Dawn broke red on the mud.
Not from sunrise alone. From the false fires Zhao had laid in the low fields, from the watch-braziers along Yong'an's wall, from the first spill of blood where Green Dike's outer lane met Zhang's vanguard and refused, if only for an hour, to become a road.
Ziyan felt the day in her bones before the first horn sounded.
She sat her horse on the rise north of Green Dike, where the old dike-wall curved like a half-healed scar. Below, the village looked smaller than it had three days ago, because so much of what mattered had already been pulled inward: children, ledgers, grain, the old and the feverish, hidden in cellars and reed paths and the backs of carts headed anywhere but open ground.
What remained was witness.
Luo stood in the square with a staff and a face like dry wood. The tavern woman had tied her apron tighter and put a knife in the back of her belt in the way women did when they intended not to use it unless the world insulted them first. The sparrow still hung. Zhang's decree did not.
And coming down the road in ordered lines were the evil men who meant to make absence out of all of it.
Not a patrol. Not another testing prod. A proper edge of the army: shields, spears, twenty riders to the flank, and behind them, a banner bearing the ash-black "order" mark Zhang liked to pretend was peace.
Li Qiang rode up beside her, breath smoking. "Three hundred, first count," he said. "Maybe more behind the rise. They're not here to parley."
Wei spat into the frost. "You can tell by the ladders," he said. "Anyone who brings ladders to a village wants to insult it professionally."
Ziyan's fingers tightened on the reins until the leather bit.
Across the low field, the lead officer reined in and surveyed Green Dike with the calm interest of a man already picturing where to put the fires.
He was not the loud sergeant from before. Nor the captain who had hammered the decree. This one wore rank more naturally. Heavy cloak, polished throat-guard, a scar at one eyebrow that had healed into arrogance.
"Name?" Han asked from her other side.
"Doesn't matter yet," Ziyan said. "Only whether he thinks this place is worth spending men on."
"He does," Feiyan's voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once. She crouched in the lee of the wall below them, hair tied back, one cheek striped with soot. "Scouts say his second line has hooks and crowbars. They want the beams. They want the house. They want to be seen taking it."
Of course they did.
Zhang would not be satisfied with merely killing. He wanted visible corrections. He wanted towns to watch law being dismantled plank by plank and decide, before the next horse ever arrived, that witness was too expensive a habit.
Ziyan looked down at Green Dike's square and felt the whole commonwealth pressing behind it. Haojin on its boats, Reed Mouth in its reeds, Stone Gate's dead, Yong'an's walls, the old Emperor's reprieve already dying in Bai'an, Wang Yu still breathing under ash-beams, Ji Lu writing words he probably hated.
One village.
And all of them.
The enemy horn sounded.
The officer rode forward far enough that his voice carried.
"By the authority of the Regent of Qi," he called, "this village is declared corrupted by the so-called Road City. Deliver the ringleaders. Tear down the marks. Surrender the records. Do this, and the innocent may yet be spared."
On the wall below, the tavern woman laughed in his face.
It was a terrible laugh. Too tired to be brave, too furious to be sane. Perfect.
"The innocent?" she shouted back. "You lot burned Stone Gate and call us corrupted?"
A ripple through the villagers. Fear and agreement in equal measure.