They laid the report at Zhang's feet the way men lay a body when they aren't sure if the family wants to see the face. The tent burned bright; the lamps had been fed to full as if light could make news behave. Outside, frost thinned under hooves and dried blood. Inside, the air smelled of ink and ironed silk.
"Read it," Zhang said, not looking up.
The officer had practiced the cadence until it sounded like fate: bridges lost, vanguard broken in a valley of black pines, wagons burned, three thousand unaccounted for, Lord Han riding with the traitor, the river refusing to obey. He reached the part about drums in the night and smoke that walked like armies and faltered there, as if ashamed to give imagination a commission.
Zhang took the paper, weighed it, and let it slide from his hand to the floor. "Three thousand," he repeated mildly, as if pricing geese. "Missing."
"Excellency," the officer said, forehead touching rush mat, "the count is from the master of rolls—"
"Men who are not counted do not exist," Zhang said. "Our scholars taught us that. The river is a ledger. You drowned ink."
He rose without hurry. When he reached the threshold, he crooked two fingers. The guard closest to the post knew the gesture from old campaigns and took the officer under the arms without ceremony. The blade across the throat made a soft, housebroken sound. Outside, someone started to laugh and thought better of it.
"Promote the next man," Zhang said to the aide who flinched least. "Find a clerk who can spell 'regret' with fewer strokes." He poured himself wine and did not drink it, watching instead how the light moved through it as if the tent were a river and his hand the bridge. "Send messengers to the southern engineers. Double their pay. Tell them the Empire has decided to learn construction."
"Excellency," the adviser ventured, "Lord Han's defection suggests Qi's court—"
"Suggests that fear breeds innovation," Zhang said. "We will breed more fear." His smile did not reach the lamps. "Dictate."
The adviser unrolled silk, held brush, waited. Zhang spoke as if reciting something he had once promised himself not to say: absolute authority over the defense, over the levy, over all seals save the Emperor's own; all proclamations to pass through his tent before they touched a gate or a wall. When he finished, he signed with a character that had learned to cut. The seal went on heavy; the wax took it like a bruise.
"Make a copy," Zhang said. "Burn the copy. Let the courier remember the words because his life requires it."
The adviser bowed; the silk disappeared into the night that had taught itself to carry dangerous things without dropping them.
The palace lamps were lit at noon. Ash from the east had found a way through the screens and settled like second thoughts in the carved petals of the lotus pillars. The Emperor sat in a room that made a habit of silence. He had dismissed the ministers at dawn and their shadows had not quite left.
On the table lay three reports that did not lie. The fourth was a petition written with more ink than humility. He read Zhang's demand twice, the brushwork neat as accounting. He did not answer it. He placed it under the jade paperweight shaped like a carp and let the carp carry the weight it had been given.
Outside, a wind pushed at the garden pines as if trying to remind them of mountains. Inside, Minister Li waited beyond the screen, eyes on the seam in the floor where two generations of emperors had scuffed sandals when pacing became more natural than sitting. He had hewn his loyalty into a shape the palace could use and now found that shape fit poorly in a room with fewer voices.
A junior scribe brought him a slip: Zhang's courier at the outer gate, bearing words that wished to be commands. Minister Li took the slip, folded it, and put it in his sleeve without reading. He turned to the attendant who had learned to be his voice.
"Prepare paper," he said, and when the boy hesitated: "Plain."
He dictated a letter to no one. Daughter, wherever the road has made you colder. Your name is used by men who have taught themselves to dislike warmth. I once believed good order could be argued into being. I forgot that fire answers more quickly than reason. If you are alive, be inconvenient. If you must die, be— He stopped there, because the rest wanted to be a blessing and he had never practiced those well. He signed nothing. He sealed nothing. He slipped the page under the lining of his sleeve where it would warm from skin and not from lamps.
When the Emperor at last spoke, it was to the courier whose boots left water on the jade. "You will carry a letter," he said. "Not to the Regent. To the girl." He did not say Ziyan's name. Names had become expensive. "You will not show it. If you are captured, you will burn. If you reach her, you will not bow. Give it and go."
The courier's nod was not brave. It was useful.