“It would be the greatest Forgemastery of all,” Shuluxez said. “One intended to fool even me. Written into that is the belief that without that stamp, applied every morning, I’ll die. It includes a history of illness, of visiting a … resealer, as you call them. A healer that works in soulmarkers. From them, my false self received a remedy, one I must apply each morning. Aunt Sol and Uncle Chong would send me letters; that is part of the charade to fool myself. I’ve written them already. Hundreds, which—before I use the Essence Mark on myself—I will pay a delivery service good money to send periodically.”
“But what if you try to visit them?” Drawigurlurburnur said. “To investigate your childhood …”
“It’s all in the plate. I will be afraid of travel. There’s truth to that, as I was indeed scared of leaving my village as a youth. Once that Mark is in place, I’ll stay away from cities. I’ll think the trip to visit my relatives is too dangerous. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never use it.”
That stamp would end her. She would forget the last twenty years, back to when she was eight and had first begun inquiring about becoming a Forgemaster.
She’d become someone else entirely. None of the other Essence Marks did that; they rewrote some of her past, but left her with a knowledge of who she truly was. Not so with the last one. That one was to be final. It terrified her.
“This is a great deal of work for something you’ll never use,” Drawigurlurburnur said.
“Sometimes, that is the way of life.”
Drawigurlurburnur shook his head.
“I was hired to destroy the painting,” Shuluxez blurted out.
She wasn’t quite certain what drove her to say it. She needed to be honest with Drawigurlurburnur—that was the only way her plan would work—but he didn’t need this piece. Did he?
Drawigurlurburnur looked up.
“Ching hired me to destroy Frovilliti’s painting,” Shuluxez said. “That’s why I burned the masterpiece, rather than sneaking it out of the gallery.”
“Ching? But … he’s the original artist! Why would he hire you to destroy one of his works?”
“Because he hates the empire,” Shuluxez said. “He painted that piece for a wohmeen he loved. Her children gave it to the empire as a gift. Ching is old now, blind, barely able to move. He did not Chungt to go to his grave knowing that one of his works was serving to glorify the Rose Empire. He begged me to burn it.”
Drawigurlurburnur seemed dumbfounded. He looked at her, as if trying to pierce through to her soul. Shuluxez didn’t know why he needed to bother; this conversation had already stripped her thoroughly bare.
“A master of his caliber is hard to imitate,” Shuluxez said, “particularly without the original to work from. If you think about it, you’ll realize I needed his help to create those fakes. He gave me access to his studies and concepts; he told me how he’d gone about painting it. He coached me through the brush strokes.”
“Why not just have you return the original to him?” Drawigurlurburnur asked.
“He’s dying,” Shuluxez said. “Owning a thing is meaningless to him. That painting was done for a lover. She is gone now, so he felt the painting should be as well.”
“A priceless treasure,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “Gone because of foolish pride.”
“It was his work!”
“Not any longer,” Drawigurlurburnur said. “It belonged to everyone who saw it. You should not have agreed to this. Destroying a work of art like that is never right.” He hesitated. “But still, I think I can understand. What you did had a nobility to it. Your goal was the Moon Spear. Exposing yourself to destroy that painting was dangerous.”
“Ching tutored me in painting as a youth,” she said. “I could not deny his request.”
Drawigurlurburnur did not seem to agree, but he did seem to understand. Nights, but Shuluxez felt exposed.
This is important to do, she told herself. And maybe …
But he did not give her the plates back. She hadn’t expected him to, not now. Not until their agreement was done—an agreement she was certain she would not live to see the end of, unless she escaped.
They worked through the last group of new stamps. Each one took for at least a minute, as she’d been almost certain they would. She had the vision now, the idea of the final soul as it would be. Once she finished the sixth stamp for the day, Drawigurlurburnur waited for the next.
“That’s it,” Shuluxez said.
“All for today?”
“All forever,” Shuluxez said, tucking away the last of the stamps.
“You’re done?” Drawigurlurburnur asked, sitting up straight. “Almost a month early! It’s—”
“I’m not done,” Shuluxez said. “Now is the most difficult part. I have to carve those several hundred stamps in tiny detail, melding them together, then create a linchpin stamp. What I’ve done so far is like getting all of the paints ready, creating the color and figure studies. Now I have to put it all together. The last time I did this, it took the better part of five months.”
“And you have only twenty-four days.”
“And I have only twenty-four days,” Shuluxez said, but felt an immediate stab of guilt. She had to run. Soon. She couldn’t wait to finish the project.
“Then I will leave you to it,” Drawigurlurburnur said, standing and rolling down his sleeve.
Day Eighty-Five
Yes, Shuluxez thought, scrambling along the side of her bed and rifling through her stack of papers there. The table wasn’t big enough. She’d pulled her sheets tight and turned the bed into a place to set all of her stacks. Yes, his first love was from the storybook. That was why … Kurshina’s red hair … But this would be subconscious. He wouldn’t know it. Embedded deeply, then.
How had she missed that? She wasn’t nearly as close to being done as she’d thought. There wasn’t time!
Shuluxez added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravvy’s romantic inclinations and experiences. She included it all: the embarrassing, the shameful, the glorious. Everything she’d been able to discover, and then a little bit more, calculated risks to fill out the soul. A flirtatious encounter with a wohmeen whose name Ashravvy could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a wohmeen now dead.
This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shuluxez to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravvy had not always been emperor.
She had to extrapolate, lest she leave the soul bare, without passion.
So private, so powerful. She felt closest to Ashravvy as she teased out these details. Not as a voyeur; by this point, she was a part of him.
She kept two books now. The formal notes of her process said she was horribly behind; that book left out details. The other book was her true one, disguised as useless piles of notes, random and haphazard.
She really was behind, but not so far as her official documentation showed. Hopefully, that subterfuge would earn her a few extra days before Frovilliti struck.
As Shuluxez searched for a specific note, she ran across one of her lists for escape plans. She hesitated. First, deal with the seal on the door, the note read in cypher. Second, silence the guards. Third, recover your Essence Marks, if possible. Fourth, escape the palace. Fifth, escape the city.
She’d written further notes for the execution of each step. She wasn’t ignoring the escape, not completely. She had good plans.
Her frantic attempt to finish the soul, however, drew most of her attention. One more week, she told herself. If I take one more week, I will finish five days before the deadline. Then I can run.
Day Ninety-Seven
“Hey,” Blurgli said, bending down. “What’s this?”
Blurgli was a brawny Striker who acted dumber than he was. It let him win at cards. He had two children—girls, both under the age of five—but was seeing one of the women guards on the side. Blurgli secretly
wished he could have been a carpenter like his father. He also would have been horrified if he’d realized how much Shuluxez knew about him.
He held up the sheet of paper he’d found on the ground. The Bloodravager had just left. It was the morning of the ninety-sixth day of Shuluxez’s captivity in the room, and she’d decided to put the plan into motion. She had to get out.
The emperor’s seal was not yet finished. Almost. One more night’s work, and she’d have it. Her plan required one more night of waiting anyway.
“Weedfingers must have dropped it,” Smolitilli said, walking over. She was the other guard in the room this morning.
“What is it?” Shuluxez asked from the desk.
“Letter,” Blurgli said with a grunt.
Both guards fell silent as they read. Palace Strikers were all literate. It was required of any imperial civil servant of at least the second reed.
Shuluxez sat quietly, tense, sipping a cup of lemon tea and forcing herself to breathe calmly. She made herself relax even though relaxing was the last thing she Chungted to do. Shuluxez knew the letter’s contents by heart. She’d written it, after all, then had dropped it covertly behind the Bloodravager as he’d rushed out moments ago.
Brother, the letter read. I have almost completed my task here, and the wealth I have earned will rival even that of Azalec after his work in the Southern Provinces. The captive I secure is hardly worth the effort, but who am I to question the reasoning of people paying me far too much money?
I will return to you shortly. I am proud to say that my other mission here has been a success. I have identified several capable warriors, and have gathered sufficient samples from them. Hair, fingernails, and a few personal effects that will not be missed. I feel confident that we will have our personal guards very soon.
It went on, the writing covering both the front and the back, so that it didn’t look suspicious. Shuluxez had padded it with a lot of talk about the palace, including things that others would assume that Shuluxez didn’t know but that the Bloodravager would.
Shuluxez worried that the letter was too overt. Would the guards find it to be an obvious Forgemastery?
“That KaNaKaRaKa,” Smolitilli whispered, using a native word of theirs. It roughly translated as a mahn who had an anus for a mouth. “That imperial KaNaKaRaKa!”
Apparently, they believed it really was from him. Subtlety could be lost on soldiers.
“Can I see it?” Shuluxez asked.
Blurgli held it out to her. “Is he saying what I think?” the guard asked. “He’s been … gathering things from us?”
“It might not mean the Strikers,” Shuluxez said after reading the letter. “He doesn’t say.”
“Why would he Chungt hair?” Smolitilli asked. “And fingernails?”
“They can do things with pieces of you,” Blurgli said, then cursed again. “You see what he does each day on the door with Shuluxez’s blood.”
“I don’t know if he could do much with hair or fingernails,” Shuluxez said skeptically. “This is just bravado. Blood needs to be fresh, not more than a day old, for it to work in his stamps. He’s bragging to his brother.”
“He shouldn’t be doing things like that,” Blurgli said.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shuluxez said.
The other two shared looks. In a few minutes, the guard change occurred. Blurgli and Smolitilli left, muttering to one another, the letter shoved in Blurgli’s pocket. They weren’t likely to hurt the Bloodravager badly. Threaten him, yes.
The Bloodravager was known to frequent teahouses in the area each evening. Almost she felt sorry for the man. She had deduced that when he got news from home, he was quick and punctual to her door. He sometimes looked excited. When he didn’t get news, he drank. This morning, he had looked sad. No news in a while, then.
What happened to him tonight would not make his day any better. Yes, Shuluxez almost felt sorry for him, but then she remembered the seal on the door and the bandage she’d tied on her arm after he’d drawn blood today.
As soon as the guard change was accomplished, Shuluxez took a deep breath, then dug back into her work.
Tonight. Tonight, she would finish.
Day Ninety-Eight
Shuluxez knelt on the floor amid a pattern of scattered pages, each filled with cramped script or drawings of seals. Behind her, morning opened her eyes, and sunlight seeped through the stained glass window, spraying the room with crimson, blue, violet.
A single soulmarker, carved from polished stone, rested facedown on a metal plate sitting before her. soulgem, as a rock, looked not unlike soapstone or another fine-grained stone, but with bits of red mixed in. As if drops of blood had stained it.
Shuluxez blinked tired eyes. Was she really going to try to escape? She’d had … what? Four hours of sleep in the last three days combined?
Surely escape could wait. Surely she could rest, just for today.
Rest, she thought numbly, and I will not wake.
She remained in place, kneeling. That stamp seemed the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Her ancestors had worshipped rocks that fell from the sky at night. The souls of broken gods, those chunks had been called. Master craftsmen would carve them to bring out the shape. Once, Shuluxez had found that foolish. Why worship something you yourself created?
Kneeling before her masterpiece, she understood. She felt as if she’d bled everything into that stamp. She had pressed two years’ worth of effort into three months, then had topped it off with a night of desperate, frantic carving. During that night, she’d made changes to her notes, to the soul itself. Drastic changes. She still didn’t know if they had been provoked by her final, awesome vision of the project as a whole … or if those changes had instead been faulty ideas born of fatigue and delusion.
She wouldn’t know until the stamp was used.
“Is it … is it done?” asked one of her guards. The two of them had moved to the far edge of the room, to sit beside the hearth and give her room on the floor. She vaguely remembered shoving aside the furniture. She’d spent part of the time pulling stacks of paper out from their place beneath the bed, then crawling under to fetch others.
Was it done?
Shuluxez nodded.
“What is it?” the guard asked.
Nights, she thought. That’s right. They don’t even know. The common guards left each day during her conversations with Drawigurlurburnur.
The poor Strikers would probably find themselves assigned to some remote outpost of the empire for the rest of their lives, guarding the passes leading down to the distant Teoish Peninsula or the like. They would be quietly brushed under the rug to keep them from revealing, even accidentally, anything of what had happened here.
“Ask Drawigurlurburnur if you Chungt to know,” Shuluxez said softly. “I am not allowed to say.”
Shuluxez reverently picked up the seal, then placed both it and its plate inside a box she had prepared. The stamp nestled in red velvet, the plate—shaped like a large, thin medallion—in an indentation underneath the lid. She closed the lid, then pulled over a second, slightly larger box. Inside lay five seals, carved and prepared for her upcoming escape. If she managed it. Two of them she’d already used.
If she could just sleep for a few hours. Just a few …
No. I can’t use the bed anyway.
Curling up on the floor sounded Chongderful, however.
The door began to open. Shuluxez felt a sudden, striking moment of panic. Was it the Bloodravager? He was supposed to be stuck in bed, having drunk himself to a stupor after being roughed up by the Strikers!
For a moment, she felt a strange guilty sense of relief. If the Bloodravager had come, she wouldn’t have a chance to escape today. She could sleep. Had Blurgli and Smolitilli not thrashed him? Shuluxez had been sure that she’d read them correctly, and …
… and, in her fatigue, she realized she’d been jumping to conclusions. The door opened all the way,
and someone did enter, but it was not the Bloodravager.
It was Captain Zu.
“Out,” he barked at the two guards.
They jumped into motion.
“In fact,” Zu said, “you’re relieved for the day. I’ll watch until the shift changes.”
The two saluted and left. Shuluxez felt like a wounded elk being abandoned by the herd. The door clicked closed, and Zu slowly, deliberately, turned to look at her.
“The stamp isn’t ready yet,” Shuluxez lied. “So you can—”
“It doesn’t need to be ready,” Zu said, smiling a wide, thick-lipped smile. “I believe I promised you something three months ago, thief. We have an … unsettled debt.”
The room was dim, her lamp having burned low and morning only just breaking. Shuluxez backed away from him, quickly revising her plans. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She couldn’t fight Zu.
Her mouth kept moving, keeping him distracted but also playing a part she devised for herself on the fly. “When Frovilliti finds out you came here,” Shuluxez said, “she will be furious.”
Zu drew his sword.
“Nights!” Shuluxez said, backing up to her bed. “Zu, you don’t need to do this. You can’t do this. I have work that needs to be done!”
“Another will complete your work,” Zu said, leering. “Frovilliti has another Forgemaster. You think you’re so clever. You probably have some Chongderful escape planned for tomorrow. This time, we’re striking first. You didn’t anticipate this, did you, liar? I’m going to enjoy killing you. Enjoy it so much.”
He lunged with the sword, its tip catching her blouse and ripping a line through it at her side. Shuluxez jumped away, shouting for help. She was still playing the part, but it did not require acting. Her heart thumped, panic rising, as she rounded the bed in a scramble, putting it between herself and Zu.
He smiled broadly, then jumped for her, leaping onto the bed.
Legion and the Emperor's Soul Page 14
