Day Seventy-Six

I need to do it, Shai thought as the Bloodsealer cut her arm. Today. I could go today.

Hidden in her other sleeve, she carried a slip of paper made to imitate the ones that the Bloodsealer often brought with him on the mornings that he came early.

She’d caught sight of a bit of wax on one of them two days back. They were letters. Realization had dawned. She’d been wrong about this man all along.

“Good news?” she asked him as he inked his stamp with her blood.

The white-lipped man gave her a sneering glance.

“From home,” Shai said. “The woman you’re writing, back in Dzhamar. She sent you a letter today? Post comes in the mornings here at the palace. They knock at your door, deliver a letter . . .” And that wakes you up, she added in her mind. That’s why you come on time those days. “You must miss her a lot if you can’t bear to leave her letter behind in your room.”

The man lowered his arm and grabbed Shai by the front of her shirt. “Leave her alone, witch,” he hissed. “You . . . you leave her alone! None of your trickery or magics!”

He was younger than she had assumed. That was a common mistake with Dzhamarians. Their white hair and skin made them seem ageless to outsiders. Shai should have known better. He was little more than a youth.

She drew her lips to a line. “You talk about my trickery and magics while holding in your hands a seal inked with my blood? You’re the one threatening to send skeletals to hunt me, friend. All I can do is polish the odd table.”

“Just . . . just . . . Ah!” The young man threw his hands up, then stamped the door.

The guards watched with nonchalant amusement and disapproval. Shai’s words had been a calculated reminder that she was harmless while the Bloodsealer was the truly unnatural one. The guards had spent nearly three months watching her tinker about as a friendly scholar while this man drew her blood and used it for arcane horrors.

I need to drop the paper, she thought to herself, lowering her sleeve, meaning to let her forgery slip out as the guards turned away. That would put her plan into motion, her escape . . .

The real Forgery isn’t finished yet. The emperor’s soul.

She hesitated. Foolishly, she hesitated.

The door closed.

The opportunity passed.

Feeling numb, Shai walked to her bed and sat down on its edge, the forged letter still hidden in her sleeve. Why had she hesitated? Were her instincts for self-preservation so weak?

I can wait a little longer, she told herself. Until Ashravan’s Essence Mark is done.

She’d been saying that for days now. Weeks, really. Each day she got closer to the deadline was another chance for Frava to strike. The woman came back with other excuses to take Shai’s notes and have them inspected. They were quickly approaching the point where the other Forger wouldn’t have to sort through much in order to finish Shai’s work.

At least, so he would think. The further she progressed, the more impossible she realized this project was. And the more she longed to make it work anyway.

She got out her book on the emperor’s life and soon found herself looking back through his youthful years. The thought of him not living again, of all of her work being merely a sham intended to distract while she planned to escape . . . those thoughts were physically painful.

Nights, Shai thought at herself. You’ve grown fond of him. You’re starting to see him like Gaotona does! She shouldn’t feel that way. She’d never met him. Besides, he was a despicable person.

But he hadn’t always been. No, in truth, he hadn’t ever truly become despicable. He had been more complex than that. Every person was. She could understand him, she could see—

“Nights!” she said, standing up and putting the book aside. She needed to clear her mind.

When Gaotona came to the room six hours later, Shai was just pressing a seal against the far wall. The elderly man opened the door and stepped in, then froze as the wall flooded with color.

Vine patterns spiraled out from Shai’s stamp like sprays of paint. Green, scarlet, amber. The painting grew like something alive, leaves springing from branches, bunches of fruit exploding in succulent bursts. Thicker and thicker the pattern grew, golden trim breaking out of nothing and running like streams, rimming leaves, reflecting light.

The mural deepened, every inch imbued with an illusion of movement. Curling vines, unexpected thorns peeking from behind branches. Gaotona breathed out in awe and stepped up beside Shai. Behind, Zu stepped in, and the other two guards left and closed the door.

Gaotona reached out and felt the wall, but of course the paint was dry. So far as the wall knew, it had been painted like this years ago. Gaotona knelt down, looking at the two seals Shai put at the base of the painting. Only the third one, stamped above, had set off the transformation; the early seals were notes on how the image was to be created. Guidelines, a revision of history, instructions.

“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.

“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 his 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 brush strokes.”

“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.