Emperor Shao (少帝), Bian (辯), and the Prince of Chenliu (陳留王), Xie (協), the two young princes, sat upon a broad rock on the slope of a hill north of Luoyang, their hands clasped together. The hand of Zhang Rang (張讓) had unfolded from their hands. That night Zhang Rang himself walked into a small stream upon the hill and pressed his face down beneath the water. Of the ten flies, the last remaining one had dropped quietly from its seat.

Within the night wind of Luoyang, the fourteen-year-old Bian began to weep. The nine-year-old Xie did not weep. He only gripped his elder brother's hand more tightly. "Elder brother. Can we return home?" Xie's voice was small, yet it was not the voice of nine years. Bian could not answer. His own shoulders were tilting toward the burning sky of the palace.

At that moment, the smell of earth came up from below the hill. After the earth came leather; after leather, oil. After that came the smell of horses. Not one or two, but several thousand horses advancing this way all at once. The owners of those horses were men of Xiliang (西涼).

The man at the head of that army was a thick-built fellow with broad shoulders and a turbid look in his eyes. Though he held the seat of grand administrator of Hedong (河東太守), in truth he held some twenty thousand Xiliang cavalry within the grip of his fist. From Lintao (臨洮) in Longxi (隴西). His surname was Dong (董), his given name Zhuo (卓), his style Zhongying (仲顈). His face was thick; his smile was rare. In place of smiling, his mouth kept moving by halves, as if he were lightly chewing on something.

Dong Zhuo reined in his horse. Upon the rock before him, two young children were sitting with hands clasped. His turbid eye turned first toward Emperor Shao, Bian, then crossed toward the Prince of Chenliu, Xie. His voice reached the young Emperor for the first time.

"Is His Majesty truly His Majesty?"

The young Bian tried to open his mouth, yet no line came out. Only his lips trembled; only his breath trembled. Dong Zhuo's gaze settled turbidly upon those trembling lips. In that moment, the young Xie lifted his head before his elder brother and looked upon Dong Zhuo.

"This one is my elder brother, the Emperor of the Han (漢); I am his younger brother, the Prince of Chenliu, Xie. The elder from Xiliang will have suffered greatly upon the long road. The meaning of meeting these two children this night we brothers shall not forget."

It was a voice of nine years. Yet that single sentence ran one breath faster than his fourteen-year-old elder brother's. Dong Zhuo's eye rested long upon the side of the Prince of Chenliu.

That night, Dong Zhuo's Xiliang cavalry seated the two young children upon the rear of their horses. The image of two small children sitting behind the saddles was turned to, each in turn, by the twenty thousand cavalry. From no horse did a sound come out. Yet that silence was not the silence of an army, but the silence of men who had already known by themselves that they were holding the fate of a country.

The head of the cavalry began to turn toward the southern gate of Luoyang. Five li outside the gate, Dong Zhuo slackened the reins. The burning western sky of Luoyang reflected red upon his helmet. Upon the watchtower of the gate, one sentinel saw the redness of that helmet first. He stepped one step backward and opened the gate slowly, halfway. Through the half-opening, it was a gap too narrow for two thousand Xiliang horses to pass at once. Yet before the order to widen the gap came down from above, the sentinel's own hand pushed the gate out a little more.

That this single push would open one year of a country was something the owner of that hand did not yet know. The footsteps of Xiliang were crossing, today for the first time, into the Han capital of Luoyang.

Before that night ended, the palace of Luoyang was no longer the possession of one man. The young Emperor Bian returned. Yet beside his seat, the turbid eye of one man met this day for the first time followed him, step by step. That the shadow of the Emperor had become two required, strangely, no proclamation and no edict.

The eleventh night of Book 1 deepened quietly before the hand of one sentinel at the southern gate of Luoyang. The three characters Seoryangjeok (西凉跡, the footprint that came from Xiliang) were planted quietly as a seed through the halfway gap of one gate. The seat of blood in the palace courtyard and the middle of the northern plain of Day 10 were gathering, today, into the footstep of a new master at the inside of one capital.

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