This one landed near the granary square, tearing a jagged wound in the cobbles. Dust and screams rose together. One of the law tablets shuddered, cracked down its face, and slid sideways.
Ren the scribe stared at it, inkbrush frozen in mid-stroke.
A third stone took the corner off the temple's outer wall, sending a shower of worn bricks across the steps where people had been sitting to eat thin gruel. Bowls shattered. A carved wooden guardian lost its head.
"Inside," Ziyan breathed.
She had thought herself ready for this. She was wrong.
"Han, you have the north for now," she said, voice suddenly sharp. "Zhao, take the east. Chen Rui, reinforce wherever Han points his chin. Wei—"
"I stay," Wei said. "If you're mad enough to walk under falling rocks, someone has to be mad enough to drag you out when they do."
Feiyan's hand was already on Ziyan's sleeve. "We go," she said. "If they're aiming there, there's a reason, and it's not to improve the view."
Li Qiang's jaw tightened, but he didn't argue. "I'll hold here," he said. "If they try to make the breach while you're gone, I'll scream loud enough to shame the gods."
"You won't be alone," Han said. "I like this wall. I'm not letting anyone rearrange it without my say."
Ziyan took one last look at the fields, at the distant clusters of siege engines being walked to new angles like obedient oxen, then turned and ran down the stairs.
Stones fell as she went.
They landed in bursts: sometimes on empty roofs, sending tiles cascading; sometimes in streets, breaking cart shafts, flattening stalls; once through the upper story of a house whose lower level had already been evacuated, thanks to a runner who'd listened when Ren the scribe started shouting orders.
Ziyan forced herself not to flinch at each impact. She flinched anyway when they reached the granary square.
Dust hung thick. The air tasted like broken teeth.
One of the law tablets lay in pieces, its carved script shattered. Another stood tilted, as if considering whether to follow. The third, bearing the section about grain and tax, had a chunk missing from its corner, but held.
People clustered at the edges, eyes wide. No one had run far. They'd backed off just enough to see.
The steward from the temple was there, soot still at the edges of his sleeves, bucket in hand. He stared at the broken tablet as if someone had struck him, not stone.
Ren the scribe turned at Ziyan's approach, chalk-whitened with dust. His eyes were blazing.
"They hit the law," he said. "First the warehous e, then here. It's not accident."
"Of course it isn't," Ziyan said.
The steward swallowed. "Does it… count?" he asked hoarsely. "If the stone breaks it… does the rule—"
"The rule is ink and bone, not rock," Ziyan snapped. Then she softened her tone. "It counts. It stands. We'll carve another. You keep scrubbing floors. That's how it lives."
Relief and shame slid across his face in the same breath.
"We have to move people," Ren said. "Away from here. The square's a target now."
"Not yet," Ziyan said.
He stared. "If we leave them here—"
"We'll leave the tablets undefended," she said. "If the square empties at the first stone, what they will remember is that their law was the first thing they abandoned. We pull children back. We move the infirm who can't walk. The rest—"
She stepped up onto the half-shattered base, dust puffing around her boots. Another stone whistled overhead, this one landing somewhere behind the temple with a crash.
"—the rest can decide for themselves where they want to stand."
Faces turned toward her: merchant apprentices, grimy and wide-eyed; an old woman with a broom still in her hands; two of Chen Rui's westerners, helmets askew; the caravan guard, blood drying on his knuckles from the wall, now oddly out of place on the square.
"This law," Ziyan said, voice carrying over the rumble of distant impacts, "does not stop stones. It never promised to. It does not stop hunger. Or fear. I wish it could."
Another crash. The cracked tablet slid a little further, held by one stubborn corner.
"What it can stop," she went on, "is us deciding we are nothing but people other men move with letters and threats. If you leave this square because you're ordered, I'll understand. If you stay because you choose, you make this stone worth carving again."
Someone laughed shakily. "You ask us to stand under sky-fall for a rock."
"For a promise," Ziyan corrected. "The rock can be replaced. The promise can only be broken if we do it ourselves."
The steward lifted his bucket. "I'll stay," he said. "If the law breaks, I want to see it so I can tell the sick exactly what killed them."
The old woman snorted. "I was born before Zhang was worth spitting at," she said. "I'll be damned if I run now because some emperor's toy throws pebbles at my square."
One by one, people straightened. Some stepped back to safer corners where they could still see. Others stepped forward, not in a line, not in anything a general would call formation, but in a small, stubborn cluster around the tablets.
Ren shook his head in disbelief and went to drag children out of reach.
Feiyan tugged Ziyan's sleeve. "Temple," she said. "If I were Luo, that's where I'd send knives while everyone's watching you do something inspiring and foolish out here."
She was right.
They reached the temple just as the first infiltrator knifed a guard at the rear entrance.
He moved well—low, precise, in armor dullened with mud. Not Xia colors; those had been stripped. His companions flowed behind him: four men, faces wrapped, blades short and meant for close work.
They'd come up through an old drainage culvert, half-collapsed, that opened just under the temple's side steps. Two bodies lay by the hole already: unsuspecting watchmen whose throats had not even had time to be surprised.
Inside, the infirmary was chaos. Patients tried to scramble off pallets; the old healer swung a ladle like a mace; the boy with river-frost in his lungs clutched his blanket and shook.
The lead infiltrator hurled a clay pot toward the herb shelves. It shattered, oil spilling, fire licking greedily along the floor where a lamp had been knocked over in the panic.
The steward—temple scrubber, failed merchant of medicine—threw himself at the spreading flame with a howl. He upended his bucket, water hissing, then grabbed a wool blanket from the nearest pallet and slammed it down, beating at the fire with frantic, clumsy blows.
"Get back!" the healer shrieked.
"Not again," he shouted back, eyes wild. "We don't lose this twice."
The infiltrator moved toward him, blade angling for kidney.