The Emperor's Soul(25)

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.

Day Ninety-Eight

Shai 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 soulstamp, carved from polished stone, rested facedown on a metal plate sitting before her. Soulstone, 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.



Shai 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, Shai 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?

Shai 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 Gaotona.