One tablet was indeed in pieces now. Another was chipped in three new places. Dust lay thick. But people were still there. Fewer, perhaps. More cowering at the edges. But enough.
Ren the scribe had already set up a stool and was carving into a fresh slab of wood with furious, precise strokes, copying, word for word, the lines that had been lost.
The caravan guard leaned on his spear, bleeding from a cut on his brow. The old woman with the broom was berating a stone as if it could apologize. Children peered around doorframes, eyes enormous.
Ziyan stepped back onto the broken base.
"They tried," she said simply. "They will try again. They'll aim for the places that make us more than a wall with people on it. That's how you break a city: not by killing everyone, but by convincing those who live that they were fools for standing."
She lifted her bandaged hand. Blood had already seeped through in a small, stubborn circle.
"I will not call you fools," she said. "Not for staying. Not for running. Not for arguing with these tablets until your throats are sore. That's the point. That you get to argue at all."
She pointed toward the sealed temple. "They came for our medicine and our sick. They failed because a man who once tried to sell what wasn't his decided, today, that some things aren't bought."
The steward flushed, ducking his head as dozens of eyes turned toward him.
"If you want to curse anyone," Ziyan said, "curse me. I am the one who painted a target on this square when I carved my name above those rules. But know this: every stone they waste here, every jar of herbs they fail to burn, every culvert they crawl through and die in—it all costs them. It all buys us one more day to prove that we are not what Zhang wrote in his letters."
She let her gaze sweep the faces, the broken stone, the scarred square.
"And if we fall," she said quietly, "we will fall as we have lived these few days: knowing why. Under words we agreed to. Not under another man's bargain."
Silence held for a moment. Then someone—she would never later be sure who—started clapping. It was an awkward, half-hearted sound at first, not sure whether it was permitted. Then others joined. Not a cheer. Something rougher. Like men slapping dust from their cloaks and finding they could still stand.
Feiyan watched, unreadable.
"That's two blows traded," she said later, when they stood again on the north wall as afternoon bled into another gray dusk. "You burned his wagons. He cracked your square. You saved your herbs. He learned your culverts. Next he'll… what? Send flowers?"
Ziyan's mouth curved. "He'll keep coming. So will we. Until one of us runs out of men or patience or reasons."
"And if that one is you?" Feiyan asked.
Ziyan thought of the law tablets, of Ren's furious carving, of the steward's blistered hands. Of children watching stones fall and choosing not to lie about what happened.
"Then I trust," she said slowly, almost as if testing the words, "that someone else here will remember the shape of this road and start walking it again. Even if my name is the first thing they scrape off the tablets."
On the command hill, Ren Kanyu read the report of the failed culvert raid. He traced the characters that described his men dead in a temple, caught between a scrubber with a bucket and a woman with a knife.
He set the brush down.
"General?" his adjutant ventured.
Ren looked toward Yong'an, where the law square and temple now sat slightly altered but undeniably still there.
"She patched the crack," he said. "And she let her people see her bleed doing it. That road of hers… it's not only hers anymore."
He picked up the Emperor's letter one last time, then folded it until the seal cracked and the words hid.
"Tomorrow," he said softly, to himself more than to any listening gods, "we see whether an empire's fear is heavier than a city's stubbornness."
The wolves were not done.
Neither was the road.