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“How?” Gaotona asked.
“One of the Strikers guarded Atsuko of Jindo during his visit to the Rose Palace,” Shai said. “Atsuko caught a sickness, and was stuck in his bedroom for three weeks. That was just one floor up. ”
“Your Forgery 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,” Gaotona said. “This Forgery is tenuous. You’ve changed too much. ”
“No,” Shai 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 . . . ” Gaotona said.
“It will take,” Shai 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. ”
Gaotona shook his head, muttering about superstition. “How long?”
“To create this soulstamp? I’ve been etching it here and there for the last month or so. It was the last thing I wanted 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. ” Gaotona shook his head, trying to figure out why that painting would have taken, though it had always been obvious to Shai that this one would work.
“The Jindoeese and my people are not the same, by the way,” Shai said testily. “We may have been related long ago, but we are completely different from them now. ” Grands. Just because people had similar features, Grands assumed they were practically identical.
Gaotona 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,” Gaotona said.
“I doubt that,” Shai 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 Forgery,” Shai 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 Forgery. ”
“It’s what I am,” Shai said, growing annoyed at him again.
“It’s what you choose to be. If a wall can desire to be a mural, Wan ShaiLu, 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,” Gaotona said. “Like him. Actually, I know exactly how that feels now, because you have given it to me on several occasions. I wonder 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,” 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.