, erasing syllables, erasing sense. Yet hands kept lifting tokens to one another while the corridors filled with breath and ink and fear.
Han Heshan rode that reflex like a well-trained mount. He surfaced where corridors narrowed, where fear made people grateful for any certainty, and he never stayed long enough to be questioned. A sleeve flashed; a token-board appeared as if it had been waiting in the air. He pressed fresh seal-impressions into damp palms, the cinnabar still tacky, and his voice was mild as a clerk’s lullaby. “By order,” he murmured, “by order. Move now, before the counterseal arrives.” Names of offices fell from him in the correct sequence. Numbers, too. A team of porters turned because he angled his hand; a file of spear-men peeled off because his stamp looked like command. Behind him, doubt tried to form, and found no foothold on proper paperwork.
Misdirection bred like mold in a damp ledger room. Lamp oil, precious as blood, was hauled toward storerooms already dark while corridor lamps guttered and died. Spear-staves were thrust into hands without shields, and men with shields were sent to fetch more staves. In the roll-call courts, the same names were shouted twice from stamped lists that no longer matched living bodies: seals immaculate, reality unraveling.
Below the wall, Chen Cangyong drove his ranks uphill in measured surges, not a mob but a tool: shield rims locked, spearpoints tucked, breaths counted between drumbeats. Arrows hissed down and found the gaps anyway. He did not look away when men folded; he only tightened the cadence, as if casualties were a fee he could pay once, to buy the Ledger Hall’s door before it shut again.
Wei Wenyu did not follow the roar. He let it slide past him like wind past a shut shutter and turned instead into the fortress’s spine, where authority ran in straight lines and every door wore a stamped label like a collar. The air here was warmer. Not from comfort, but from bodies packed too close and lamps kept low to spare oil. Clerks flowed in countercurrent, sleeves gathered, mouths moving without sound as they traded news like contraband.
He kept his head down the way a serf was supposed to, but he did not slow. In his left hand the requisition slip crumpled and uncrumpled with his grip: a strip of mulberry paper half-dried, ink smeared where he’d written faster than the brush could drink. No seal. No counterseal. Only the tight, ugly urgency of a list, spirit-salt, lamp oil, clean water, bandage cloth, things that no longer existed in the quantities men pretended.
At the first junction a pair of runners nearly collided with him. One glanced at the soot on Wei’s cuffs and dismissed him, already searching for someone with rank to blame. Wei slipped between them and felt, as plainly as heat from a kiln, the faint wrongness threading the corridor stones. Hostile seepage. Not strong enough to knock a man down. Just enough to turn a crowd’s fear into panic, to make mistakes look like fate.
A guard barred the next passage with his spear haft, eyes flicking to the paper in Wei’s hand. “Orders are. For an instant the guard’s certainty faltered. Specialists were allowed to hurry. Oath-bound serfs were allowed to be used.
“It’s for ward contamination,” Wei said, keeping his voice as small as possible while still forcing it through. He tapped the slip with one knuckle. “Annex shortage. I need the Ledger countersign.”
The guard’s gaze snagged on the words ward and Ledger: the fortress’s twin fears. Behind him, a clerk’s door whispered as it opened and shut, seals clicking like teeth. Wei stepped forward before the hesitation could harden into refusal, and the passage swallowed him, narrowing toward the heart where names were kept and made to obey.
The Ledger Hall’s outer chamber hit Wei Wenyu like stepping into a stream in winter. Shock without sound. Lacquered registers rose in neat ranks along the walls, their black backs gleaming, each one banded and labeled as if a name could be braced against hunger. Between them, seal-cases sat in cradles of carved wood, their bronze corners chained to iron rings set into the stone. The chains were not for thieves, Wei thought. They were for clerks who might remember mercy.
Incense burned in a thin, official thread, trying to sweeten the sour bite of old ink and damp paper. It failed. The smell of correction (scraped characters, re-wetted pages) sat under everything like bruising.
Jin stood beneath the hanging tally-board, armor creaking when he shifted his weight, voice driving the room the way a mallet drives a stamp. He snapped decrees at runners, as if even breath needed a countersign. “Pass-token. Seal it. Now. The proper red.”
Clerks hunched over low tables, brushes trembling with haste, eyes fixed downward in practiced blindness. The ward-lamps along the beams flickered with a sickly stutter, and in that stutter Wei felt the seepage’s thread, thin, persistent, patient as rot.
Wei set his inkstone down on the counting table, then the two vials of spirit-salt beside it. He did not ask. The scrape of stone on lacquer cut clean through the lull between Jin’s shouted orders, and a few brushes paused as if the sound had struck their wrists.
He kept his shoulders rounded, gaze lowered, exactly what a serf should look like in the Hall, but his voice came out like a line item read aloud. “Western wall talisman-bricks, third tier: registry stamps Xi-47 through Xi-52. Cracked. The seepage follows the stamp-grooves.” He nudged the requisition slip forward. “Lamp oil is short by three jin, seven liang, compared to the last sealed tally. The cistern flow: two buckets less each morning since the ninth day. The ration proclamations do not match the dates recorded.”
Jin’s glare came down like a seal-stamp. “A serf in my Hall?” he demanded, hand near the register chains as if they were a weapon. Wei did not offer apology. He offered sequence. “Requisition for spirit-salt: signed by Clerk Lu, lacking Second Seal. Pass-token ledger, West Gate folio. Corner smudged where the stamp was lifted, reset.” He met no eyes. “Postern-latch grease: Captain Ma’s dates. Every third night. Pattern, not accident.”
The chamber seemed to narrow around the counting table. A clerk’s eyes lifted, then dropped as if burned; a runner froze with a scroll held midair. Jin’s jaw flexed, weighing punishment against the danger of being seen to hesitate. Wei kept his gaze down, ash on his sleeves like humility, and slid the final truth forward: spirit-salt enough for a test, not a pardon: use it, and the ward-lines would betray whoever had been feeding them rot.
Wei broke the jar’s wax with the pad of a thumb already split from furnace work and rationed cold. The seal gave with a quiet, stubborn crack, the sound of something meant to be official failing in private. A breath went around the counting table. Clerks who had learned to fear any act done without witnesses, without the proper calligraphy to make it safe.
By regulation it was simple: one pinch per ward-nail, measured on the brass spoon, recorded in the salt ledger, countersigned by a second hand that did not tremble. Spirit-salt was not medicine; it was mandate made granular. Even the air around it tasted faintly metallic, clean in a way starvation never was.
Wei did not reach for the spoon.
He tipped the jar into his palm. Grains gathered like frost, too bright for the soot-black Hall, then slid between his fingers. He felt Jin’s stare like a blade held close to skin, waiting for the smallest excuse. He kept his head bowed as if counting, as if this were obedience and not theft.
“Name,” one clerk whispered, before he could stop himself. The word carried the weight of registry: who would be marked for this subtraction.
Wei’s throat tightened. His oath sat under his tongue like a swallowed coin. Serve the fortress. The binding never said serve the seals. He closed his fingers around the salt and forced his hand steady.
“It will be accounted,” he said, voice low, almost gentle. Not a plea. A line he could later write down without lying.
A runner shifted, parchment rustling. Someone’s brush hovered above an empty column, waiting for Jin’s command to begin the punishment script. Jin said nothing. The Hall’s silence became its own order.
Wei stepped away from the table toward the door, the salt biting into the raw cracks of his skin. He did not look back to see if anyone followed. If they wanted him stopped, they would have to do it openly, with seals and witnesses and all the machinery that made cruelty feel lawful.
His palm stung as if the grains had teeth. Underneath that clean sting, his trained perception found the other taste, faintly sour, like spoiled rice-water, threading through the stone of the western wall, patient and hungry.
He crouched where the western stones sweated cold, back to the wind-slot, and poured a thread of cistern water into his palm. The spirit-salt softened at once, turning from bright grit to a thin, chalk-white paste that clung to the lines of his skin. The water smelled of iron and old moss, too thin, too rationed, yet it was all he was permitted, all the fortress would admit it had left.
Wei set the first touch against a talisman-brick and drew it out, not straight as a mason would, but obedient to the pressure under his perception: the faint sour bite that did not belong in honest stone. The crack looked like nothing, a hairline fault under stamped characters. To him it pulled like a mouth working silently.
He took his silver probes from his sleeve. The needles quivered when they neared the fracture, not from his shaking, he forced his breath into the dull cadence of stabilizing forms, but from something reaching back, a slow, wet current in the wall.
“Here,” he murmured, to no one. He dragged the milky slurry along the fault, letting it find the leak’s hidden edges, and kept drawing until the paste thinned and his raw fingers began to burn.
The wash did not seal; it obeyed his hand like a reluctant stream. Wei shifted his wrist, not chasing straight lines but steering by taste and pressure. Sour where the hostile seepage licked, numb where honest stone still held. He laid the chalk-white paste in a slanting braid across the fracture, guiding it away from the deeper threads he could feel running toward the ancestral terrace, those shrineward veins that drank blood and answered anger. Not there, he thought, and forced the current aside.
He worked it toward a single junction where three talisman-bricks met, a place of old repairs and cramped script. The ward-line responded with a broken hum, a stammering resonance that made his teeth ache, as if the fortress was trying to recite its mandate and finding gaps in its own memory.
When the redirected pressure struck the junction, the ward did not flash. It flowered. Light crawled, patient as mold, along mortar seams and the stamped characters, and where it touched, the stone confessed. Altered seal-impressions blistered into sharp halos; overwritten registry-marks rose like scraped lacquer; “missing” countersigns burned in thin, accusing threads. For one suspended heartbeat, the wall became a ledger anyone could read.
The cost landed in the same moment as the light. Spirit-salt, thinned to mercy, still bit through his wrapping and found the furnace burns beneath; pain snapped his careful breathing into uneven pulls. He felt his last private grains being drawn off his palm, fed into the flare to keep it from scattering. Wei swayed, jaw locked, and held: long enough for anyone watching to see it: not chance, not rebels alone, but sabotage folded neatly into stamped procedure, suddenly undeniable.
The flare did not strike like lightning; it seeped, deliberate, along the western parapet as if dawn had been poured from a ladle and told to find every crack. In that warped brightness Captain Ma saw what ordinary torchlight forgave. The stone’s surface, usually a single hard story, broke into layers: soot smears laid down by winter wind, boot-scuffs from routine patrol, and, new, an oily gloss where hands had worried the latch too often.
Grease where grease was forbidden. Not the animal fat the cooks hoarded, but lamp oil thinned with something slicker, so the iron tongue would lift without a complaint. The flare made it shine like wet fish-scale.
He crouched, two fingers hovering, then touched the mark and drew them to his nose. The scent was faint, masked, yet wrong in a way his body recognized before his mind named it. His gaze followed the trail as if it were a set of prints in fresh snow: a half-moon smear on the inner parapet, a scuffed patch where someone had braced, a thread of powdery residue caught in mortar like blue-black pollen.
Spirit-ink. Not the cheap soot ink clerks mixed from ash and spit: this one had depth, a cold sheen, the kind used for seals meant to outlast weather and audits. It ran in a ribbon only the flare made legible, leading away from the wall toward the places officers pretended were inviolate.
Below, men shouted. Somewhere metal rang; somewhere a body hit stone. The western weak point was already becoming a mouth.
Ma lifted his head. Jin stood further down the walk, armored, barking at runners. Ordering bodies into gaps, ordering courage by decree. For a breath Ma waited for the command that would name what Ma was seeing. It didn’t come. Jin’s eyes were on the valley, not on the wall’s own confession.
Ma’s decision settled with the same quiet certainty as a drawn bow. A breach could be plugged with flesh until the flesh ran out; a hand inside the fortress would open it again, and again, and call it misfortune. He rose, turned from the parapet without saluting, and followed the ink’s invisible road.
Ma dropped from the wallwalk into the service stair without looking down, boots finding each narrow tread as if the stone had been laid for his feet alone. The shouting above dulled, replaced by the close, muffled hush of inner passages where orders traveled on paper more often than breath. He moved the way he tracked deer in new snow: slow enough to hear the world, fast enough that the world could not rearrange itself behind him.
The clerk routes were meant to be protected by more than locks. A wicket gate waited at the landing, its lintel stamped with a ward-sign and a name-line that promised punishment for the unregistered. Ma did not spit or bow. He drew his snare wire, looped it around the iron tongue, and twisted until metal complained. The warding seal resisted like a held breath, then let go with a small, almost embarrassed click. Taboo broke cleanly. Nothing thundered. No ancestor struck him down.
Cold corridor air slid over his face, and with it came a scent too refined for starvation: spirit-ink, cut with resin and powdered mica, sharp as winter pears. Han Heshan had passed this way recently.
Han Heshan heard boots in the service stair and let the kindly mask slide from his face as easily as a sleeve. At the next turning he met a lone gate-guard, young, hollow-eyed, before a clerk-only door banded in iron. Han’s hand produced a pass-token with practiced boredom. “By Registry convenience,” he said, voice smooth with the idioms that made men obey without thinking. “Emergency conveyance of seal-stock. Delay will be entered.”
For a heartbeat the guard’s fingers closed around the token as if it were real authority. Then the ward-flare’s afterlight, still clinging to stone like a memory of dawn, caught the stamp. The crimson impression softened, bled at its edge, and the seal-lines swam. Wrong ink, wrong spirit-pressure.
The guard’s gaze flickered up, doubt opening like a crack. Captain Ma did not give it time to widen. He hit the door with his shoulder before the bar could fall, wood shuddering, iron screaming, and drove Han onward into the maze where clerks once walked untouchable.
At the torn gap in the western wall, rebels spilled through like floodwater, months of gnawing hunger and grievance in their breath. Their eyes lifted, greedy for the ancestral terrace’s height (its incense vents, its shrine-steps) mistaking sacred ground for the surest ground. Wei Wenyu lurched into their line, ash-caked, salt-burned blood dark on his sleeve. He raised a shaking hand and, voice scraped raw, named the ward’s price: spill blood there and the shrine would answer.
Redirected, the first surge ran not toward desecration but toward mechanism: down the clerk corridors where lantern light trembled on seal-stamps and hinge-plates tattooed with script. Wei dragged air into his lungs, forced his cultivation breaths into a steady rhythm, and kept calling, hoarse with pain: Not the terrace. The Hall. Faces turned, anger re-aimed. They began to see the true lever was ink. Behind them, orders thinned, and men chose the flare they’d witnessed over voices they’d always feared.
The Ledger Hall gates trembled under the press of bodies: shoulders jammed tight, spear-butts thudding into lacquered wood until the metal studs rang like struck coins. The seal-script set into the lintel flared in thin, sickly lines, then dimmed, then flared again, as if the ward were a lamp starved of oil. Each pulse carried a taste in the air: iron, incense, and the faint sting of spirit-salt where someone had tried to shore up failing law with costly powder.
Wei Wenyu stood half a corridor back, pinned by the crush and by his own oath’s invisible leash. His trained senses snagged on the ward’s discharge the way a finger snags on a rough seam. There was authority in it, yes, but also gaps, seams poorly mended, ink that had been asked to bear weight it did not recognize. He watched the light crawl over the gatebricks and saw where it hesitated, where it skittered away as though ashamed.
Jin planted himself before the threshold like a nail driven into a board. In one hand he snapped open a lacquered register; in the other he held his seal as if it were a blade. His voice cut through the corridor’s roar with practiced brutality. He spoke names the way a clerk speaks sums: this one owes grain, that one owes years, that one owes his breath. He invoked conscriptions, penalties, oath-binds. Ordering the ink to bite back, to wrap itself around wrists and throats and haul men to their knees.
For a heartbeat, the ward answered. Lines of script on the gates brightened; a pressure pushed outward, making rebels stagger as if they’d struck a living thing. Then the light guttered. It did not fail cleanly. It stuttered, caught between orders, the way a tired scribe’s hand trembles between characters.
Wei felt it: the hall itself unsure which authority to obey. Somewhere in those registers were contradictions. Countersigns that didn’t match, entries overwritten, seals impressed with the wrong spirit-pressure. Jin’s commands landed on ink that had already been taught to lie. The ward flared again, weaker, and in its hesitation Wei heard the bureaucracy’s oldest fear: not rebellion, but an audit.
Wei stepped forward into the choke-point as if into a mouth. Behind the iron grates the seal-vault breathed a dry, cold air that carried spirit-salt’s sting and the dull sweetness of lacquered paper. Old vows sealed and shelved, waiting to be used like weapons. The corridor pressed tight around him: rebel shoulders, garrison sleeves, clerks clutching pass-slips so hard the paper fluttered like wounded birds.
He did not look toward the shrine stairs. He kept his gaze on what his hands knew, ink, pressure, impression. The gatebricks’ rubbings glimmered where ward-light had licked them; the countersigns on the passes shone with fresh panic-sweat. In that thin flare his trained perception caught the mismatch: one seal’s spirit-pressure too shallow, another’s stroke-weight wrong, a third turned a fraction off the registry’s axis.
Wei lifted his ash-smeared finger and pointed, not accusing any person, only the marks. “Those stamps don’t match,” he said.
The words were small. They struck anyway. Not a rebel’s threat, not a prayer: an audit note spoken aloud, the kind the Hall could never dismiss as mere rage.
Jin’s eyes narrowed, and he did what frightened men in office always did: widened the net until everyone was caught. “Kneel,” he barked. “Renew the oath. Here. Now.” He struck his seal to the register’s margin. Clerks, soldiers, annex-workers (anyone with a name in ink) were forced into the corridor’s cramped geometry of ritual, palms pressed to cold brick as if the wall itself were witness.
The ward-line tried to bite. It stuttered instead. Names slid out of alignment with their seals; punishments flung at rebels snagged on garrison scribes and furnace boys whose entries had been “streamlined,” countersigns altered to make shortages look orderly.
Wei breathed once, slow, and placed his voice where law could hear it. “Service binds me to the fortress,” he said, careful as a brushstroke. “To its mandate. To keeping sacred ground unbloodied.” The phrasing wedged into the ritual like a shim under a door: holding the terrace aside, forcing the surge toward the ledgers where the oath’s true teeth lived.
From the service passages came the ugly music of a chase ending: boots skidding, a grunt, then a breathless curse swallowed by stone. Captain Ma dragged Han Heshan into the lantern-light by his sleeve, hard as hauling in a snared fox. Han’s frost-bitten fingers were still stained with spirit-ink. His kit split; forged seal-impressions clattered out. Ma slapped them beside Jin’s boots. What once blurred audits now lay sharp as proof. Han’s smile finally cracked.
The ward-line answered with one last, measured flare and then thinned to nothing. Silence fell as if the mandate had breathed out and discovered no hook left in the world. Jin’s fingers hovered above the register, trapped between command and comprehension; the pages no longer cut, only contradicted. Wei’s lungs scraped with smoke as he shepherded bodies through the gap he’d made (off the shrineward stones, into the ledger’s throat) until authority failed not with shouting, but with ink that refused to hold.
Dawn comes thin and gray, more a lifting of shadow than a blessing, and Tianlu’s corridors do not answer it with their usual ritual. No clerk’s sing-song tally, no barked “Present” to bind the day to ink. The silence sits in the throat of the fortress like a swallowed stone. Wei Wenyu wakes before he means to. Habit drags him upright on his pallet in the alchemical annex, ash gritty on his cheek, fingers curled as if around a brush. For a breath he waits for the bell that orders labor and obedience. None comes. The furnace court is cold enough that his breath ghosts, and the jars on the shelf seem to listen with him.
Then: the drawn rasp of wood on stone. A bar being shifted from its cradle. A bolt lifted with care rather than ceremony. The sound travels oddly without the constant murmur of bureaucracy to soften it, each small act of unfastening landing like a verdict.
From the corridor a voice, woman’s, hoarse, whispers a name the way one addresses a clerk at a window. “Recorded. Another voice answers with a shush that is not command but disbelief.
Wei slides his feet into worn cloth shoes and moves to the threshold. He does not step fully out. The oath in his bones, the ink-deep habit of not crossing without sanction, tightens at his ribs. He draws a slow cultivation breath feeling for the familiar sting of binding. It is there, but slackened, like a knot that has been worked loose by other hands.
More bolts. A latch clicks, tentative. Someone laughs once, sharp with fear, then swallows it. In the distance, from deeper within the keep, comes the scrape of a door that has not yielded in months. Wei’s gaze drops to his own stained fingers. He thinks of seals impressed into wet clay, of names turned into property by a single brushstroke.
The fortress is waiting, walls, wards, people, for an authorized voice. And for the first time in his memory, none arrives.
Doors that had once yielded only to lacquered tokens and the bite of a seal now came loose under unmarked fingers. Bars slid back with a sound like breath released too late, and for a moment no one moved, as if the stone itself might remember the old rules and strike. Wei watched from the annex threshold, his shoulders held tight against habit. The binding in his chest did not flare; it only tugged, confused, like a leash cut and still felt in the skin.
In the passage, men who had worn the garrison’s cords stepped out with their hands open, palms turned outward in a silent pledge: not reaching, not taking. Opposite them, rebels in patched coats kept spearpoints down, blades angled toward the floor, careful not to let metal ring against the shrine-stones. Eyes flicked to every lintel and every ink-dark talisman-brick, gauging whether authority still lived there.
They walked around the incense vents as if heat might still scald, and around the ancestral paths as if a careless heel could wake a punishment. Nobody dared spit. Nobody dared shout. Freedom, at first, arrived as caution.
Along the corridor toward the inner keep, the fortress’s lines of rank fold in on themselves. Men who once held whips and keys stand shoulder to shoulder with the ones who carried buckets and corpses, each breathing the same trapped ash, each careful where they put their boots. Faces that had been permitted only to lower their eyes now lift them, quick, measuring glances, not quite daring to settle. No one cheers. Even relief seems superstitious here, as if sound might summon the old mandate back through the cracks in the talisman-bricks.
A former overseer clears his throat and thinks better of speaking. A rebel’s hand tightens on a spearshaft, then loosens. The questions pass between them without words: who will give orders now, and who will be made to answer for the night the seals went quiet.
Wei Wenyu is guided through the corridor’s gathered bodies the way one carries a cracked jar: hands close, grips gentle, the fear not of him but of what he represents. No one shoves. No one bows. A rebel walks on each side because the hall ahead is ink and seal and law, and his eyes can still tell true stamps from lies. He keeps his gaze lowered, counting absent faces by habit, drawing slow breaths to taste for taint: blood too near shrine-stone, water gone sharp with seeped qi, panic heavy enough to curdle a room.
Chen Cangyong’s people spread along the hall approaches with their spearbutts planted soft, eyes scanning hands more than faces. Two men take the stair-landing, not to threaten, but to stop anyone slipping away with seal-rubbers or oil-lamps. Commands come in unadorned speech, hold, wait, let them pass, and the quiet obedience answers. The fortress stirs, tentative, like a limb relearning weight.
The Ledger Hall doors did not burst inward. They simply gave, on a dry complaint of wood, as if the warding had been holding its breath and now decided to let it go. Cold air slid out, ink-scented and stale, carrying the old discipline of the room. Wei Wenyu crossed the threshold with his hands tucked into his sleeves, fingers remembering what they had been taught never to touch without leave. Clerks in soot-dark robes stood frozen behind their desks, their faces pale crescents above collars, brush-tips still stained. Someone had been mid-stroke; a character trailed off into nothing where the writer’s courage had failed. No one shouted for them to kneel. A rebel with a scarred knuckle pointed, not at throats, but at corners and shelves. “Away from the cabinets,” he said. “Leave the inkstones upright.”
The order was oddly reverent. Ink overturned could be claimed as accident, as omen; in this place, even a spill might become a pretext for punishment. Wei heard a clerk swallow and felt, behind his ribs, the old reflex to apologize for existing.
Chen Cangyong entered last, letting the room see his empty hands. “Count them,” he said, voice level. “In front of everyone. If one page goes missing, we will know whose sleeve it rode in.”
They brought the registers out one by one. Lacquered covers, corners worn to the grain; title slips tied with cord; the weight of names pressing through wood and paper like trapped weather. Men who had carried stones and corpses took them as carefully as newborns, palms flat under the spines, forearms braced. Wei watched for haste, for greed’s twitch. He watched for the subtle wrongness of altered seals, the counterfeit sheen of fresh spirit-ink.
He was made to speak only when asked. “That one,” he murmured once, and the carrier halted. “It’s the ration ledger. Don’t bend it: pages crack in the cold.”
A clerk’s eyes flicked up at him, startled by the fact that his knowledge was being used without a lash attached. The registers were set on a clean mat in the corridor, counted aloud, guarded on all sides. Nothing disappeared into private sleeves. The hall, emptied of its hoarded weight, began to look less like a court and more like a room where people might breathe.
The seal-vault is opened in daylight, not by a triumphal shout but by the scrape of key in old metal and the soft grunt of men leaning their shoulders into a door that has always meant consequence. Wei Wenyu stands close enough to smell the lacquer and camphor that once clung to punishments like incense. Inside, the shelves are neat in the way hunger makes people neat: clay seal-blocks stacked by office, iron seal-rubbers wrapped in oiled cloth, tablets etched with the characters for confiscation, lashes, exile: words that used to bite before they were even read.
Chen Cangyong has them brought out and laid on a mat as if they are tools taken from a dead craftsman’s chest. “Count,” he says. Not “bow.”
Wei names stamps by their registry marks, voice low, careful. A rebel scribe repeats each title, dips a brush, and writes it down without trembling. No one reaches for a collar. No one steps back as if the clay could leap. In the clean light, the seals look chipped, ordinary: objects that require hands to make them cruel. The room’s air loosens, and the throat of it stops threatening to close.
In the main corridor they lay the conscription rolls on a trestle as if preparing a body. A single brush is brought out, its hairs trimmed to a narrow edge; the ink is not the fortress’s old punitive black but whatever can be spared, thinned with cold water. Names are read, then read again. Witnesses step forward and confirm each line in plain speech: yes, that one; no, he died at the west wall; she was taken for kitchen labor, not levy. Then the brush crosses the characters with one deliberate stroke, neither flourish nor anger, just a steady hand cutting a knot. It is slow enough to feel like drudgery. Until the corridor’s breathing changes, and the weight of hundreds of lines struck through becomes a kind of mercy made visible.
What came after was not victory-talk but arithmetic, and it turned the corridor mean. Wei watched pages open like wounds: rations narrowed by half-grains no mouth could spare, lamp oil entered twice under two seals, medicine “issued” and replaced with jars rinsed clean. Water tallies fell again. Each mark lower, each day shorter. The first honest totals made the lanternlight feel thinner than the wind.
The infirmary benches keep a census no ledger can revise. Wei knows the pattern of bodies the way he knows ingredient weights: the old porter who always claimed the hottest corner by the brazier, the young archer who joked through stitches, the silent woman who brought her own rag to bite. Now there are clean spans of plank. Some names survive only as ink; others slipped into the dark before anyone could write them free.
Chen Cangyong chose a storeroom that still smelled of hemp and old millet husks, its shutters warped so the mountain wind worried at every crack. No dais waited for him: only a plank dragged from a collapsed cot and laid across two barrels. Someone had swept, not out of ceremony but because rats loved corners, and order began with corners.
At the center of the plank he set a guard captain’s badge, dulled by years of polishing. Not a crown. Not a rebel token. Just proof of what he had been inside these walls, and what he would not pretend to be now. When the murmuring swelled, he lifted the badge between two fingers and turned it so the stamped characters caught the weak light.
“I won’t trade one hidden whip for another,” he said. His voice carried without shouting, drilled by watch calls and winter alarms. “We are boxed in by rock and hunger. If we start eating each other in secret, the siege is finished without a ladder.”
He named the first law: no private hoarding. Not because sharing was holy, but because a hidden sack was a knife held under a sleeve. The second: no secret judgments: no midnight tribunals, no whispered sentences decided by rank or friendship. Accusations would be spoken in the open and answered in the open, with witnesses named and heard. The third: no violence on shrine-ground. He did not dress it as piety. He spoke of consequence: the terrace wards were old and watching, and blood there would turn stone and spirit alike against whoever spilled it.
Each law, he insisted, had the same spine: written record, plain enough for any hand to recognize. A former clerk was pulled forward, ink-stained and trembling; a soldier with cracked knuckles stood beside him, chosen not for letters but for stubbornness. “If it isn’t written where all can see,” Chen said, tapping the plank hard enough to make the badge jump, “it doesn’t count. If it can’t be checked, it can’t be enforced. That is how we keep from becoming what we fled.”
Chen had the doors thrown wide and the shutters pinned back with spear shafts so the light couldn’t be bargained with. Men dragged out sacks that had lived behind locks, jars crusted with old seal-wax, bundles of lamp-wick tied in twine darkened by soot. Wei stood close enough to smell grain-dust and rancid oil, silver probe tucked in his sleeve on habit, and watched Chen’s hands: no flourish, only the refusal to let anything stay hidden.
“Open it,” Chen ordered, and the knife went in.
Millet spilled like pale teeth. A ladle was dipped, leveled with a finger, poured into a bowl; the bowl was emptied and dipped again until the measure became a rhythm the room could see. Lamp-wicks were unrolled, pinched between thumb and forefinger, weighed against a stone marked with an old registry notch. The numbers were called twice: first by a clerk whose voice still carried the cadence of decrees, then by a soldier who stumbled over characters but refused to be corrected into silence.
When rations were issued, each palm left ink and skin behind: a name scratched, a thumbprint pressed, a witness beside it. The justice was rough, but it made stealing harder than hunger.
The first quarrel came before the fresh tallies had even dried to a dull shine. A man with an officer’s ribbon still stitched to his collar stepped forward, chin lifted, and set down a small jar wrapped in waxed cloth. “Sealed for defense,” he said, as if the words themselves were a pass-token. A kitchen hand (thin, flour dust ground into her knuckles) shook her head hard enough to fling tears. “From the communal bins. I saw it go under his cloak.”
Chen did not let the room decide by volume. He called for names, for who saw, for when. He turned the jar, studying the seal-impression, then handed it to Wei, who knew the bite of an honest stamp and the lazy blur of a forged one. The accused spoke without a fist in his mouth. The judgment was plain: the cache returned, the attempt entered beside his name, and a week of restitution hauling water and scrub-ash: work that mended what hunger had torn, not fear.
Chen drew the boundary where stone met old incense ash. The ancestral terrace was not to be won or lost; it was to be kept unangered. Spears were planted butt-first before the steps, their points lowered like eyes. He named tenders, two elders and a boy with steady hands, to light incense with watched flame. “Spill blood here,” he warned, “and you indict us all,” because the wards punished panic as readily as guilt. Patrols were rerouted, arrests taken elsewhere, so the fortress’s own protections would not be coaxed into biting inward.
Only after the rules sat on the table in full daylight did Chen reach for the lacquered registers. “Bring them whole,” he said, and men carried the books like offerings, laying them spine to spine for copying under three sets of eyes. Wei’s gaze moved by habit: debt knots, conscription barbs, the phrases that turned a person into inventory: set aside for cutting. But the living lines remained: grain, lamp-oil, bandage cloth, fever powder, written clean so endurance had a map.
Wei Wenyu crossed the threshold as if he were still being marched to punishment. Two guards shadowed his shoulders, hands ready from old reflex, and the Ledger Hall’s air met him like cold water: lacquer, dust, and the faint sweet rot of ink that had dried over decades of fear. He kept his eyes lowered to the stone in front of his feet, because looking up at the shelves, row on row of names, always made his ribs tighten.
A shove came anyway, impatient, unnecessary.
Chen Cangyong’s voice cut across it. “Hands off. He’s not here to be bent.”
The guard’s palm halted in midair, then fell away with a muttered apology. The room shifted. Not softening, exactly, but reordering itself. Men who had been ready to watch a trial recalibrated to watch work.
Wei was placed at the table where the registers waited under cloth weights. No incense burned here; the shrine had its own rules. This was the place of seals and countersigns, of straight lines drawn through lives. Chen did not ask him if he had conspired, did not demand confession for an audience.
“Read,” Chen said. “Tell us what the columns do. Tell us what can be kept without keeping chains.”
Wei’s throat felt scraped raw, as if he had swallowed furnace ash. Still, duty had grooves in him deeper than panic. He unfolded the first register with care, as though opening skin. The paper was thick, the ink black enough to drink light.
His finger hovered over the headings. “This side. Grain allotment, lamp oil, salt,” he murmured, and then, more firmly, “This keeps bodies upright.” He slid to the next column where the characters tightened into legal knots. “This one pretends it’s labor-hours, but it is an oath clause. It binds service as property. It can be traded. It can be inherited.” He looked up once, cautious, meeting Chen’s scar-split brow. “If you strike the wrong line, the Hall will treat it as theft, not mercy.”
A clerk leaned in, frowning. “They’re written together.”
“They were meant to be,” Wei said, quieter. “So hunger would guard the shackles.” He turned a page. “Here is medicine tally. Bandage cloth, fever powder. Here is… conscription credit. Same ink. Different teeth.”
Wei set his ash-smudged thumb at the margin and moved it down like a plumb line, reading not just characters but the way they leaned into one another. The old bureaucracy hid its snares in ordinary columns: a “ration adjustment” that was really an oath-renewal, a harmless-looking countersign that redirected a person’s days the way a seal could redirect grain from one storehouse to another. He had seen it before in the annex ledgers. Hunger used as a lock, obedience written as arithmetic.
As he traced the ink, his alchemical perception answered with small, unwelcome sensations: a prickling behind the nails, a metallic bitterness at the back of the throat. Binding phrases carried a residue, as if the paper had been soaked in something that wanted to crawl into the blood.
He kept his voice low, meant for the table and not the room. “This line can be struck cleanly,” he said, tapping a clause that pretended to be a labor tally. “It’s tied only to the serf stamp.” His finger slid to a tighter knot of wording. “Not this. This is keyed to the Hall’s warding. Break it without the proper cancellation mark and it will snap back: on the gate, on the registrar, on whoever holds the brush.”
Under their eyes, three rebel captains, two clerks, one man with ink on his knuckles who had survived Jin’s punishments by remembering forms, Wei dictated as if reciting a remedy. “We do not tear the book,” he said. “We separate its poisons from its food.” Grain measures, salt fractions, bandage cloth, lamp oil: copied stroke for stroke into a clean ledger, numbers checked against the annex tallies he could recite in his sleep. Then his fingertip slid to the hooked phrases and he had them bracketed in red string like infected flesh.
A clerk balked, brush hovering. Wei named the exact cancellation line and the counterseal needed. “This voids ownership,” he murmured, “without voiding the count.”
When the fresh ledger was stitched shut with waxed thread and set on the table, someone, one of Chen’s captains, voice still rough with siege, told Wei to step forward for his entry. His feet moved before his fear could argue. The clerk lifted the serf stamp, then stopped. The square meant to bruise the page remained clean. In the hush that followed, the blank space felt less like mercy than a ward unlatched.
Wei took the brush before anyone could offer it, its wolf hair still stiff with old ink. In the blank beneath his unmarked name he wrote what he would answer to now: cistern water tested and kept sweet, stores tallied without shaving, remedies logged and remade so fever could not root in sealed corridors. Not a distant mandate: lines that could be counted. As the ink set, his eyes stayed on the margins, measuring how a “necessary” note might someday become a hook.
Jin’s confiscated seals were laid out for counting on the long table that had once been reserved for oath-renewals. Bronze squares and a few pale-jade chops sat in rows like ration cakes, each turned so its face could be read. The red paste clung in the grooves and the smell of it rose when the room warmed: mineral, oily, faintly sweet, like spoiled incense.
Wei kept his hands folded inside his sleeves. He had handled seals only when a clerk pushed them at him with averted eyes, when someone higher up wanted his neat script but not his presence. Now there was no hand above them, no sleeve embroidered with rank to give the metal meaning, and yet the air around the table tightened as if the tools themselves were still issuing orders.
A rebel captain started to laugh, then stopped halfway through, throat clicking shut. One of the clerks leaned closer as though the right stamp might leap up and bite him. Chen Cangyong stood behind the table without reaching for anything, his gaze moving across the laid-out chops like a guard walking a wall line: not reverent, not careless. He knew what each could open, what each could lock.
Wei saw it differently. Each seal face held a character that was also a hook. He could almost feel, with that trained alchemical perception that warned him of tainted water, the residue of intent in the carved strokes: confiscate, bind, seize, condemn. In the fortress, those words had been more contagious than any fever. They moved from hand to hand and called themselves “procedure.”
A clerk counted aloud. “Prefectural Storehouse. Inner Ward Pass. Oath Register Counterseal…” His voice slowed on the last one, and the pause drew everyone’s attention harder than shouting would have.
Wei’s eyes found the small chop with the plain border: the one used for “temporary measures.” It had always come out smiling. It looked harmless. It never was.
A young clerk (one of the ones who had spent the siege with his head down and his mouth full of borrowed phrases) cleared his throat. He held his brush like a spear he did not trust. “If we’re to keep the inner ward from turning into a market,” he said, eyes flicking to the table of confiscated chops, “we should issue fresh passes. For order. Properly stamped, so there’s no confusion. Only until things settle.”
Proper. Necessary. Temporary.
Wei felt the words settle into the room as if they carried their own weight of ink. He remembered wrists chafed raw where paper strips had been tied, the stamp impressed so hard it bruised skin through the fiber. He remembered men ushered to the western wall with “temporary reassignment” written neatly over a seal that meant no appeal. The paper had always looked clean. The consequences never did.
His gaze went to the plain-bordered chop again: the one that made exceptions look like housekeeping. Around him, people nodded because they were tired, because an unmarked gate was frightening, because procedure promised warmth. Wei swallowed, tasting furnace ash, and kept his hands tucked away so they would not reach for the stamp on instinct.
Chen’s reply cracked across the table like a snapped spear shaft. “No fresh passes on a clerk’s unease.” His hand hovered over nothing, no seal, no brush, yet the room stilled as if he’d struck stone. “Any decree we make gets a date. A witness from the ranks and a witness from the Hall. It names what it touches and what it cannot touch. It ends, written plain, when the cistern is measured again, or when the outer pickets change, or when the sickbay count drops. If it has no ending, it’s not order. It’s a chain.”
Heads nodded, relieved to be told how to behave. Wei felt the relief thicken, the way warmth thickens around a brazier: people edging closer, hands extended. Even careful limits, once inked and stamped, stood up straighter than fear alone.
Wei bent closer to the faces of the chops, reading the registry-marks the way he read a wound’s edge. The characters were crisp, but the margins were generous: space for addenda, “clarifications,” small strokes that could turn bread into forfeiture. A ration allotment could become a penalty. A medicine tally could become a list of the troublesome. Even “review” could be a collar, if hunger needed a name.
A runner came hard-breathing from the inner ward, cheeks raw with cold. “Authority,” he said, “to search quarters: hidden stores, stolen oil.” Wei did not lift a brush. He lifted his eyes. “Whose order. Which register takes the complaint. Who signs the inventory. Where does the accused speak back.” The runner blinked, badge gleaming new. Convenience, Wei thought, was how a cycle found its first link.
Dawn slid over the cliff edge in a thin, cautious blade, touching the fortress where it could: the rim of a lintel, the corner of a record chest, the wet sheen of frost on a barred window. The light did not arrive like an announcement. It seeped, as water seeps through a hairline crack, and in the corridors that had always felt lacquer-sealed by ink and decree, something in the air loosened first.
Wei Wenyu felt it before he named it. The drafts changed. They no longer circled endlessly under eaves and beams the way smoke did when a hall wanted to keep its own sanctity. The fortress drew breath and let it go, outward, down, away, like a man who has been holding his lungs tight for a shouted order that never comes.
Incense still burned, because people did not know what else to do with their hands when fear lifted. But the smoke was no longer coaxed into thick, impressive ropes. No clerk stood in a doorway to demand the right angle of the censer, the correct number of wafted bows. The thin threads rose and then found the hidden ways: vents cut like narrow mouths in the stone, cracks along old talisman-bricks, the seams where mountain and wall had been forced to agree. The scent, bitter resin, a hint of cedar, did not cling to faces. It traveled.
In the infirmary passage, the air tasted less of old lamp oil and more of cold rock warmed by sun. Wei’s fingers, stained with soot and spirit-salt, paused against his sleeve as if he were listening for contamination. There was still the familiar sting of ash, the faint iron of blood soaked into boards, but beneath it ran a new emptiness. Space where the fortress’s breath could move without being counted.
Below, toward the valley siege-lines, the smoke drifted down as if it meant to be seen, not to impress. It carried a faint warmth that did not belong to fire so much as to permission: a loosening of the inward grip, a recognition that a sealed room was not the same as a safe one.
At the ancestral shrine, the stone stays clean. No slick of red, no hurried wash marks in the grooves where old offerings have seeped in other winters. The threshold talisman, cracked at one corner, still holds its shape; someone has wedged a sliver of pine resin beneath it like a splint. Wei stands back from the steps, hands tucked into his sleeves, and lets his trained sense skim the air the way he would skim a fevered brow. There is incense, yes, and the thin sourness of extinguished candles, but no fresh spike of violence to wake the terrace wards.
The vents breathe with a steady exhale, as if the mountain itself is testing whether this new order will keep its promises. Not a blessing. Not a warning. A watchfulness that does not yet know where to settle.
Ash motes drift down and stipple the offering table. Nobody snaps a cloth out. A woman who used to recite decrees under her breath simply lays down a bowl of rationed water and withdraws her hands as though asking permission.
The shrine is being addressed, not enlisted.
In the infirmary, Wei Wenyu clears a space on the scarred bench as if a hand might still rap his knuckles for disorder. He wipes soot aside with his sleeve, then stops, chooses a rag instead, and folds it to a neat square. Habit as armor. From his personal kit he draws the last vial of spirit-salt and sets it where the morning light can reach it, not for warmth but for witness. Harder to “misplace” what is plainly seen.
He grinds ink, copies the new ration list, and checks each measure twice, matching brushstrokes to reality: water ladles, grain cakes, bandage strips, mugwort pinches. The columns hold steady. For once, the numbers do not feel like a charge read aloud. They look like a path narrow enough to walk.
Footsteps moved past the infirmary door: soft soles, a limp, a pause as if someone had forgotten whether they were allowed to stop. Not the clipped rhythm of an audit, not the heavy certainty of guards. A murmur of voices followed, untidy and human. Wei held still, waiting for the old demand (seal, countersign, registry mark) and heard instead: How much water can we spare? How many clean strips? What do we do when the fever climbs?
When he lifts the brush, the last stroke still shines, wet enough to blur under a careless thumb. The totals sit there, too low, too honest, and a familiar tightness rises in his chest. He does not hide them. He leaves the sheet in open view, weighted by the spirit-salt vial like a paired offering: one to knit flesh, one to keep the fortress’s breath clean. No distant seal guards this promise; only the eyes of those who will live by it, for this morning, for one more day they can choose.