Legion and the Emperor's Soul (20 page)

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

   
S
huluxez 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.

It promptly collapsed. During the night, while crawling under the bed to get her notes, she had Forged the wood of the frame to have deep flaws, attacked by insects, making it fragile. She’d cut the mattress underneath in wide slashes.

Zu barely had time to shout as the bed broke completely away, crashing into the pit she’d opened in the floor below. The water damage to her room—the mildew she’d smelled when first entering—had been key. By reports, the wooden beams above would have rotted and the ceiling would have fallen in if they hadn’t located the leak as quickly as they had. A simple Forgemastery, very plausible, made it so that the floor
had
fallen in.

Zu crashed into the empty storage room one story down. Shuluxez stood puffing, then peered into the hole. The mahn lay among the broken remnants of the bed. Some of that had been stuffing and cushioning. He would probably live—she’d been intending this trap for one of the regular guards, of whom she was fond.

Not exactly how I planned it,
she thought,
but workable.

Shuluxez rushed to the table and gathered her things. The box of stamps, the emperor’s soul, some extra soulgem and ink. And the two books explaining the stamps she had created in deep complexity—the official one, and the true one.

She tossed the official one into the hearth as she passed. Then she stopped in front of the door, counting heartbeats.

She agonized, watching the Bloodravager’s mark as it pulsed. Finally, after a few tormenting minutes, the seal on the door flashed one last time … then faded. The Bloodravager had not returned in time to renew it.

Freedom.

Shuluxez burst out into the hallway, abandoning her home of the last three months, a room now trimmed in gold and silver. The hallway outside had been so near, yet it felt like another country entirely. She pressed the third of her prepared stamps against her buttoned blouse, changing it to match that of the palace servants, with official insignia embroidered on the left breast.

She had little time to make her next move. Soon, either the Bloodravager would make his way to her room, Zu would wake from his fall, or the guards would arrive for the shift change. Shuluxez Chungted to run down the hallway, breaking for the palace stables.

She did not. Running implied one of two things—guilt or an important task. Either would be memorable. Instead, she kept her gait to a swift walk and adopted the expression of one who knew what she was doing, and so should not be interrupted.

She soon entered the better-used sections of the enormous palace. No one stopped her. At a certain carpeted intersection, she stopped herself.

To the right, down a long hallway, lay the entrance to the emperor’s chambers. The seal she carried in her right hand, boxed and cushioned, seemed to leap in her fingers. Why hadn’t she left it in the room for Drawigurlurburnur to discover? The arbeetrees would hunt her less assiduously if they had the seal.

She could just leave it here, in this hallway lined with portraits of ancient rulers and cluttered with Forged urns from ancient eras.

No. She had brought it with her for a reason. She’d prepared tools to get into the emperor’s chambers. She’d known all along this was what she would do.

If she left now, she’d never
truly
know if the seal worked. That would be like building a house, then never stepping inside. Like forging a sword, and never giving it a swing. Like crafting a masterpiece of art, then locking it away to never be seen again.

Shuluxez started down the long hallway.

As soon as no one was directly in sight, she turned over one of those horrid urns and broke the seal on the bottom. It transformed back into a blank clay version of itself.

She’d had plenty of time to find out exactly where these urns were crafted and by whom. The fourth of her prepared stamps transformed the urn into a replica of an ornate golden chamber pot. Shuluxez strode down the hallway to the emperor’s quarters, then nodded to the guards, chamber pot under her arm.

“I don’t recognize you,” one guard said. She didn’t recognize him either, with that scarred face and squinty look. As she’d expected. The guards set to watching her had been kept separate from the others so they couldn’t talk about their duties.