Legion and the Emperor's Soul (19 page)

“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 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,” 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?”

“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

   
Y
es, 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

   “
H
ey,” 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.