Jade screens cast latticed shadows over the Eastern Bureau's map table, where rivers are mercury veins and fortresses glow like trapped fireflies beneath pressed-gold pins. The lamps burn low; the room smells of ink, wintergreen, and the thin copper of fear that servants pretend not to taste. Yile stands like a brush held poised above silk—still, immaculate. Around him his assistants breathe unevenly.

"Elder Brother," whispers Eunuch Rui, slim as a reed, counting seals with ink-stained nails, "the Hall of Celestial Contemplation has not sent the customary bell. It is late."

"Late is a door that wishes to be noticed," Yile says, soft enough that the paper cranes dangling from the rafters seem to lean in. "And a noticed door is one that closes on fingers. Leave it to the wind."

Little Jin, barely grown, clutches a ledger tight to his chest as if it were a child or a shield. "The Prince is with His Majesty," he risks, voice a frayed thread. "Should we prepare—offerings? Congratulations? Consolations?"

"Prepare arithmetic," Yile replies, eyes on the pins that chart the palace corridors. "Two parts smoke, one part rumor, one part pity. Stir and pour into the ears that ache for sweetness."

Eunuch An, heavy-lidded and careful, taps a folio. "The petitions for the Autumn Assizes—should they be forwarded to Old Ji tonight? There is the matter of Sima's widow seeking—"

"Forward nothing," Yile murmurs, and the room tightens. "Tonight is a ledger that will add itself."

Jin's fingers worry the ledger's stitched spine. "Elder Brother, the kitchens report the leopard jars were tampered with—"

"The kitchens always report tampering when their stew burns," says Yile. He is watching dust perform a slow ballet in the lamplight. "Rui, the bronze coffer. Open it."

Rui hesitates, then lifts the lid. Inside, silk-wrapped packages breathe the faint scent of chrysanthemums and iron. Yile does not look. "Take the green-wrapped letters and place them under the blue tile near the north pillar. Not the cracked one. The one pretending to be perfect."

An's mouth twitches—half skepticism, half respect. "You hide paper like men hide bastard sons."

"Paper is more dutiful," Yile says, and finally his gaze cuts to them—cool, fathomless, a lake under winter skin. "Speak what trembles in your teeth and be done."

An sets down his brush. "The Guard shifts in their sheaths. Shen Huo's men drill under moonlight. It smells of—"

"Weather," Yile says.

"Storm?" Jin asks.

"Harvest," Yile corrects. "Some crops are scythed at midnight."

Jin swallows. "Do you ever—" He stops, cheeks flushing. "Forgive me."

"Ask," Yile invites.

"Do you ever fear the shadow stepping behind you is your own?"

Something like a smile might cross Yile's mouth and vanish. "I cultivate a wide orchard," he says. "My shadow is only one tree."

The floor murmurs. At first it is a vibration felt through the lacquer, a heartbeat under stone. Then, from far down the colonnade, a shout splits and scatters like startled sparrows.

"The Emperor is dead!"

The words reach the Bureau as if carried on knives. The assistants flinch; Yile does not move. The shout repeats, nearer now, multiplying into a ragged chorus that scrapes the ear. Somewhere a gong misstrikes, then finds the cadence for calamity. Footfalls converge, hard and iron-shod.

Jin goes colorless. "Elder Brother—"

"Do not run," Yile says. "Running makes the walls chase you." Yile's hand lifts, two fingers drawing a precise line in the air. "Rui. The green letters. Now. An, extinguish the second lamp—no, the second. Leave the first. It makes honest shadows. Jin—give me the ledger."

Jin hands it over with shaking hands. Yile opens it. The brush glides to his fingers from the inkstone as if summoned by thought alone. He writes three characters so spare they could be wind. He blows once, watching them dry like blood.

The door booms under a mailed fist.

"In the name of His August—" The voice stumbles over its own title, recalibrating. "In the name of the Imperial Guard, open!"

Rui's eyes fly to Yile. Permission trembles unspoken.

Yile closes the ledger, slides it beneath the lip of the table where a groove waits, long prepared. His sleeves fall in pale waterfalls. "Open," he says.

An unbars the door. It does not swing: it detonates inward on the muscles of six men. The first halberd rakes the lintel and showers the room with cinnabar dust. Shen Huo enters, scar catching lampglow like a crooked smile. Behind him, a wall of scaled armor breathes as one creature.

"Hands where the spirits can count them," Shen Huo says, voice flat as a blade laid on stone.

Jin's hands go up, too fast, knocking a porcelain ink-boat. It shatters. The scent of iron blooms.

Rui steps forward, chin high despite the tremor. "Head Guard," he says carefully, "the Eastern Bureau welcomes—"

"Spare the courtesies," Shen Huo cuts. His gaze locks on Yile as if everything else is furniture. "Eunuch Yile of the Eastern Bureau."

Yile inclines his head an exact degree. "Head Guard Shen."

"The Emperor is dead," Shen Huo says, and the room hears the sentence choose a target. "By order of—" A moment's blank; the empire's mouth has not yet learned a new name. He settles on the mechanism rather than the hand. "By order of the Palace Guard and the Bureau of Heavenly Judgment, you are remanded."

"Remanded," Yile repeats, turning the syllables as if testing a coin for weight. He lifts his eyes to the halberd heads, to the little galaxies of light caught on steel. "For what crime?"

Shen Huo does not blink. "For answering later. Bind him."

The room tightens. Rui's breath catches. An puts his hand, briefly, on Jin's wrist. Yile spreads his fingers, palms outward, perfect as a painted Bodhisattva—surrender that looks like benediction.

...

Earlier, the bedchamber still smolders with incense and the metallic breath of fresh blood. Silk sheets lie wrecked like a failed treaty; tiger pelts soak slowly, drinking a new color. The Crown Prince stands bare to the waist, moon-pale beneath an erratic constellation of red freckles. His hands hang stupidly at his sides, still remembering the weight of the dagger. The dead Emperor's bulk slumps into imperial ruin, mouth parted as if trying, even now, to summon a decree.

A seam in the darkness parts.

Meibei steps through it like a calligrapher's final stroke—quiet, exact, inevitable. She bows very low, not to the corpse but to the boy who made it.

"Highness," she murmurs, voice steady as a ritual bell. "Congratulations."

He blinks, as if the word were foreign script. The brazier hisses; blood clots into dull roses on the tiger's brow.

Meibei's gaze flickers to the toppled stool, the drift of pearls from a snapped cord, the faint half-moon bruise on the Prince's wrist where rings once pressed. "The mountain has fallen," she says. "Now the valley must learn its new wind. If you will sit, I will help you dress the weather. The cut can wear another name."

He stares at her, breath thin. "Another name."

"A hungry one," she says softly. "A Zhou knife perhaps, found where it ought not be; or a western oath, born on the wrong mouth. A shadow slipped past the Guard—let me choose which shadow. Accept the throne and I will make the first story obedient."

His eyes, enormous and lightless, shift from her to the Emperor's open hand. A tremor visits his shoulder and departs. "I want Yile."

Meibei's head tilts, the smallest bird's-gesture. "Yile is not the one you think," she replies, even gentler.

"Yile," the Prince repeats, but now the syllables are armor. He turns, crosses the carpet in three swift steps, wrenches the door.

"Shen Huo!" he calls into the throat of the corridor. His voice splits, then steadies. "Guards!"

Bootfalls answer, first one, then many, an iron rain gathering. Shen Huo arrives at a run, crest dark with sweat; behind him, lances tilt like a wheatfield deciding the wind. They see the blood, the vacancy on the divan, the boy's bare chest spattered like a painter's sleeve. Their halberds rise by themselves.

The Prince extends his arm, a magistrate pronouncing a case. "An assassin," he declares, and his voice does not crack. He points to Meibei. "She entered my father's chamber and tried for us both. Heaven preserved me. Take her."

Meibei's eyes widen a fraction, the surprise small and human before the mask returns. She folds her hands. "Highness—"

"Silence," Shen Huo snaps, because silence is the fastest bandage. He does not look away from the Prince. "Your Highness is hurt."

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"I am Emperor," the boy says.

Maids flood the threshold in a whispering flock, arms laden with towels, salves, clean robes. They gather around the Prince like foam around a rock. He shoves the nearest away; the girl staggers, copper basin ringing on stone. "I am going to the Eastern Palace," he says. "Open the way."

"Your Highness, you need a phys—" another ventures, sweating.

"Bow," he says, and the word is a lash. "Bow before your Emperor."

They kneel as if the floor yanked them.

Steel breathes. The Guards spread, closing a spiral around Meibei. Shen Huo lifts two fingers; lances notch, a cage of glinting teeth.

Meibei steps toward the nearest spearpoint as if approaching a skittish horse. The lancer flinches half a hair; it is enough. Her left hand ghosts along the ash shaft, her right turns his wrist into an obedient hinge. The spear arcs; the butt kisses a knee, the heel of her palm kisses a throat. He is falling before he understands. She owns his weapon by the time his visor meets tile.

"Alive," Shen Huo roars, but the word is already too late for someone. Meibei writes in air: a bright slash that shortcuts tendon; a pivot that empties a chest of breath; a back-cut that plucks a helmband like a zither string and paints a new smile in an old scar. The lance seems longer in her hands than in theirs, and lighter, and crueler.

A maid rises from the obedient pile, too calm, too deliberate. Kexing's plain face wears another woman's powder; a humble ewer hangs from her fingers as if by accident. She staggers—oh dear—and spills a shining throat of lamp oil across the onyx tiles, beneath the trampling boots.

"Mind the—" a guard begins, and then inevitable happens.

Meibei sees it, the way a hawk sees the mouse counting its last heartbeats. She flicks the lance. Its hook nicks the bronze lamp on the low table; the lamp leaps, tosses a petal of flame, tumbles into the spreading oil.

Light runs.

In an instant the floor is a meadow of fire. It moves with animal pleasure, licking silk hems, tasting greaves, finding the fallen pearls and making each a brief star. Men bark, stumble. A halberd hits the lacquer with a kiss and becomes an exclamation of sparks. The Emperor's curtains curl and blacken, embroidered dragons writhing in a final agony.

"Shields! Wet cloths! Close on her!" Shen Huo roars, already dragging a man whose leggings burn like torches. Smoke grips the throat with two hands. The room becomes a furnace that remembers it was once a throne.

Meibei does not linger in any one place long enough to become a target. She threads the chaos, stepping in the negative spaces between lunges, riding the hinge of breath. The lance describes a circle and men forget how wrists work; it jabs like a question that has only one answer and it is blood. She opens a path by closing throats. She never looks back.

Kexing is suddenly at her shoulder. No one sees how the maid reached the lance-singer through the wreathing heat. "Left," she says, as if discussing tea. "The servants' corridor wakes behind the tiger screen."

A guard lurches out of the flames, hair crisping, eyes mad. Meibei pivots, lets his momentum spend itself on her absence, and offers him the lance haft across the bridge of his nose. Something soft inside his face breaks; he folds without ceremony.

"Go," Shen Huo coughs, to men, to fate, to the idea of order.

The Prince is gone—dragged, obeyed, surrendered to his own command. The maids who remain are prone, foreheads to tile, their bun pins burning like little comets. Kexing kicks one fallen lamp farther into the oil with a demure flick of shoe; the new flame blossoms, applauds the old.

Meibei and Kexing slip along the wall where the smoke is thinnest, where shadows carry ladders. The tiger screen waits, tail singed, eyes bright. It knows the hinge. Kexing palms the seam; the panel sighs. Heat inhales behind them as they pass through.

...

The Eastern Palace glows like a wound that refuses to scab. Lanterns gutter in lacquered brackets, shedding halos that smell of sesame smoke and singed silk. The Crown Prince—barefoot, robe thrown over blood-stiff underlayers—waits upon a dais of dark wood polished to a moon's reflection. His pulse is a drum the room pretends not to hear.

Shen Huo arrives with iron and breath. Chains scrawl along the tiles, and Yile is written at their end—neck collared, wrists silk-bound, hair immaculate despite the march. The Head Guard's halberd taps once, the sound a small verdict.

"Your Highness," Shen Huo says, then corrects himself when he meets the boy's eyes, now fathomless. "Your Majesty. The prisoner."

Yile studies the floor like a poet considering an unworthy rhyme. He lifts his gaze only when compelled by silence.

"The Emperor is dead," the new Emperor says. "You have one sentence to persuade me not to kill you."

The room stops breathing. Yile does not. His lips part, then seal. No ribboned plea, no deft trap. Only quiet.

A whisper of chain answers where a voice does not. Meicao pours out of shadow, a scythe on a leash of links hissing from her sleeve with the bright intimacy of a serpent leaving its hole. The hooked blade sings for blood and the arc it draws chooses the throat that bears the realm.

Metal meets metal. Meibei is there—with a theatre mask on her face—her stolen lance catching the scythe in a V of iron. Sparks bead and fall like amber tears. She plants, pivots; the chain snarls around her haft and she turns its hunger aside by degrees, each movement slender as a brushstroke and twice as final.

"Stand down," she says to Meicao, voice like a winter reed. "Bow to your Emperor. Or bleed for air that is no longer yours."

Meicao's eyes are pits. "Traitor," she breathes, drawing the chain back into a coil that wants to be lightning. Her gaze slashes to the dais, to Yile, back to Meibei. "You and Kexing. As Meice. As Meicong. As Kuan. How many knives for one master's back?"

"Knives sprout in soil watered by reasons," Meibei answers, almost tender. "The world does not betray a man who feeds it bread."

"Enough riddles," says Kexing wearing the ash of kitchens and the calm of temples. She steps from a carved screen, hands empty, eyes not. "We never once betrayed him," she says to the guards, to the Prince, to the idea of fate. "Not once."

"What is the meaning of all this?" the Emperor demands.

At that, Yile breaks like a bow that chooses to unstring itself. He drops, not to his knees but all the way—forehead to tile, palms open, a supplicant to the blade he honed. His voice is a scrape of silk across stone. "Kill me," he says. "Majesty, kill me."

The Emperor descends a single step. His bare foot gleams with a dried crescent of someone else's life. He places it on the back of Yile's skull, testing the hinge of bone as if it were a door he expects to open.

"If you wished to die," he says, pressing until Yile's breath hisses between his teeth, "a thousand softer roads were yours. A length of silk. A bath and a knife. A cup. Instead you chose to play with the sleeping dragon." The foot grinds. Yile's cheek kisses quartz in the tile; a pink smear appears and tries, trembling, not to be a flower.

"Kill me," Yile repeats, voice muffled, steady. "Majesty, I beg."

The Emperor laughs, a bright sound with no heat. He speaks while his heel forces syllables out of Yile like pips from fruit. "Listen, Yile. The world is changed. The mountain fell and I am the river that chose its new bed. From this night, you are my dog. Not a jade hound in a scholar's painting—no. A courtyard cur with a rope for a soul. You will eat when I throw, sleep when I permit, bite who I point at, and when you tire of living I will hold your eyes open and pour dawn into them until you hate the sun. You will not die. Not easily, not kindly, not by your own hand. When your knees ache for graves, I will give you errands. When your breath begs to stop, I will use it to blow out other men's candles. You trained me in levers; I make you my lever. You taught me that power is patience sharpened. I will be patient. I will sharpen you until you scream like wire."

"Mercy," Yile whispers to the tile, to the heel, to the boy he raised into a blade. "Mercy, my Emperor."

The foot lifts. The world returns to three dimensions. The Emperor grips Yile by the collar and hauls him upright with a strength that surprises even anger. He brings their faces near. Yile's perfume—winter plum, bitter tea—meets the Emperor's breath—copper, pitch, the after of tigers.

"You will never know rest," the Emperor says, conversational, as if declaring a holiday. "You will never know mercy."

He turns without releasing his hold and addresses the air behind Shen Huo's shoulder. "Bring me Sima."

A Guard steps forward, fist to chest. "Majesty—Eunuch Sima is confined below the Ministry cells. Condemned to die at the Autumn Assizes. Orders drawn and sealed."

"By whose ink?" the Emperor asks, though the answer trembles visibly at Yile's wrist.

"By… by your late Celestial Father's decree," the Guard admits, eyes slipping to the chain, then away.

The Emperor's smile cuts. "Sima is a victim of Yile's scheme. He is to be graced at once. Break his chains. Wash him. Put rice and ginger wine in his hands. If a clerk complains, remove his brush-fingers."

"At once!" The Guard pivots; boots drum. The command leaves the room and runs into corridors.

Something unclenches inside Yile—not joy, not relief, something thinner that still manages to feel like breath. He sees Kexing's calm again as if across smoke; he hears an old sentence: We never once betrayed you. He tastes its shape now. Sima. Freedom arranged behind his back while he was busy mastering cages he did not want. They did it for him. Not for Sima. For his sake.

He kneels. Not prostration born of theater, but the low bow of a man putting his head where a blade could find it if it wished to and perhaps being at peace with that geometry. His forehead touches wood. "May Heaven lengthen Your Majesty's shadow," he says, and the sincerity is a quiet astonishment inside his own mouth. He turns his head slightly. "Meicao."

Meicao's jaw works. Fury stands beside loyalty and both refuse to yield. The chain whispers a last syllable, then slumbers. She drops, hard, palms open.

Meibei follows, liquid as falling ink. Kexing kneels as if she has been kneeling all her life and only now remembers why.

Shen Huo looks from the Emperor to the floor and back. Iron creaks as men rediscover a muscle they seldom use. Halberds tilt toward lacquered screens; armor murmurs; knees touch tile.

One by one the Palace Guards fold until the hall is a field of bowed backs and lowered spears, all of it pointing like a compass needle toward the young man who stands barefoot in a robe crusted with his father's blood.

...

A trumpet of shark-bone sounds, harsh and holy. The sky over the Vermilion Steps is a bowl of hammered gold; banners drag long tails of color through the heat. The boy walks in blood-washed silk patched with new embroidery, barefoot still, as if the earth must remember him.

On the jade terrace the world kneels; he does not. The jade seal is brought on a pillow the color of dried poppy. He takes it with both hands, and the herald cries a name that was never spoken for him as a child and will be nailed to every edict like a star to a night: Emperor Yanming.

The first era title falls from the drum-beat mouths of a hundred officials: Severed Dawn. The words roll across rooftops and into the poor quarters like thunder looking for hills. When he bows to Heaven and his mother's tablet, the wind lifts and all the banners strain as if some immense beast is inhaling. A line of maids folds like grass. Kexing's head touches stone. Meibei watches the Emperor's bare heel leave the last crescent of old blood on the top step before the red washy glare devours it.

In the cool shadow behind the throne, a man with a hawkish nose and piercing eyes stands clean. They have cut the prison from his hair and combed loyalty into it. He has no ring, no hidden blade, only a brush and a ledger with a new seal. "Rise, Sima," the Emperor says without looking at him, testing the name like an old coin rubbed thin by superstition. "Sit where numbers break men or save them." Sima kneels, not as a eunuch begging to be allowed to breathe, but as the new prime minister of the Moukopl Empire.

Across the hall, Yile stands with wrists unbound. He bows so low that his forehead remembers the grain of this wood forever. Sima's eyes slide to him. Neither speaks. The drum of decree begins; the quill-scratch of reform answers.

...

The Hall of Celestial Contemplation opens its stone belly and vomits ledgers, jars, jeweled toys that were never toys. A law is read under snow: no child enters this door. The door is sealed with iron runes.

Yanming watches the masons tamp the last wedge. "Leave the locks on the inside," he says. "So the ghosts may walk out if they wish."

Sima writes four characters on a board and nails it where petitions once begged to be heard: Quiet Garden. Yile stands in the courtyard through the snowfall until white clots on his lashes.

Yanming walks the hall where he killed a god and listens to the floorboards complain in new ways. He pauses by the sealed door of the Quiet Garden and sets his palm to iron gone warm in the Sun. "Mother," he says, not loudly. "The air changes." No answer comes, except the soft clicking of a cricket that chose to live here, in forbidden hush, of all places.

On a night with two moons braided together by haze, the Emperor summons Yile to the roof and gives him a cup. "Drink," he says. Yile obeys. It is only tea. It is only bitter. Yanming leans on the parapet and watches the city exhale a thousand cooking fires. "You taught me to measure people," he says. "Count me, then."

Yile studies the long plane of that face, the mess he made and the miracle it performed in spite of him. His smile is nothing anyone taught him. "You are the abacus with one bead missing," he answers. "And no sum is safe."

The Emperor laughs, briefly—no mirth, only recognition. "Good," he says.

Eight years turn their pages; each painted in ash and gold.

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