We did not wait for nightfall.
By the time the pale band on the eastern tiles had shifted a finger's width, Liao Yun had soldiers at my courtyard gate who belonged to me in deed if not in crest. Shen Yue bound Guo Sen's wrists with a cord that could be cut in one pull and replaced with one that could not. Wu Shuang drew a hood over her hair and walked between us with the gait of a servant carrying a tray that could poison or heal depending on who drank.
We moved through alleys that knew how to be silent. The bells kept time. Above the shops of calligraphers and incense sellers, ash traced little crescents in the lines of the roof tiles where the wind had no business to be. At a crossing, a dog lay asleep with its eyes open.
"The river," Liao Yun said, but I was already turning.
The fires on the bend had collapsed into smolder and steam. Char and lotus stems blackened the skin of the water. The Hall of Still Waters was gone; in its place a ring of stone stood like vertebrae left after carrion birds have taken the rest. The air tasted like old coins.
Shen Yue crouched, touched two fingers to the ground, and rose with a look I had last seen on her when she told me a man I loved more than my title had been killed on a road no map would admit existed.
"Written," she said softly.
"Where?" I asked.
"Under," she said, and pointed to the river itself.
We followed the bank. The city fell away—street by street the stone gave up its claim to rule and the reeds reclaimed their old treaty with the mud. We came to a place where the river narrowed and the foundations of something older than the palace showed like the edge of a buried blade.
There, cut into the stones and filled with pitch dark as ink, spirals spread and nested, small within large, each line so fine I could not see the tool that had made it. Not for the eye. For the tide.
Guo Sen shuddered. "Here," he whispered. "This is where the brush learns the hand."
"Be quick," Liao Yun said. He did not like that the water had stopped making noise.
We moved along the carved edge until we came to an alcove choked with shadow. A prayer bell lay there with its tongue torn out. On the wall above it a line had been scratched in a neat, clerk's hand:
COUNTING DOES NOT CHANGE THE NUMBER.
The words sat in me like a thrown nail. I reached for them with a thought and the thought slipped.
Footsteps: soft, bare. We turned as one.
A line of acolytes in grey came down to the water, heads bowed. Between them walked the monk, beads on his wrist like a string of little skulls. He looked at the words over the bell and smiled as if reading an old joke he still admired.
"You brought the witness to the dragon," he said, as if greeting a student who had solved half a problem. "And the dragon brought him back to you. We count together, then."
"Come," I said. "Count where the Emperor can hear you."
"Not yet," he said mildly, and looked past me to the river. "You feel it."
I did. The thing under my ribs had aligned with the slow circle cut into the stone. Not eager. Not angry. Ready. Like a gate hinge that had found its groove again.
"What is it?" Shen Yue hissed.
"Old math," the monk said, not to her. "The kind that asks for bone instead of abacus."
I stepped toward him.
He did not step back.
"Your sister stood where you stand," he said. "She did not tremble either."
"You taught her to count?" I asked.
"She taught herself to stop." He tilted his head. "It is an art you never learned."
Liao Yun had his blade out now. "We take him."
"Try," the monk said, as politely as if offering tea.
We moved. He did nothing—and the acolytes did nothing—and yet the space between us did not close. Not because of sorcery I could name; because every step we took seemed to land half an inch to the side of where we had willed it. Spirals cut into the stone. The river's breath. A hand that was not a hand.
The thing inside me rose, cool as a moon from behind cloud. The air strained. For one heartbeat the spiral in the stone and the spiral beneath my breastbone aligned completely, and the world made a shape I did not understand but recognized.
The monk watched me recognize it.
"Do not answer it," Shen Yue said, voice low and far away. "Do not."
I did not. I breathed. The alignment broke. The space opened. We were close enough to cut.
The monk did not move. He simply smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had added two and two in a room where numbers were made of meat.
"Be quick, Prince," he said, stepping backward into shadows that did not belong to any wall. "You were given a choice. I wonder which door you will name."
He was gone.
We stood with breath that did not fit in our mouths properly. Guo Sen began to laugh and could not stop until Shen Yue touched two points at his throat and turned the laughter into sleep.
"Back," I said. "Before the hall calls us by name."
The hall called sooner than I expected.
We were met at the palace gate not by a messenger boy but by a column of officers in full dress, their crests polished, their faces numbed by ceremony. The captain raised his palm in a salute that refused to be graceful.
"His Majesty commands all princes, ministers, and commanders to attend. At once."
"What now?" Liao Yun muttered.
We were swept in a current of silk and iron. The courtyards were full, but quiet—men moved like pieces already measured against the board's edges. At the threshold to the Hall of Judgement, a eunuch leaned close enough that I smelled the mint on his breath.
"Be steady, Your Highness," he said without moving his lips. "The mountain walks."
We entered.
The Emperor sat as before, but the air around him had changed temperature. Wu Kang stood glimmering, a statue of war about to admire itself. Wu Ling, my sister, veiled, perfectly still, as if carved from the pause between two words. The monk's absence felt like a fifth pillar added to the room only the bones could sense.
The herald lifted his staff, struck the floor once, twice.
And the doors at the back of the hall opened.
Bootsteps: measured, iron tasting the stone it owned. The kind of footfall men remember with their mouths closed.
He came into view in black armor that drank the light: tall, wide-shouldered, beard trimmed like a sentence finished. The scar along his cheek lay pale, old, unimportant.
My father.
The Lord Protector.
Alive. Upright. Eyes clear as the morning after a storm breaks.
The hall made no sound at all. A silence so complete it had texture.
He did not look at me first. He looked at the Emperor—and nodded once, not deep, not shallow. Equal, or something that refused to be counted in that way.
Then his gaze came to me.
The thing inside my chest did not stir. It waited, as if every year of my life had been arranged for this one glance.
"Prince," he said, voice steady, the old steel without rust.
I did not kneel. I did not move.
The Emperor rose.
And the bells—those patient, listening bells—stopped.