Feiyan's knife arrived first.
It slid between rib and lung with surgical speed. The man jerked, breath leaving in a wet grunt. Feiyan yanked him aside, used his body as brief shield against another's lunge.
Ziyan came in on the other flank, sword low. The second infiltrator turned toward her, thinking blade, not law; he did not see Shuye behind him wielding a broken fence post like a club.
"Jaw," Feiyan snapped.
Ziyan struck.
The man's head snapped back. His teeth clicked together with a sound that made even her wince. He collapsed.
The third went for the herb shelves instead of a person, grabbing armfuls of precious bundles and flinging them toward the still-smoldering patch. "Burn it!" he snarled. "Burn their cure!"
Chen Rui's boot hit his knee from the side like a hammer. He screamed, dropped, tried to roll. She pinned him with her weight and drove her sword down, not theatrically, just hard.
The last infiltrator made it to the boy's pallet.
He grabbed the child by the collar and hauled him up, knife at his throat. "Back!" he shouted in accented Qi. "Drop your blades or—"
The boy bit him.
It was not a heroic bite. It was desperate, badly located, on the part of his hand that had the least meat. But it startled the man enough that his arm jerked.
Ziyan didn't hesitate.
She closed the distance between them in three strides and rammed her shoulder into the man's chest. Pain flared in her injured arm. She let it feed her. Her sword was trapped between their bodies; she dropped it and grabbed his wrist instead, wrenching it up and away from the boy's throat.
The knife nicked her palm. The boy yelped as he fell, scrabbling under a pallet.
Feiyan arrived like punctuation, her blade a brief, decisive line across the man's exposed forearm. He howled, fingers spasming open, knife clattering. Ziyan kicked it away and drove her forehead into his nose. Cartilage crunched. He went down.
In the sudden silence, the only sounds were ragged breathing, the hiss of a dying fire, and the boy's thin, outraged cough.
"Are there more?" Ziyan demanded.
"Five," the steward panted, halfway between sobbing and laughing. "I counted five. That's five. Gods curse them, that's five."
Feiyan nodded once. "Culvert," she said, jerking her chin toward the shattered corner where the infiltrators had come up. "Wei's men will seal it. Or set jars in it so the next rat learns better manners."
Ziyan's cut hand throbbed. The healer grabbed it without ceremony. "You're bleeding on my floor," she snapped. "Sit."
Ziyan sat.
Outside, another stone crashed, closer now. Dust sifted from the rafters.
The healer wrapped Ziyan's hand briskly. "You tore your arm open again," she scolded. "At this rate, I'll sew you into your own cloak so you stop leaking."
"How many?" Ziyan asked.
"In here? None dead," the healer said grudgingly. "Out there… you'll have to ask Ren. The one with ink, not the wolf's friend."
The steward sank to his knees, shaking, staring at the smoked stain on the floor where the fire had tried to take hold. "I saw it," he whispered. "For a moment, I saw it all burning. The herbs. The pallets. The boy—"
"And you put it out," Ziyan said. "While a knife was coming for your back."
He barked a laugh that had no humor in it. "I half-hoped you'd hang me," he said. "When you caught me selling what I scrubbed. It would have been simpler."
"Simple is Zhang's word," she said. "We're stuck with complicated."
He looked at her hand, at the blood seeping through the fresh bandage. "Does it still count?" he asked quietly. "The law. If they shatter the tablets. If they burn the herbs. If we die."
Ziyan thought of the cracked stone in the square. Of the caravan guard on the wall. Of Xu Min's cloth sewn into her cloak. Of Ren Kanyu, somewhere outside these walls, writing his own ledgers.
"It counts," she said. "As long as someone remembers what it said and chooses it again. Even if it's just one old scrubber in a temple hitting a fire with a blanket."
He snorted. "Don't make me a tale for children. I used to cheat them at weights."
"Then you'll spend the rest of your life making up the difference," she said. "We're all paying off old debts here."
Feiyan leaned in close enough that only Ziyan heard her next words. "He came for your heart," she murmured. "He nearly took it."
"Not mine," Ziyan said. "The city's. And he was right to aim there. If we'd run, if we'd let the herbs burn and the tablets fall and hidden—you felt how the ground shook. It would have shaken us worse."
She stood, ignoring the healer's protest, and strode back to the temple door.
The granary square was still standing.