They started kneeling at the wrong times.
Not the courtiers—soldiers, porters, a lamplighter with ash on his cheek. At the second bell a file of rats paused before the north gate and pressed their heads to the stone as if remembering a lesson. In the prison yard, six men awaiting sentence woke from different dreams and spoke my name together, each in a voice that did not belong to him. A scribe copying tax rolls wrote, without knowing why, long live His Majesty in the margin and then didn't know which majesty he meant.
The guards tried not to look at me. A few looked too long and blinked hard, as if the air dried their eyes from the inside. One vomited quietly into his sleeve and begged forgiveness for nothing he could describe. I wanted to say I am not here to be worshiped. The words hung in my mouth like a coin I could not spit out.
I keep counting. It helps. Ten steps between the old cypress and the broken well. Three breaths before the ache under my breastbone becomes a note. On the fourth breath it's almost a voice.
I put my hand to the wall. The plaster is warm, as if it had been thinking and did not expect to be touched. It remembers a mason's humming thirty years ago. It remembers rain through a hole that was sealed and then opened again. The wall does not remember my face. I am grateful and afraid in the same heartbeat.
Shen Yue brings me news in the kind of voice one uses for wolves. "The palace kitchens have started boiling water twice," she says. "It goes sweet if they don't. The wells tell lies. A child swore the west gate had moved in the night. He was right."
"Does the court still call this harmony?" I ask.
"They call it order," she says, "and then they count the candles."
Wu Jin calls it something else. In the Lotus Hall his face is made of patience. He sits so still the room must decide to move around him. The ministers split, as all prudent men do: one half kneels toward Heaven and whichever thing wears Heaven's shape; the other half toward the knife that can keep them from losing their throats tonight.
"If it is truly Heaven," one says carefully, "then His Majesty is Heaven's instrument. We should proclaim a sacred alliance and receive the Zhou legions as guardians of the pact."
"If it is blasphemy," another counters, "we should call it treason and cut it out before Zhou finds pretext to cut us in half."
Wu Jin holds up a hand and the hall quiets with the relief of children whose father has decided their quarrel for them. "We kneel to no god," he says. "Living, dead, or undecided. Zhou can bring its psalms wrapped in steel; the South can pray until their tongues crack—we will write our own scripture on brick and grain."
Wu Shuang stands one step behind the throne. The light finds her and can't leave. "And if the god kneels to no Heaven?" she asks. The question lands gently, like snow, and the room discovers it is winter.
He doesn't look back at her. "Then we will teach Heaven to stand," he says, and hates the sound of himself for pretending defiance is a craft.
The He Lian banners don't move; the silk is too heavy. Yet above them, faint and disloyal, a breath stirs the older fabric hidden in the rafters—a pale scrap of Liang that refuses to rot. No one mentions it. Everyone feels their tongue do the work of silence.
At Hei Fort the Lord Protector begins to spend what can't be minted. He rides the walls at dawn and dusk and walks them at noon, because a man should feel stone as well as see it before he trusts it to carry him. He calls three captains to his tent and dismisses them by name and then, when they bow, gives them different names they wore as boys in the blue of Liang. Those names open doors they thought were walled up.
"You will vanish," he says quietly. "Not to desert—deserters make noise. To remember. Find men who still sew with that old thread. Bring them quietly. We will build a second oath."
They don't ask what it means. Men who have outlived two capitals know the price of questions. One leaves by the river and another by the road and one by the dead gate, which only opens for those who learned, long ago, how to move like smoke. At midnight the old general writes a letter with no words and seals it with a thumbprint. In the morning the thumb is clean; the seal holds. He laughs once with his teeth covered and eats a crust of bread as if it were a treaty.
I try ordinary things. I sit on a low step in the practice yard and tie a strap. My fingers remember the knot. There is mercy in this. I close my eyes and call up my mother's face. First comes her voice; it knows the way. The face follows not quite right and then fixes itself like a map smoothed by a hand. I think of Shen Yue saying You're still you as if the sentence itself were a spine.
Under my ribs the bridge tightens and then loosens, not in ascent now but in a spread, like frost that has understood a window. I speak aloud to hear my own sound.
"I'm not a god," I tell the air. "I'm what happens when no god answers."
The air does not disagree. Somewhere the prison yard answers with a clatter of chains as if men had nodded.
Shen Yue has stopped trying to argue me back into a single thing. "If you are many," she says steadily, "then be many and choose." She spreads a cloth on the step next to me and sets down a bowl. Rice, cabbage, a little fish. The rice is warm enough to feel like news from the living.
I eat. It tastes like metal and a field after rain. "If I ask you to run," I say, "will you run?"
She looks at me the way soldiers look at an order they will obey but will not forgive. "If you ask me to watch you become something I can't follow," she says, "I'll run into you with a blade."
This is love when the world has emptied its markets.