They reached Three Rivers Prefecture at noon, where three bands of water stitched a city together and pulled it thin.
Bridges arched like ribs over the channels. Markets crowded the banks—rice, fish, cheap copper charms stamped with the shape of a flame. Above the central square rose a Lantern tower taller than any they had seen, its chains sunk into stone like roots.
Li Yan whistled low. "If Heaven loves anything, it loves a good view."
Elder Qinghe didn't smile. "It loves order."He tapped his cane twice. "We watch first."
They watched.
The tower's flame did not burn steady. It pulsed—three beats bright, one beat dim—as if keeping a rhythm only it could hear. Each dimming sent a shiver through the square. Vendors paused mid-word. Children flinched without knowing why.
A bell rang from the magistrate's hall. Officials in blue stepped out with ledgers pressed to their ribs. Behind them, six armored men carried spears tipped with little lanterns that burned a clean, cold white.
A crier unrolled a scroll and shouted, voice practiced to carry over fish-scales and arguments."Tithe Day. All citizens present their years in good order. Infants exempt till the third winter. Elders above seventy exempt with proof seal."
Li Yan made a choking noise. "They're just… saying it out loud."
Qinghe's face did not change. "In small towns the Lantern drinks quietly. In cities, it is managed."
Lines formed. People extended their wrists to a clerk who brushed each with a brush of black silk. The white-tipped spears hummed. A faint blue line unspooled from skin to tower—quick, almost gentle. Most barely swayed.
Then a woman stepped forward holding a boy of four.
The clerk frowned. "Exempt until third winter."
"Third was last snow," she said. "He dreams of the tower and wakes with blood from his nose. Take my years if you must. Not his."
The clerk's mouth thinned. "The Lantern takes what it takes."
When the silk touched the boy's wrist, the tower brightened—too bright. The line between child and flame thickened, drinking hard. The boy went white. The mother screamed. People surged; guards shoved them back with spear shafts and apologies spoken like orders.
Xu Pingsheng felt the wheel behind his heart turn. The Seal at his throat stung a warning.
"Don't," Qinghe said softly.
He didn't move. He saw Threads—so many Threads—braided through the square, into the tower, out again along the bridges to the other two Lantern towers that marked the city's east and west. The three flames blinked in rough time, sometimes together, sometimes not, like eyes trying to focus on the same thing and failing.
The boy stopped breathing.
The tower dimmed, satisfied.
A guard crouched, pressed fingers to the child's throat, then shook his head at the clerk. The clerk wrote something in the ledger with a pen that squeaked like a rat and said, without looking up, "Next."
The mother did not move.
A man at the back of the line shouted, "Thieves!" Another, "Murderers!" The word rolled forward, picking up stones as it came. Guards lifted spears. The little white lanterns on the tips burned bright, and the crowd dimmed—only slightly, but enough to put knees on the ground.
Li Yan's hands bunched to fists. "Say the word," he hissed. "I'll complicate their order for a day."
Pingsheng did not say the word. He couldn't. The Seal tightened each time the wheel stirred, as if it knew why.
Qinghe's gaze tracked the ledgers, the spears, the tower's beat. "Something is pulling out of sequence," he murmured. "Tithe should skim, not strip."
A bell rang from the east tower. The west answered, a breath late. The central tower dimmed, brightened, dimmed again—then held steady as if a hand had steadied a cup.
The line moved. The city pretended not to tremble.
An hour later the square returned to market-sound. A thin sheet covered the boy. His mother sat beside him with her back against the tower's base, eyes dry past crying. People stepped around the pair with practiced kindness that did not risk looking down.
Elder Qinghe approached the magistrate's steps. A clerk barred him with a ledger. "Petitions in the morning."
"I'm not a petitioner," Qinghe said.
"Everyone is," the clerk said. "The city keeps order by keeping time. Whose time are you here to spend?"
Qinghe inclined his head, a bow that could be taken for courtesy or threat. "Taiching Sect. We were sent to investigate the missing teams."
The clerk's knuckles whitened on paper. "We haven't—"
"Three teams," Qinghe said, not unkind. "We'd prefer not to become the fourth."
The clerk hesitated, then stepped aside. "You'll want the Records Hall."
They crossed a courtyard lined with stone tablets incised in tiny, clean characters: names, dates, tithe totals. Inside the Hall, chalk dust lifted in slow sunlight. A woman in gray cataloged ledgers by height and sigh.
"The teams came, yes," she said when Qinghe asked. "They examined our balances, spoke to the keeper of the east tower, and then they followed the river. Everyone follows the river. Everyone thinks the answer lives where water and flame meet. Everyone is wrong."
"Where, then?" Li Yan asked.
The woman looked at Pingsheng's throat, where the Seal lay like a shadow of ink. Her gaze flicked away as if burned. "You should leave before dark."
"Why?" Li Yan said.
"Because at night," she said, and her voice did not shake only because she had run out of ways for it to, "the towers drink backward."
Qinghe's cane tapped once. "What does that mean?"
"The ledgers lose lines," she whispered. "Names unwrite. We cannot find the bodies in the morning because there were no bodies. There were no people. Only gaps where their mothers stand and smooth a blanket no son ever used."
Silence pressed the room flat.
Li Yan swallowed. "You could have led with that."
They left the Hall. Afternoon tilted into a bruise-colored evening. Lanterns along the lanes lit one by one, taking small sips. The towers burned steadier. The central flame smoothed its pulse until it matched the rhythm of feet on bridges and the clap of stall shutters closing.
Qinghe steered them down a narrow stair to a quay where river met the tower's shadow. "Three towers, one prefecture," he said. "A triad system to share load. But the central pillar is averaging the debt. When the east starves, the center eats heavy. When the west overgathers, the center spits."
"Spits how?" Li Yan asked.
"Back into the Record," Qinghe said. "Backward."
Pingsheng watched the water catch sky and give it back thinner. He could feel Threads braided under the river's skin—cold, strong, threaded with numbers like tiny bells: five, seven, twelve…
A girl stepped out from beneath the stair, barefoot, hair bound in a scrap of red cloth. She held a bowl with nothing in it but water and the shadow of a fish."You're from the mountain," she said.
Qinghe glanced down. "We are."
"They say the mountain talks to Heaven."
"Sometimes it argues first."
She nodded as if this were a reasonable order of operations. "My grandmother says the river remembers better than Heaven does."
"What does it remember?" Li Yan asked.
The girl looked at Pingsheng. She did not look away from the Seal. "It remembers the name of anyone who watches the tower too long."
Pingsheng met her gaze. The Seal stung."Don't," Qinghe murmured, and it wasn't clear whether he meant don't look or don't answer.
The girl lifted the bowl. "Drink. The water here has too many names. One more won't drown you."
He took the bowl. The water tasted of iron and summer and something cut fine as wire. A Thread touched his tongue and flinched.
"How old are you?" Li Yan asked, because he could not stand the way the city had decided to be quiet.
"Old enough to carry my own name," she said. "Not old enough to keep it if I stand in the square on Tithe Day."
"Go home," Qinghe told her.
"I live under the east tower," she said. "It's the only part of the city that doesn't forget me at night."
She slipped away under the stair, bowl empty, leaving nothing to prove she had been but a wet ring on the stone.
They found an inn whose sign promised beds that did not bite. The keeper did not meet their eyes long enough to notice that one of them wore a Seal where words should be.
They ate in silence. Even Li Yan ran out of ways to make the food less itself.
When the moon dragged itself up the haze, a bell tolled once from the west tower. The east answered late. The central flame steadied, then dimmed, then steadied again hard enough to throw blue light across every window on the quay.
"Now," Qinghe said. "We see if the Records Hall clerk was mad or honest."
They returned to the square. The stall where the boy had stood was gone. The woman who had been his mother sat alone against the pedestal with her hands folded in her lap as if waiting for a teacher who had not yet been born. Pingsheng looked for the sheet. There was no sheet. There was no boy. There was only the echo of a place where grief had been set down a few hours to rest.
The Seal burned like a brand.He felt the backward pull—not from flesh to flame, but from ledger to light, names sliding from stone into air, from air into nothing.
"Qinghe," Li Yan whispered. "Do you—do you remember the boy?"
"Yes," Qinghe said. "Which means we are already standing outside the current this city swims in."
Blue lines crawled along the tower's chains, then reversed. The flame reeled as if trying to drink its own smoke. The crowd thinned—not by walking home, but by unhappening. A boy leapt after a tossed orange and did not land, because there had never been an orange and the stones under his feet had not been crowded five breaths ago.
"Enough," a voice said.
Not Heaven's. Human. Sharp with authority and something like fear.
A man in white with a black cord at his waist stepped into the light cast by the tower. His hair was bound in a magistrate's knot. His left sleeve bore three stitched circles: east, west, center.
Qinghe bowed a fraction. "Prefect."
The man did not return it. His gaze went to Pingsheng's throat and stuck there. "Seal," he said. "Good."He clapped his hands once. The tower slowed as if embarrassed to be caught miscounting.
"You will come to the yamen at dawn," the prefect said. "You will offer your mountain's courtesy. And you will not touch my towers."
Li Yan's mouth opened. Qinghe's hand closed on his sleeve without looking.
The prefect turned to go, then paused and spoke without facing them."If the mountain insists on helping," he said, "it may start at the Weir Gate. Names drown there each night. The ledger cannot reach what the river hides."
He vanished into the dark like a line crossed off a page.
Li Yan exhaled. "Is it my imagination, or did the city just tell us where the bodies went?"
"Bodies?" Qinghe said. "Tonight there are no bodies."
They stood under the tower as the flame tallied backward, forward, backward again—then steadied as if satisfied with its own arithmetic. The square repopulated by degrees, with people who had always been here, who would be here tomorrow, who had never had a boy who bled from his nose when he dreamed of fire.
Pingsheng closed his eyes. He reached inward, felt the wheel turn once against the Seal, slow and deliberate.He listened the way Qinghe had taught him—without pulling, without pushing, letting the Threads scrape his mind like reeds along a boat's hull.
There—a tug from the river's bend. Not from the towers. From water curled around stone.
He opened his eyes.
"Weir Gate," Qinghe said, the word a direction more than a place. "Before dawn. No banners. No bells."
Li Yan flexed his hands. "And if the water remembers us too well?"
"Then we teach it a new name," Qinghe said.
Pingsheng touched the Seal. It answered with a sting, and he answered back with silence.
If Heaven writes backward, he thought, I will learn to read the river.
The wheel turned.
— End of Chapter 10 —