The Emperors Soul

functional working relationship again.
    Gaotona cocked his head. “I . . . Now that is odd.”
    “Odd in what way?” Shai asked, watching the seconds pass on her pocket watch.
    “I remember encouraging myself to become emperor. And . . . and I resent myself. For . . . mother of light, is that really how he regarded me?”
    The seal remained in place for fifty-seven seconds. Good enough. “Yes,” she said as the seal faded away. “I believe that is exactly how he regarded you.” She felt a thrill. Finally that seal had worked!
    She was getting close now. Close to understanding the emperor, close to having the puzzle come together. Whenever she neared the end of a project—a painting, a large-scale soul Forgery, a sculpture—there came a moment in the process where she could see the entire work, even if it was far from finished. When that moment came, in her mind’s eye, the work was complete; actually finishing it was almost a formality.
    She was nearly there with this project. The emperor’s soul spread out before her, with only some few corners still shadowed. She wanted to see it through; she longed to find out if she could make him live again. After reading so much about him, after coming to feel as if she knew him so well, she needed to finish.
    Surely her escape could wait until then.
    “That was it, wasn’t it?” Gaotona asked. “That was the stamp that you’ve tried a dozen times without success, the seal representing why he stood up to become emperor.”
    “Yes,” Shai said.
    “His relationship with me,” Gaotona said. “You made his decision depend upon his relationship with me, and . . . and the sense of shame he felt when speaking with me.”
    “Yes.”
    “And it took.”
    “Yes.”
    Gaotona sat back. “Mother of lights . . .” he whispered again.
    Shai took the seal and put it with those that she had confirmed as workable.
    Over the last few weeks, each of the other arbiters had done as Frava had, coming to Shai and offering her fantastic promises in exchange for giving them ultimate control of the emperor. Only Gaotona had never tried to bribe her. A genuine man, and one in the highest levels of imperial government no less. Remarkable. Using him was going to be far more difficult than she would have liked.
    “I must say again,” she said, turning to him, “you’ve impressed me. I don’t think many Grands would take the time to study soulstamps. They would eschew what they considered evil without ever trying to understand it. You’ve changed your mind?”
    “No,” Gaotona said. “I still think that what you do is, if not evil, then certainly unholy. And yet, who am I to speak? I am depending upon you to preserve us in power by means of this art we so freely call an abomination. Our hunger for power outweighs our conscience.”
    “True for the others,” Shai said, “but that is not your personal motive.”
    He raised an eyebrow at her.
    “You just want Ashravan back,” Shai said. “You refuse to accept that you’ve lost him. You loved him as a son—the youth that you mentored, the emperor you always believed in, even when he didn’t believe in himself.”
    Gaotona looked away, looking decidedly uncomfortable.
    “It won’t be him,” Shai said. “Even if I succeed, it won’t truly be him. You realize this, of course.”
    He nodded.
    “But then . . . sometimes a clever Forgery is as good as the real thing,” Shai said. “You are of the Heritage Faction. You surround yourself with relics that aren’t truly relics, paintings that are imitations of ones long lost. I suppose having a fake relic for an emperor won’t be so different. And you . . . you just want to know that you’ve done everything you could. For him.”
    “How do you do it?” Gaotona asked softly. “I’ve seen how you speak with the guards, how you learn even the names of the servants. You seem to know their family lives, their passions, what they do in the evenings . . . and yet you spend each day locked in this room. You haven’t left it for months. How do you know these things?”
    “People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control.
    “Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made