On the night the city fell, his father split a bronze seal in two and pressed half into his hand. “Head south. Don’t look back.”
He looked back once. The battlements were packed with people. When the roll call reached his name, no one answered. He called out, “Alive!”
Three months later, he was escorted to the northern frontier. He still held half the seal, but now there was a city in his arms.
The city was empty. He walked its perimeter: of the twelve stretches of wall, only three were still standing. The granary held sixty-three shi of grain, and not a single name was listed in the register.
There was no mountain of gold or silver inside the seal. Only an empty city and a mouth that had to be fed every day.
There were only two things he could do: carry stones and write names in the register. Neither could be done quickly. By the third year, the wall had grown from three sections to twelve, and the population in the register from zero to four hundred.
Every time a new section of wall was finished, another shadow appeared on the battlements. He had never told anyone.
Of the nine frontier garrisons in the north, he had only one. The other eight were scattered across the Four Kingdoms and Great You, and some had vanished so completely that no one knew where they were.
He hadn’t originally been called Wei Zheng.
