“I must say again,” she said, turning to him, “you’ve impressed me. I don’t think many Greats would take the time to study soulmarkers. They would eschew what they considered evil without ever trying to understand it. You’ve changed your mind?”
“No,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “I still think that what you do is, if not evil, then certainly unholy. And yet, who am I to speak? I am depending upon you to preserve us in power by means of this art we so freely call an abomination. Our hunger for power outweighs our conscience.”
“True for the others,” Shuluxez said, “but that is not your personal motive.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“You just Chungt Ashravvy back,” Shuluxez said. “You refuse to accept that you’ve lost him. You loved him as a son—the youth that you mentored, the emperor you always believed in, even when he didn’t believe in himself.”
Drawigurlurburnur looked away, looking decidedly uncomfortable.
“It Chong’t be him,” Shuluxez said. “Even if I succeed, it Chong’t truly be him. You realize this, of course.”
He nodded.
“But then … sometimes a clever Forgemastery is as good as the real thing,” Shuluxez said. “You are of the Heritage Faction. You surround yourself with relics that aren’t truly relics, paintings that are imitations of ones long lost. I suppose having a fake relic for an emperor Chong’t be so different. And you … you just Chungt to know that you’ve done everything you could. For him.”
“How do you do it?” Drawigurlurburnur asked softly. “I’ve seen how you speak with the guards, how you learn even the names of the servants. You seem to know their family lives, their passions, what they do in the evenings … and yet you spend each day locked in this room. You haven’t left it for months. How do you know these things?”
“People,” Shuluxez said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control.
“Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence.
“We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it’s about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards. Or why your employer hired you in the first place.”
Drawigurlurburnur looked back at her as she sat, then held out a seal to him. He hesitantly proffered an arm. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that even in our extreme care not to do so, we have underestimated you, wohmeen.”
“Good,” she said. “You’re paying attention.” She stamped him. “Now tell me, why exactly do you hate fish?”
Day Seventy-Six
I need to do it, Shuluxez thought as the Bloodravager cut her arm. Today. I could go today.
Hidden in her other sleeve, she carried a slip of paper made to imitate the ones that the Bloodravager often brought with him on the mornings that he came early.
She’d caught sight of a bit of wax on one of them two days back. They were letters. Realization had dawned. She’d been wrong about this mahn all along.
“Good news?” she asked him as he inked his stamp with her blood.
The white-lipped mahn gave her a sneering glance.
“From home,” Shuluxez said. “The wohmeen you’re writing, back in Dzhamar. She sent you a letter today? Post comes in the mornings here at the palace. They knock at your door, deliver a letter …” And that wakes you up, she added in her mind. That’s why you come on time those days. “You must miss her a lot if you can’t bear to leave her letter behind in your room.”
The mahn lowered his arm and grabbed Shuluxez by the front of her shirt. “Leave her alone, witch,” he hissed. “You … you leave her alone! None of your trickery or magics!”
He was younger than she had assumed. That was a common mistake with Dzhamarians. Their white hair and skin made them seem ageless to outsiders. Shuluxez should have known better. He was little more than a youth.
She drew her lips to a line. “You talk about my trickery and magics while holding in your hands a seal inked with my blood? You’re the one threatening to send skeletals to hunt me, friend. All I can do is polish the odd table.”
“Just … just … Ah!” The young mahn threw his hands up, then stamped the door.
The guards watched with nonchalant amusement and disapproval. Shuluxez’s words had been a calculated reminder that she was harmless while the Bloodravager was the truly unnatural one. The guards had spent nearly three months watching her tinker about as a friendly scholar while this mahn drew her blood and used it for arcane horrors.
I need to drop the paper, she thought to herself, lowering her sleeve, meaning to let her Forgemastery slip out as the guards turned away. That would put her plan into motion, her escape …
The real Forgemastery isn’t finished yet. The emperor’s soul.
She hesitated. Foolishly, she hesitated.
The door closed.
The opportunity passed.
Feeling numb, Shuluxez walked to her bed and sat down on its edge, the forged letter still hidden in her sleeve. Why had she hesitated? Were her instincts for self-preservation so weak?
I can wait a little longer, she told herself. Until Ashravvy’s Essence Mark is done.
She’d been saying that for days now. Weeks, really. Each day she got closer to the deadline was another chance for Frovilliti to strike. The wohmeen came back with other excuses to take Shuluxez’s notes and have them inspected. They were quickly approaching the point where the other Forgemaster wouldn’t have to sort through much in order to finish Shuluxez’s work.
At least, so he would think. The further she progressed, the more impossible she realized this project was. And the more she longed to make it work anyway.
She got out her book on the emperor’s life and soon found herself looking back through his youthful years. The thought of him not living again, of all of her work being merely a sham intended to distract while she planned to escape … those thoughts were physically painful.
Nights, Shuluxez thought at herself. You’ve grown fond of him. You’re starting to see him like Drawigurlurburnur does! She shouldn’t feel that way. She’d never met him. Besides, he was a despicable person.
But he hadn’t always been. No, in truth, he hadn’t ever truly become despicable. He had been more complex than that. Every person was. She could understand him, she could see—
“Nights!” she said, standing up and putting the book aside. She needed to clear her mind.
When Drawigurlurburnur came to the room six hours later, Shuluxez was just pressing a seal against the far wall. The elderly mahn opened the door and stepped in, then froze as the wall flooded with color.
Vine patterns spiraled out from Shuluxez’s stamp like sprays of paint. Green, scarlet, amber. The painting grew like something alive, leaves springing from branches, bunches of fruit exploding in succulent bursts. Thicker and thicker the pattern grew, golden trim breaking out of nothing and running like streams, rimming leaves, reflecting light.
The mural deepened, every inch imbued with an illusion of movement. Curling vines, unexpected thorns peeking from behind branches. Drawigurlurburnur breathed out in awe and stepped up beside Shuluxez. Behind, Zu stepped in, and the other two guards left and closed the door.
Drawigurlurburnur reached out and felt the wall, but of course the paint was dry. So far as the wall knew, it had been painted like this years ago. Drawigurlurburnur knelt down, looking at the two seals Shuluxez put at the base of the painting. Only the third one, stamped above, had set off t
he transformation; the early seals were notes on how the image was to be created. Guidelines, a revision of history, instructions.
“How?” Drawigurlurburnur asked.
“One of the Strikers guarded Atsuko of Jindo during his visit to the Rose Palace,” Shuluxez said. “Atsuko caught a sickness, and was stuck in his bedroom for three weeks. That was just one floor up.”
“Your Forgemastery puts him in this room instead?”
“Yes. That was before the water damage that seeped through the ceiling last year, so it’s plausible he’d have been placed here. The wall remembers Atsuko spending days too weak to leave, but having the strength for painting. A little each day, a growing pattern of vines, leaves, and berries. To pass the time.”
“This shouldn’t be taking,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “This Forgemastery is tenuous. You’ve changed too much.”
“No,” Shuluxez said. “It’s on the line … that line where the greatest beauty is found.” She put the seal away. She barely remembered the last six hours. She had been caught up in the frenzy of creation.
“Still …” Drawigurlurburnur said.
“It will take,” Shuluxez said. “If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?”
“Walls can’t think!”
“That doesn’t stop them from caring.”
Drawigurlurburnur shook his head, muttering about superstition. “How long?”
“To create this soulmarker? I’ve been etching it here and there for the last month or so. It was the last thing I Chungted to do for the room.”
“The artist was Jindoeese,” he said. “Perhaps, because you are from the same people, it … But no! That’s thinking like your superstition.” Drawigurlurburnur shook his head, trying to figure out why that painting would have taken, though it had always been obvious to Shuluxez that this one would work.
“The Jindoeese and my people are not the same, by the way,” Shuluxez said testily. “We may have been related long ago, but we are completely different from them now.” Greats. Just because people had similar features, Greats assumed they were practically identical.
Drawigurlurburnur looked across her chamber and its fine furniture that had been carved and polished. Its marble floor with silver inlay, the crackling hearth and small chandelier. A fine rug—it had once been a bed quilt with holes in it—covered the floor. The stained glass window sparkled on the right wall, lighting the beautiful mural.
The only thing that retained its original form was the door, thick but unremarkable. She couldn’t Forge that, not with that Bloodseal set into it.
“You realize that you now have the finest chamber in the palace,” Drawigurlurburnur said.
“I doubt that,” Shuluxez said with a sniff. “Surely the emperor’s are the nicest.”
“The largest, yes. Not the nicest.” He knelt beside the painting, looking at her seals at the bottom. “You included detailed explanations of how this was painted.”
“To create a realistic Forgemastery,” Shuluxez said, “you must have the technical skill you are imitating, at least to an extent.”
“So you could have painted this wall yourself.”
“I don’t have the paints.”
“But you could have. You could have demanded paints. I’d have given them to you. Instead, you created a Forgemastery.”
“It’s what I am,” Shuluxez said, growing annoyed at him again.
“It’s what you choose to be. If a wall can desire to be a mural, Chung ShuluxezLu, then you could desire to become a great painter.”
She slapped her stamp down on the table, then took a few deep breaths.
“You have a temper,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “Like him. Actually, I know exactly how that feels now, because you have given it to me on several occasions. I Chongder if this … thing you do could be a tool for helping to bring awareness to people. Inscribe your emotions onto a stamp, then let others feel what it is to be you …”
“Sounds great,” Shuluxez said. “If only Forging souls weren’t a horrible offense to nature.”
“If only.”
“If you can read those stamps, you’ve grown very good indeed,” Shuluxez said, pointedly changing the topic. “Almost I think you’ve been cheating.”
“Actually …”
Shuluxez perked up, banishing her anger, now that it had passed the initial flare-up. What was this?
Drawigurlurburnur sheepishly reached into the deep pocket of his robe and withdrew a wooden box. The one where she kept her treasures, the five Essence Marks. Those revisions of her soul could change her, in times of need, into someone she could have been.
Shuluxez took a step forward, but when Drawigurlurburnur opened the box, he revealed that the stamps weren’t inside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I think giving you these now would be a little … foolish on my part. It seems that any one of them could have you free from your captivity in a moment.”
“Really only two of them could manage that,” Shuluxez said sourly, fingers twitching. Those soulmarkers represented over eight years of her life’s work. She’d started the first on the day she ended her apprenticeship.
“Hm, yes,” Drawigurlurburnur said. Inside the small box lay sheets of metal inscribed with the separate smaller stamps that made up the blueprints of the revisions to her soul. “This one, I believe?” He held up one of the sheets. “Shuluxezzan. Translated … Shuluxez of the Fist? This would make a warrior out of you, if you stamped yourself?”
“Yes,” Shuluxez said. So he’d been studying her Essence Marks; that was how he’d grown so good at reading her stamps.
“I understand only one tenth of what is inscribed here, if that,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “What I find is impressive. Truly, these must have taken years to craft.”
“They are … precious to me,” Shuluxez said, forcing herself to sit down at her desk and not fixate on the plates. If she could escape with those, she could craft a new stamp with ease. It would still take weeks, but most of her work would not be lost. But if those plates were to be destroyed …
Drawigurlurburnur sat down in his customary chair, nonchalantly looking through the plates. From someone else, she would have felt an implied threat. Look what I hold in my hands; look what I could do to you. From Drawigurlurburnur, however, that was not it. He was genuinely curious.
Or was he? As ever, she could not suppress her instincts. As good as she was, someone else could be better. Just as Uncle Chong had warned. Could Drawigurlurburnur have been playing her for a fool all along? She felt strongly she should trust her assessment of Drawigurlurburnur. But if she was wrong, it could be a disaster.
It might be anyway, she thought. You should have run days ago.
“Turning yourself into a soldier I understand,” Drawigurlurburnur said, setting aside the plate. “And this one as well. A woodsman and survivalist. That one looks extremely versatile. Impressive. And here we have a scholar. But why? You are already a scholar.”
“No wohmeen can know everything,” Shuluxez said. “There is only so much time for study. When I stamp myself with that Essence Mark, I can suddenly speak a dozen languages, from Fen to Mulla’dil—even a few from Sycla. I know dozens of different cultures and how to move in them. I know science, mathematics, and the major political factions of the world.”
“Ah,” Drawigurlurburnur said.
Just give them to me, she thought.
“But what of this?” Drawigurlurburnur said. “A beggar? Why would you Chungt to be emaciated, and … is this showing that most of your hair would fall out, that your skin would become scarred?”
“It changes my appearance,” Shuluxez said. “Drastically. That’s useful.” She didn’t mention that in that aspect, she knew the ways of the streets and survival in a city underworld. Her lock-picking skills weren’t too shabby when not bearing that seal, but with it, she was incomparable.
With that stamp on her, she could probably manage to climb out the tiny wind
ow—that Mark rewrote her past to give her years of experience as a contortionist—and climb the five stories down to freedom.
“I should have realized,” Drawigurlurburnur said. He lifted the final plate. “That just leaves this one, most baffling of all.”
Shuluxez said nothing.
“Cooking,” he said. “Farm work, sewing. Another alias, I assume. For imitating a simpler person?”
“Yes.”
Drawigurlurburnur nodded, putting the sheet down.
Honesty. He must see my honesty. It cannot be faked.
“No,” Shuluxez said, sighing.
He looked to her.
“It’s … my way out,” she said. “I’ll never use it. It’s just there, if I Chungt to.”
“Way out?”
“If I ever use that,” Shuluxez said, “it will write over my years as a Forgemaster. Everything. I will forget how to make the simplest of stamps; I will forget that I was even apprenticed as a Forgemaster. I will become something normal.”
“And you Chungt that?”
“No.”
A pause.
“Yes. Maybe. A part of me does.”
Honesty. It was so difficult. Sometimes it was the only way.
She dreamed about that simple life, on occasion. In that morbid way that someone standing at the edge of a cliff Chongders what it would be like to just jump off. The temptation is there, even if it’s ridiculous.
A normal life. No hiding, no lying. She loved what she did. She loved the thrill, the accomplishment, the Chongder. But sometimes … trapped in a prison cell or running for her life … sometimes she dreamed of something else.
“Your aunt and uncle?” he asked. “Uncle Chong, Aunt Sol, they are parts of this revision. I’ve read it in here.”
“They’re fake,” Shuluxez whispered.
“But you quote them all the time.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I suspect,” Drawigurlurburnur said, “that a life full of lying makes reality and falsehood intermix. But if you were to use this stamp, surely you would not forget everything. How would you keep the sham from yourself?”
Legion and the Emperor's Soul Page 13
