“Sounds great,” Shai 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,” Shai said, pointedly changing the topic. “Almost I think you’ve been cheating.”
“Actually…”
Shai perked up, banishing her anger, now that it had passed the initial flare-up. What was this?
Gaotona 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.
Shai took a step forward, but when Gaotona 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,” Shai said sourly, fingers twitching. Those soulstamps represented over eight years of her life’s work. She’d started the first on the day she ended her apprenticeship.
“Hm, yes,” Gaotona 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. “Shaizan. Translated … Shai of the Fist? This would make a warrior out of you, if you stamped yourself?”
“Yes,” Shai 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,” Gaotona said. “What I find is impressive. Truly, these must have taken years to craft.”
“They are … precious to me,” Shai 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 …
Gaotona 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 Gaotona, 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 Won had warned. Could Gaotona have been playing her for a fool all along? She felt strongly she should trust her assessment of Gaotona. 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,” Gaotona 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 woman can know everything,” Shai 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,” Gaotona said.
Just give them to me, she thought.
“But what of this?” Gaotona said. “A beggar? Why would you want 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,” Shai 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 window—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,” Gaotona said. He lifted the final plate. “That just leaves this one, most baffling of all.”
Shai said nothing.
“Cooking,” he said. “Farm work, sewing. Another alias, I assume. For imitating a simpler person?”
“Yes.”
Gaotona nodded, putting the sheet down.
Honesty. He must see my honesty. It cannot be faked.
“No,” Shai said, sighing.
He looked to her.
“It’s … my way out,” she said. “I’ll never use it. It’s just there, if I want to.”
“Way out?”
“If I ever use that,” Shai said, “it will write over my years as a Forger. Everything. I will forget how to make the simplest of stamps; I will forget that I was even apprenticed as a Forger. I will become something normal.”
“And you want 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 wonders 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 wonder. 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 Won, Aunt Sol, they are parts of this revision. I’ve read it in here.”
“They’re fake,” Shai whispered.
“But you quote them all the time.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I suspect,” Gaotona 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?”
“It would be the greatest Forgery of all,” Shai 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 soulstamps. From them, my false self received a remedy, one I must apply each morning. Aunt Sol and Uncle Won 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?” Gaotona 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 Forger.
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,” Gaotona said.
“Sometimes, that is the way of life.”
Gaotona shook his head.
“I was hired to destroy the painting,” Shai blurted out.
She wasn’t quite certain what drove her to say it. She needed to be honest with Gaotona—that was the only way her plan would work—but he didn’t need this piece. Did he?
Gaotona looked up.
“ShuXen hired me to destroy Frava’s painting,” Shai said. “That’s why I burned the masterpiece, rather than sneaking it out of the gallery.”
“ShuXen? But … he’s the original artist! Why would he hire you to destroy one of h
is works?”
“Because he hates the empire,” Shai said. “He painted that piece for a woman he loved. Her children gave it to the empire as a gift. ShuXen is old now, blind, barely able to move. He did not want to go to his grave knowing that one of his works was serving to glorify the Rose Empire. He begged me to burn it.”
Gaotona seemed dumbfounded. He looked at her, as if trying to pierce through to her soul. Shai 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,” Shai 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 brushstrokes.”
“Why not just have you return the original to him?” Gaotona asked.
“He’s dying,” Shai 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,” Gaotona said. “Gone because of foolish pride.”
“It was his work!”
“Not any longer,” Gaotona 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 Scepter. Exposing yourself to destroy that painting was dangerous.”
“ShuXen tutored me in painting as a youth,” she said. “I could not deny his request.”
Gaotona did not seem to agree, but he did seem to understand. Nights, but Shai 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, Gaotona waited for the next.
“That’s it,” Shai said.
“All for today?”
“All forever,” Shai said, tucking away the last of the stamps.
“You’re done?” Gaotona asked, sitting up straight. “Almost a month early! It’s—”
“I’m not done,” Shai 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,” Shai 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,” Gaotona said, standing and rolling down his sleeve.
DAY EIGHTY-FIVE
YES, Shai 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!
Shai added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravan’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 woman whose name Ashravan could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a woman now dead.
This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shai to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravan 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 Ashravan 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 Frava struck.
As Shai 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 cipher. 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,” Hurli said, bending down. “What’s this?”
Hurli 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. Hurli secretly wished he could have been a carpenter like his father. He also would have been horrified if he’d realized how much Shai knew about him.
He held up the sheet of paper he’d found on the ground. The Bloodsealer had just left. It was the morning of the ninety-sixth day of Shai’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,” Yil said, walking over. She was the other guard in the room this morning.
“What is it?” Shai asked from the desk.
“Letter,” Hurli 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.
Shai 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 wanted to do. Shai knew the letter’s contents by heart. She’d written it, after all, then had dropped it covertly behind the Bloodsealer 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. Shai had padded it with a lot of talk about the palace, including things that others would assume that Shai didn’t know but that the Bloodsealer would.
Shai worried that the letter was too overt. Would the guards find it to be an obvious forgery?
“That KuNuKam,” Yil whispered, using a native word of theirs. It roughly translated as a man who had an anus for a mouth. ?
??That imperial KuNuKam!”
Apparently, they believed it really was from him. Subtlety could be lost on soldiers.
“Can I see it?” Shai asked.
Hurli 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,” Shai said after reading the letter. “He doesn’t say.”
“Why would he want hair?” Yil asked. “And fingernails?”
“They can do things with pieces of you,” Hurli said, then cursed again. “You see what he does each day on the door with Shai’s blood.”
“I don’t know if he could do much with hair or fingernails,” Shai 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,” Hurli said.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shai said.
The other two shared looks. In a few minutes, the guard change occurred. Hurli and Yil left, muttering to one another, the letter shoved in Hurli’s pocket. They weren’t likely to hurt the Bloodsealer badly. Threaten him, yes.
The Bloodsealer 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, Shai 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, Shai took a deep breath, then dug back into her work.
Tonight. Tonight, she would finish.