The Emperors Soul Read Online Free PDF

discomfort at seeing the Forgery.
    “What was that?” Gaotona demanded.
    “I was tired of getting splinters,” Shai said, settling back in her chair. It creaked. You are next, she thought.
    Gaotona stood up and walked to the table. He touched it, as if expecting the transformation to be mere illusion. It was not. The fine table now looked horribly out of place in the dingy room. “This is what you’ve been doing?”
    “Carving helps me think.”
    “You should be focused on your task!” Gaotona said. “This is frivolity. The empire itself is in danger!”
    No, Shai thought. Not the empire itself; just your rule of it. Unfortunately, after eleven days, she still didn’t have an angle on Gaotona, not one she could exploit.
    “I am working on your problem, Gaotona,” she said. “What you ask of me is hardly a simple task.”
    “And changing that table was?”
    “Of course it was,” Shai said. “All I had to do was rewrite its past so that it was maintained, rather than being allowed to sink into disrepair. That took hardly any work at all.”
    Gaotona hesitated, then knelt beside the table. “These carvings, this inlay . . . those were not part of the original.”
    “I might have added a little.”
    She wasn’t certain if the Forgery would take or not. In a few minutes, that seal might evaporate and the table might revert to its previous state. Still, she was fairly certain she’d guessed the table’s past well enough. Some of the histories she was reading mentioned what gifts had come from where. This table, she suspected, had come from far-off Svorden as a gift to Emperor Ashravan’s predecessor. The strained relationship with Svorden had then led the emperor to lock it away and ignore it.
    “I don’t recognize this piece,” Gaotona said, still looking at the table.
    “Why should you?”
    “I have studied ancient arts extensively,” he said. “This is from the Vivare dynasty?”
    “No.”
    “An imitation of the work of Chamrav?”
    “No.”
    “What then?”
    “Nothing,” Shai said with exasperation. “It’s not imitating anything; it has become a better version of itself.” That was a maxim of good Forgery: improve slightly on an original, and people would often accept the fake because it was superior.
    Gaotona stood up, looking troubled. He’s thinking again that my talent is wasted, Shai thought with annoyance, moving aside a stack of accounts of the emperor’s life. Collected at her request, these came from palace servants. She didn’t want only the official histories. She needed authenticity, not sterilized recitations.
    Gaotona stepped back to his chair. “I do not see how transforming this table could have taken hardly any work, although it clearly must be much simpler than what you have been asked to do. Both seem incredible to me.”
    “Changing a human soul is far more difficult.”
    “I can accept that conceptually, but I do not know the specifics. Why is it so?”
    She glanced at him. He wants to know more of what I’m doing, she thought, so that he can tell how I’m preparing to escape. He knew she would be trying, of course. They both would pretend that neither knew that fact.
    “All right,” she said, standing and walking to the wall of her room. “Let’s talk about Forgery. Your cage for me had a wall of forty-four types of stone, mostly as a trap to keep me distracted. I had to figure out the makeup and origin of each block if I wanted to try to escape. Why?”
    “So you could create a Forgery of the wall, obviously.”
    “But why all of them?” she asked. “Why not just change one block or a few? Why not just make a hole big enough to slip into, creating a tunnel for myself?”
    “I . . .” He frowned. “I have no idea.”
    Shai rested her hand against the outer wall of her room. It had been painted, though the paint was coming off in several sections. She could feel the separate stones. “All things exist in three Realms, Gaotona. Physical, Cognitive,