The palace learned a new habit: it no longer pretended to breathe the same air. Curtains hung lower, as if afraid the wind might carry news that would rattle the rafters. Courtiers moved in smaller circles, their words chosen like coins to be spent later with profit. The death of an Emperor, once a thing that cleansed a court of its petty stains, had become an economy: some men sold sorrow at a high price while others bought certainty with the same coin.
Zhang walked through the Hall of Rites as if he had stopped shaving his conscience and grown an inch of surety in its place. He wore the restraint of a man who has learned the arithmetic of power: add soldiers, subtract rivalries, multiply silence. He had the seal now, wax warm under his hand, its imprint a small promise he intended to make law. He moved through ministers like a harvest wind, gathering pliant things and sowing fear in neat furrows.
In the private rooms where deals are made without witnesses, Zhang dictated a list of offices and names. Promotions, pensions, the careful distribution of favors — each parcel of power wrapped in the right sorts of obligation. "We will not call them gifts," he instructed. "Call them responsibilities. Let men believe they carry honor when in truth they carry chains." His advisers wrote obediently; even the ink looked less defiant.
Across the court, other men practiced different mathematics. There were ministers who still believed in rules and in the shape of oaths. They whispered that the seal should not be used without the rites, that the capital must remember its rituals lest it become a shop that trades in crowns. There were younger courtiers who liked the sound of a regent's hammer. There were merchants who saw opportunity and dressed their greed in silk. The city began to split, not with banners but with ledger entries.
In the prisons below the palace, Minister Li counted the hours with the patience of a man who had once taught boys to trace characters on thin paper. The light through the barred window fell like a lesson. He had been brought back to the capital not to be judged but to be made an example: a scaffold for men to step over as they crossed into favor. His hands were cleaner than the rumors that had tied him to his daughter; he had not been permitted many visitors. The warder allowed him paper and soot and a small brush, and at first he protested the indulgence. Then he wrote.
He wrote not to beg, not to explain, but to make a list of things that might still be useful once his name had been folded into ash. He wrote the names of the clerks who had once copied his ledgers without complaint, the potter in Ye Cheng who had taught Lian'er how to make sparrows in clay, the teacher who had shown a child to balance on a wall. He wrote a page of instructions about how to find a certain seam in the southern river where boats take on less water and more courage. He drew a small fool's map and labeled it "for any who still choose inconvenient things."
When a guard came to take him for the last procession, he did not lash out. He wrapped his paper and handed it to the warder with the same gesture a man uses to pass a knife to a friend: careful, deliberate. "Keep it safe," he said. "If I am righted into the ground, let my ink make trouble." The warder stared as if the request were a coin that might bite.
At sundown, they marched him out. The square had been swept of laughter. Zhang had ordered that the execution be public but brief, the sort of spectacle that convinces a city it has been cleansed. Minister Li walked with the dignity of books and the shame of compromises. When he reached the scaffold, he did not plead. He simply lifted his face to the few who had come and said, to the point where breath meets sky, "I have kept my mistakes honest. Forgive me for not doing better sooner."
The blade fell with a sound that sounded like a chapter closing. Men in the crowd looked at their hands afterward as if they had been responsible for their own blood, and a few could not keep their stomachs from rebelling against the sight. Zhang watched from his dais. He did not appear triumphant; triumph is vulgar. He looked like a man who has tidied a room and now tried to convince himself he had not removed anything of value.